Tuesday Tour: country friendship

For some folks, it might be a novelty. For us, it’s a quite accessible place to frequent.

I’m talking about an Amish market. Not too far from our neck of the woods is an Amish community.

When we drive in that vicinity, we’ll pass horse-drawn buggies on the road, see beautiful Amish farms, and can mosey into an Amish-run country market for homemade baked goods, jams, jellies, and other goodies put-up in glass jars, and Amish-made items and crafts as well.

That’s why I wasn’t terribly disappointed when we stopped at Dutch Country Market in Middlebury, Indiana on our road trip last summer (2023) and found it was already closed for the day. We can easily visit an Amish market at home.

We arrived there to view the garden designed to resemble a quilt on the Quilt Gardens Along the Heritage Trail driving tour in Elkhart County, Indiana.

Dutch Country Market, located at 11351 County Road 16, is a large family-run specialty grocery store where visitors can shop for locally made jam & jelly, apple butter, peanut butter spread, pickles, peaches, beets, and even salsa. And of course, homemade baked goods.

Got a hankering for sweets? The Lehman family’s market has fudge, 15 different flavors of salt-water taffy, and locally produced maple syrup.

But one of the store’s main attractions is their fresh home-made noodles and you can watch the process as the store owners’ daughters roll out the dough and make noodles in front of your eyes.

Not only is the noodle making noteworthy in this market but customers can watch bees in their 30-year-old hive producing pure natural honey through an observation window in the store. Eleven flavors of the spun honey made right there is available for purchase.  

A variety of locally made Amish household goods including hand-woven rugs, lotions, soaps, and other crafts are also offered at this market.

Of course, we couldn’t browse in the store since we arrived after closing hours, but we were amazed at the gigantic quilt garden on the market’s premises surrounded by peaceful countryside.

Papa is pictured in the photo below just to show how expansive it was.

And we were grateful because the owners had erected a wooden platform upon which visitors could ascend to view the entire garden at once and also snap photos of it.

The garden theme was Friendship Bouquet with three blue squares of Blue Aloha Ageratums and three dark pink diamonds of Easy Wave Bubble Gum Petunias forming the flower bouquet design and orange Variegated Zinnias as the bouquet stem.

The pink border of the “quilt pattern” used Bronze Leaf Pink Begonias and the fourth yellow “quilt block” was Easy Wave Yellow Petunias. Both sides of the garden are pictured below.

The 2024 quilt garden design at Dutch Country Market will be “Peace and Plenty” and should be just as beautiful to view.

The new theme to be featured at this Amish market sounds perfect since Amish folks are generally known as living in peace and harmony in their communities.

“A heart at peace gives life to the body.” ~ thought to be an Amish proverb

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