Roadside Farmstand Gets An Upgrade

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This story originally aired in the June 28, 2026 episode of Inside Appalachia.

When you open the door of the small green shed that is Sugarbirds Farmstand, the first thing you notice is the smell of fresh bread mixed with potpourri.

Jessica Camden is a cheerful blonde woman who puts people at easy quickly in the small shop. Although, she doesn’t personally staff it. That’s the point. Sugarbirds might look like your basic — if slightly upscale — honor system farmstand, stuffed with produce, packs of cookies, and tins of molasses among other items. But this shed combines home-baked goods with high-tech. 

Camden can take Venmo, check, or cash, as well as run a card. People talk to her by intercom and camera.

“People will ask me questions, and I can try to respond while they’re in here,” she said.

Camden lives just up the hill from the stand, which is named “Sugarbirds” in honor of her maternal grandmother. That’s what she called hummingbirds, her favorite. 

“I never heard anyone else call them that,” Camden said.

Camden can go about her farm and family duties each day while watching customer’s shop. Buyers write down what they bought on provided forms and choose their payment method.  The cameras help with inventory management. That’s important, Camden said, because it would be easy to lose track of who sold what.

“There’s 30 of us in here, so we have to figure out, like, ‘Whose cinnamon rolls did you buy’. So, it is helpful to go back in the cameras if they just wrote ‘cinnamon rolls’ and see, ‘Oh, they’ve got a pink container,’ or ‘Oh, they’ve got a red container,’” she said.

30 different sellers in a twenty-foot square shed may seem like a lot, but Camden wanted to invite all her fellow vendors from the local farmer’s market. 

“I’m a mother. I have a little farm,” she said. “I know there’s other mothers that do the same thing at the market, and I want them to benefit from this as well.”

In fact, the high-tech stand was conceived after watching the ups and downs of vendor life. While all the vendors say they love selling at the farmer’s market, some days are inevitably better than others.

“I was looking around the market on a bad day, and I saw a lot of my friends there that had full tables, as well.” Camden said. “And I thought we really need somewhere to sell this stuff that we’ve worked really hard to do.”

At first, she set up a roadside farmstand. The small wooden structure proved a hassle with rain and mice, plus customers parked awkwardly and blocked the narrow road. Camden went back to the drawing board and found homestead inspiration in an unexpected location: the beach.

Her family often visits Edisto Beach in South Carolina. Over time, Camden watched a small snack shack turn into a permanent store using tech. 

She smiles as she recalls the moment it occurred to her, “I could do that with a farmstand.” Soon, she spotted a shed for sale while driving a back road in North Carolina and realized it would be rain and mouse proof. Sheds were also classed as impermanent dwellings, so it wouldn’t be subject to the same regulations as a brick-and-mortar store.

Camden set up Sugarbirds Farmstand in September 2025. Jessica Underwood was an early vendor and enthusiast. She got into small batch candle making as a mom who cared about air quality.

“I wanted to create something with my own hands that I knew was clean. I use what they call clean fragrances, there’s no added chemicals nothing harsh in there, no endocrine disruptors,” Underwood said.

One of her best sellers is tomato leaf, although she enjoys peony and petrichor.  

“Very earthy with the peony in there,” she said

Many of Underwood’s products are geared toward busy women, like her meditation tins, a little twenty-minute candle.

“You can say your mantra, say your prayer, say nothing for twenty minutes,” Underwood said.

Underwood likes that her product vibe matches the farmstand vibe, because she things the farmstand feels more like a community that a vending opportunity. Although, she welcomes the vending opportunity, as well. 

“There’s more feminine power here,” she said, looking around at the shelves filled with handmade products like hers.

That feminine power is what Camden had in mind when she started Sugarbirds. She wanted to lift up women artisans. She did add three male producers later, but to her, the stand recognizes and honors the hard work women put into what’s for sale here.

“I hope our customers will appreciate the amount of time and the effort that these women have put into what they’ve made or what they’ve brought, the candles, the soaps, the sauerkraut, different things. If you wanna come in and put a meal together, you can get a loaf of bread, you can get some steaks, or some chicken, produce that’s in season. The ladies do not spray anything on their produce. That’s important to me,” Camden said. 

Camden knows most of the stand’s customers. She doesn’t want to sell them something her family wouldn’t buy themselves. While the farmstand is firmly embedded in the community, it has become something that locals like to show off to visitors. Some of them get inspired. 

Camden isn’t aware of any high-tech stands that have started because of hers, but she does answer many questions by email.

“People do reach out to me wanting to know how I do this or how I do that,” she said.

For Camden, inspiring strangers was nice, but real joy comes from what the stand is teaching her daughter.

“Cora is my six-year-old. And you know, if she wants something I’ll tell her, ‘Well you need to make something and sell it in the store.’ She makes these little sourdough rolls and sells those. So, it’s teaching her a lot of responsibility, a lot of, maybe, disappointment if she bakes a lot of things and they don’t sell as well as she thought and I think that’s good for her,” she said.

Camden hopes that Sugarbirds Farmstand might become her daughter’s one day. And that it will continue to empower women, one cookie and one candle at a time. 

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This story is part of the Inside Appalachia Folkways Reporting Project, a partnership with West Virginia Public Broadcasting’s Inside Appalachia. Subscribe to the podcast to hear more stories of Appalachian folklife, arts and culture.