Homestead Organics Farm

The self-serve stand on Skalkaho Highway

The Farmstand at Homestead Organics Farm keeps no clerk. It sits on the farm campus at 175 Skalkaho Highway, four miles south of Hamilton, and is open every day of the year. Buyers pay in cash, by check, or by Venmo. The shelves carry the farm’s own produce alongside meat, eggs, honey, crafts, and goods from other Montana producers. They also hold foods that the farm’s youth interns and volunteers make in the commercial kitchen on the grounds. Subscribers to Karst & Sons Sourdough Bread pick up their loaves here.

Each Thursday evening the staff post the next day’s “Farmstand Friday” list. On October 2, 2026, it named organic Honeycrisp cider, cinnamon apple twists made from scratch on the farm, and Farmer Laura’s blue cheese dressing. A week earlier the farm’s own Roma tomatoes sat beside Laura’s Old World-style ancient grain sourdough and gluten-free chocolate chip cookies made by an intern named Ally. In mid-September the list ran to organic seed neck garlic grown by Farmer Henry, winter squash, peaches from Paradise, Montana, and unfiltered, unheated honey from bees on the farm.

Geese, goats, and a gate to close

Beyond the stand lies the farm itself, visible from Highway 93. Abundant Montana’s listing gives its size as 14 acres; the farm’s own page says 12. It is certified organic by the Montana Department of Agriculture and by the Real Organic Project. It raises seed, mixed vegetables, fruit, meat chickens, egg layers, heritage turkeys, potbelly pigs, goats, ducks, and geese. Visitors may walk the grounds from 10 a.m. until dusk to see the animals, smell the flowers, and look at what is growing; the farm’s page lists Wednesdays as closed. The listing asks one thing: “Please close any door or gate that you open.” Guided group tours run when time permits. Photographs on the listing show kindergartners harvesting potatoes and Special Abilities Camp campers boating on the farm pond.

The farm’s owners, Laura Garber and Henry Wuensche, host Cultivating Connections Montana, a nonprofit whose motto is “Change your food, change the world.” The farm serves as its “Farm Classroom.” High-school interns learn organic growing and whole-food cooking. They also staff the farm’s booth at the Hamilton Farmers’ Market on Saturdays from May to October and at Darby’s market on summer Tuesdays.

Pig harvests and soup kettles

Each month the Heritage Skills Workshop Series teaches an older craft, such as sourdough baking, seed saving, cattail basketry, garlic braiding, soap making, or herbal teas. Some classes deal in meat. On September 13, 2026, Wuensche led “Learn to Harvest a Pig,” which covered humane dispatch, skinning and quartering, and preparing the hide for a whole-pig roast. At a poultry harvest the week before, participants could take their birds home or give the meat to the farm’s soup program.

That program, Ladles of Love, began in 2025. Community volunteers join the youth interns in the commercial kitchen to cook soups and other ready-to-eat food for the Haven House food bank in Hamilton and other partners. Sessions are free and close with a shared bowl of soup at the table. The fall 2026 calendar lists dates from October 7 through December 21.

Farm Fright & Fun Days fall on October 24 and 31, 2026, from noon to 4 p.m. Guests build scarecrows and carry them home. The scarecrows wear clothes donated at the stand, and the call for donations asked for torn and stretched-out garments: “the rattier, the better.” On November 29, 2026, a free holiday open house fills the Farmstand with treats and gift-making.

An experiment begun in 1999

The nonprofit dates the farm to 1999, when Laura Garber moved to Hamilton and started it “as an experiment in organic food growing.” A 2006 Farm Aid profile gives a different start. It said Garber and her husband, Paul, had founded the farm four years earlier. The couple had trained in the PEAS farmer course at the University of Montana and farmed leased land for another four years, until Laura persuaded Paul to quit his job. Their advice to other would-be farmers was “Bite the bullet, quit your job and go for it!”

By the time of that profile, the farm employed the couple full-time along with five summer interns. It sold at three farmers markets and ran a 70-member CSA and a 40-member fall CSA. Every western Montana store and restaurant in the Buy Fresh, Buy Local campaign carried its vegetables. Garber was a founding farmer of that campaign and a board member of the Alternative Energy Resource Organization. “We want our farm to be a place where children come and have good feelings and memories about farming,” she said then.

Children did come. Karen Daniels, a Hamilton teacher who had started the district’s first school garden at Grantsdale, writes that she began bringing students to the farm in 2007. Another record places her first group in 2008: students walked over from Grantsdale Elementary to tour the farm, play with the animals, and do farm tasks. Daniels has since watched Garber extend the visits to classes across the valley.

In 2015 Garber founded the Cultivating Connections farm classroom. The participants in the first youth internship came from the Linda Massa Youth Home, and one young woman stayed on with Garber and Wuensche as their foster child. Garber told the Bitterroot Star in 2023 that the relationship “was meant to be.”

Interns tended vegetable beds for Meals on Wheels, and in 2016 Andrea Williams and Grace Keny weeded and mulched them. High school students also delivered “Salads for Seniors,” the program that Ladles of Love grew out of. One former intern, Finn Belanger, kept working at the farm on breaks from college in New York. He now bakes in Brooklyn and is listed on the nonprofit’s board. Laura’s mother, Mary Garber, is a retired Wisconsin teacher who spent summers helping plant and harvest. She has recently made the valley her home and serves on the same board.

Starts by the thousand

At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Garber and Wuensche looked for a way to help. “The answer seemed really clear and obvious,” Garber said. “We can grow plants and share them.” The result was Mayday! Gardens, a spring giveaway of starts, free or by donation. Garber explained the reason by calling the purchase of seed “a financial gamble.” In 2023 more than 400 people signed up.

At the May 21, 2026, giveaway the tables and racks held Northern Ruby paste tomatoes, Padrón peppers, black Hungarian jalapeños, ashwagandha, and giant marigolds. Each was labeled by name, and egg cartons were set out for carrying them home. Some had been seeded by volunteers Garber taught. She counted more than 100,000 plants given away since 2020. As she put it in 2023: “Everyone who grows is a gardener. It can be a strip along your driveway, or an old bucket that you found on the porch.”