Marjorie and Steve Boehme invite you to our rustic garden store in the Appalachian foothills of Adams County, Ohio. Take a day trip or spend a weekend in southwest Ohio’s Amish country, and let us fill your trunk with lovely plants to take home a memory.

Worth The Trip

We’re an unofficial visitor’s center with free maps and information about things to see and do in Adams County. Our “mulch barn” sports the largest of the Adams County traditional quilt murals, part of the “clothesline of quilts” mural. Hungry or thirsty? We have refreshments. For amateur birdwatchers, over 60 species have been seen on our 158 acres. The North Country Trail and Buckeye Trail run adjacent to our farm, and you’re welcome to hike through fields and woods on our own trails.

Garden Clubs Welcome

We love to entertain garden groups with a tour. We’ll take your photo in front of our quilt barn mural, show you around, share landscaping tips and perhaps serve you a buffet meal. Call or e-mail us for available dates.

A Garden Pilgrimage

Years ago when Marjorie and I did our first gardening together we went each spring to a place I knew from childhood called “Orol Ledden & Sons” or just “Ledden’s”. It was a century-old, rambling place in a little town that had been in the family for generations. There was room after room of dusty high shelves and old wooden bins full of everything you could ever want for gardening. It had a special smell, and old newspaper clippings were framed on the walls about the place in a bygone day. You could make up your own grass seed mix from wooden bins, weighing it out on an old fashioned scale. There was a maze of old-fashioned glass greenhouses, fragrant with plants and flowers.

We called it our garden pilgrimage. It was an hour from home, but we would drive past a dozen garden stores and save our buying for the special day when we would go there and fill our car with all the “stuff”, tools and flats of annuals, fertilizer, some new perennials. It was something to look forward to, like getting the Burpee catalog on a cold winter day.

For us, Ledden’s was as much a ritual and an experience as it was a garden store. When I think back, we could have found everything we bought there much closer to home, maybe cheaper. It was just the enjoyment of the atmosphere there that made the plants somehow special, and more fulfilling even after they were home and planted.

When we bought this old farm, we wanted to create the kind of destination that Ledden’s was for us, a magic place where people would bring their kids in the hope that they would learn the excitement of planting, and return each year like migrating birds.

Set aside a day to enjoy your garden pilgrimage. Bring your children or grandchildren (or your dogs), so they can watch the goldfish, play with our dog Rascal, run in the grass or sneak up on bullfrogs along the pond bank. In an age of big-box sameness, make your spring gardening a special ritual. Each year we are improving our humble place to make it better fulfill that ideal.