APPLETON – Deer Foot Farm has occupied the same address of 1221 Appleton Road for the last 104 years. Sue Ellen Mink-Roberts is the current owner and operates the Deer Foot Farm Market and Café right on the farm.

Roberts said the market and café opened on July 23, 2013. They started serving breakfast Nov. 1, 2015.

“We serve lunch items 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily," she said. "We serve breakfast on Saturday and Sunday morning from 7:30 to roughly 11 a.m. We have a greenhouse where we grow tomatoes and peppers. We grow cut flowers. My daughter has an extensive cut flower presence here at the farm."

Roberts said they work a number of catered events, as well.

"We've catered offsite weddings with food," she said. "We've hosted onsite weddings. We used to do the farmer's market in Union. We did that for three years, but we found we were needed here on the farm. We've had three Autumn Festivals here, as well as an Appleton Day for the Appleton Historical Society, during which we collaboratively raised $9,000 for a restoration project."

Mary Beth Vankeuren and Jim McElreavy who were having breakfast in the café, said that in the summer it can be difficult to get a table.

"Our record weekend, actually, was the third week in February last year,” said Roberts. “We had 103 people in here over two days. Last Easter, we took reservations and had a special menu and we had 53 people join us just for breakfast. That's not bad for a 20-seat restaurant."

Roberts said she feels the café has an amazing product.

"It's excellent," she said. "We have the best product we can provide. My husband does the majority of the cooking for breakfast. We all do lunch. My daughter does the menu design; she has culinary arts training. She figures out the combinations and flavors. She worked at Suzuki's in Rockland and she was at Stone Cold Brewery in California."

They take pride in their food, pride in their farm and pride in their legacy as a family in the town of Appleton.

"Right now I would have to say it's more of a café than a store," she said. "We sell raw milk, farm fresh eggs, we have raw milk yogurt and grass fed meats that are raised locally by a variety of neighbors. We sell ground beef and we normally have ground lamb and Merguez sausage, but not right now."

Roberts said they carry pork from Dog Patch Farm in Washington.

"We have grab-and-go, take-and- bake, apple and blueberry pie," she said. "We try to keep as many chicken pot pies that we can, as fast as we can manufacture them. Right now we have shepherd's pie frozen, enchiladas frozen and we have homemade frozen soups. We sell Back 40 Bake House breads. My husband makes oatmeal bread once a week. Generally he makes it on Tuesday, and he makes Italian herb bread."

Roberts said everything they use in their ingredients for cooking is natural or organic.

"We have beverages and snacks and we have a lovely bakery counter," she said. "Our baker, Ann Heflin, is from Union. In the summer we have her two days a week and in the winter just one.”

The farm was started by her family in 1897. Roberts parents worked the farm after their marriage and had three sons and two daughters. Roberts parents ran a truck farm, poultry and dairy operation.

"They had a milk route in Rockland and my father learned to drive, driving his father around," Roberts said. "He was 11 years old at the time. We had more than 100 head of Holstein steers in the 1960s and we had thousands of chickens whose eggs got processed in the basement of the farm house."

Roberts shared some anecdotes about the farm.

"One of the stories handed down was that the original barn, which was an A-frame, fell down in 1946 in an unseasonable nor'easter," she said. "My uncle was out feeding in the morning at the age of 17 and he was getting ready to go to Union High School. All of a sudden the upper stories of the barn collapsed. No animals were injured, no people were injured and he ran out the back as the barn came down."

Roberts said it was a wet snow in May.

"It was a nor'easter in May,” she said. “And that resulted in the building of the Gambrel barn."

Gambrel is a style of roof typical of barns. It is a roof with two slopes on both sides, the lower slopes being steeper than the upper.

"Another story of a nor'easter in May was when my grandmother was a teenager,” she said. “A lightning storm struck a metal bed in the open chamber of the farmhouse. It started a fire and the story was she went up with the snow in her skirt to put it out."

Roberts said the farm was a wonderful place to grow up.

"I have a strong emotional attachment to this land," she said. "My goal is to hang onto this remaining 82 acres. When I was a child, the farm was hundreds of acres. We've always felt very secure in this community, having several generations of our family being born and growing up here. It was just a wonderful sense of small town America."

Reach Chris Wolf at news@penbaypilot.com.