May 2, 2007

Bradford Store has fresh
vegetables
and lots more

The store is out of another time.

Its produce may have just been picked out on the farm. Its bread and its salsa were made by neighbors.

There's a wood stove in the front, a soda cooler in the back, a dog asleep on the floor.

Welcome to North Mecklenburg's Bradford Store, where Friendship Trays is acquiring fresh produce to use in its home-delivered meals.

Lucy Bush Carter, executive director of Friendship Trays, says she is collaborating with Grier and Kim Bradford to obtain quality food for Friendship Trays recipients, but also to support an area farm creating local produce.

Friendship Trays paid "up front" for seeds and fertilizer, and will make another payment as the produce is harvested from the Bradfords' fields.

The arrangement mirrors CSA, or "community-supported agriculture," a movement taking shape across North Carolina.

In CSA, individuals buy a share of a farmer's harvest, shouldering part of the farmer's risk but sharing in the land's bounty.

The Bradford Store is east of Huntersville, just past unpaved McAuley Road.

The store was out in the country when it first opened. Shoppers now come from the nearby subdivisions. But in the store they find not only the produce of the earth but numerous reminders of an earlier time.

Listen to the banter on a recent morning as Kim Bradford served customers:

"Hey, how are you?"

"What a great place."

"Thank you!... Now, normally I'd have some fresh spinach in the fridge but I haven't picked this morning.

"The bread's organic. It just came in. Kelly... over on Odell School makes that for me. And in grandma's old refrigerator I've got salsa that Suzanne ... makes. She lives over on ... so feel free to open doors.... The strawberries are coming in from Rowan County, the Frank Patterson farm."

"I;ll watch [the store] if you want to pick the spinach."

"Oh. Well! I'll go out and get you some."

Grier and Kim Bradford are proprietors of the store, which sits on their farm off N.C. 73, about 25 minutes north of downtown Charlotte.

The building was a general store opened by Grier Bradford's grandfather in 1912. The couple moved the building away from the now-busy highway before refurbishing it.

While at the store, sign up for e-mail notifications of produce that's just come in.

The Bradford Store, at 15915 Davidson-Concord Rd., can be reached at 704-578-0023.