The Farm Stand at Petrol Station

On a cold January day nearly four years ago, Mickey Morales and a few friends set up a small farm market in a parking lot on the edge of Garden Oaks. Without a media blitz or mainroad location, it seemed unlikely to thrive. But Mickey had learned the secret of success from running other markets in town:

Keep it small, keep it honest and make it part of the community.

Over the intervening years the Farm Stand at Petrol Station has grown into a Saturday morning destination for many people in the Garden Oaks, Oak Forest area and the surrounding subdivisions. It has become a gathering place where they can have a great cup of coffee, a breakfast taco and a conversation with their neighbors while they are shopping for food.

For a small market it offers a surprising diversity of products from a combination of regular and guest vendors with everything from Indian food to wooden spoons, but where it really shines is with the locally grown, better-than-organic produce.

The produce you will find at the Farm Stand will be riper than store-bought, much more recently picked and quite likely to be of varieties that can only be grown by a small farmer with their hands in the dirt. Expect to encounter caterpillar damage on the cabbage, dirt on the carrots and blemishes on the fruit, but the textures and flavors will make supermarket equivalents seem boring in comparison.