Another article in a series about the people and the jobs that define a Maryland summer.
The building is a rustic, three-sided corrugated metal number, its contents a local food-lover's dream.
Heirloom tomatoes, obscure orange-fleshed honeydews, peppers in every color of the rainbow but blue — nearly everything grown organically and on the premises — fill the Howard County farm stand that Dave and Lydia Liker started two years ago quite by accident.
It is the sort of place that, in the midst of summer's bounty, makes people believers: in life without mealy supermarket tomatoes; in ecologically friendly food systems; in a new generation of farmers; in the wisdom of chucking everything and living a tranquil, purposeful life in agriculture.
All true, except for the tranquil part.
Customers who pull up to bucolic Gorman Farm — one long driveway and a world away from surrounding Laurel subdivisions, removed from the whoosh of Sysco and supermarket trucks on nearby Interstate 95 — would never guess it. But what looks like a soothing oasis from suburban sprawl and industrial eating is, in fact, a high-wire act.
"Friday night, I was sitting on so much food I was sweating bullets, and by Saturday afternoon it was all gone," said Dave Liker, 34, recalling how he phoned a dozen restaurants and offered tomatoes at less than half price when 80 cases of them suddenly ripened all at once. "I'm young. I can handle it. If I was 55 years old, I'd probably be having a heart attack."
Lydia Liker, 30, compares their seed-to-consumer enterprise, vulnerable to the whims of Mother Nature, consumer tastes and government regulation, to "a five-dimensional jigsaw puzzle."
"If you have a company and you're producing widgets, you have variables, but not the amount of variables we have," she said.
So much for getting out of the rat race.
The Likers were newlyweds living in Colorado, dabbling in farming at the ranch where Dave was caretaker, when they got the idea to buy a farm of their own. They had been looking at a 700-square-foot condo in the Rockies. For the same price, Dave discovered online, they could buy an organic vegetable, goat and chicken farm in "turn-key" condition in New York, north of the Catskills.
"That's what got us excited," he said.
The idea of farming was not completely out of the blue, though neither Dave nor Lydia came from a farming family.
Dave grew up in Santa Barbara. His father worked in insurance; his mother had a rare-book store. Lydia's father owns Murray Corp., the Hunt Valley maker of hose clamps. Her mother was a docent at the