In 1983 we purchased a five acre parcel of land at the corner of Secor and Erie in Temperance. Our plan was to build a home and open a fruit and vegetable stand for the summer months, and to have pumpkins in the fall.
In 1985, we built our home, leaving Toledo for the country. We moved in just three days before Christmas. Along with the new home and the new year, we also needed new seed catalogs and a new name. We decided to combine our names, Bairon and Janice, to name the farm, BJ Farm.
We opened for the first time in July of 1986, with tomatoes, cucumbers, summer squash and cantaloupe. In the fall, when the U-Pick pumpkin patch was ready for harvest, we had pumpkins, acorn and butternut squash and gourds. We were amazed, when after only two weeks we were out of all of our fall produce! The following year, in 1987, we only grew fall produce, forging the summer crops to leave more room for planting our fall crops.
