Audrey Lodato has made a home on 75 Lawrenceville St. with her husband and a friendly beagle for the past seven years. Inside, she greets guests with the smell of apple and cinnamon from a simmer pot sitting on the stove, and a garden where she grows produce such as squash, tomatoes and carrots.

“I am a fan of traditional skills,” Lodato said. “I just think that kind of stuff’s important. Baking from scratch, cooking from scratch, growing your food, sewing and so on.”

Lodato also works in animal welfare, helping shelters improve their save rates, which she said can sometimes bring a lot of emotional stress and demanding hours. For her, these hobbies help her decompress after a long day, with Lodato saying her husband tells her she “rage bakes.”

It has also helped her beagle, who was rescued from animal testing and used to be fearful of people and eating after being used to “lab chow” off the floor before he began sniffing around the garden and developing a love of vegetables.

While Lodato bakes anything from cookies (she said “probably a dozen cookies every day or every other day”), pies, bread and brownies, it is just her and her husband living at home. With a senior complex at the end of her road, and seeing a constant flow of people walking down the street, she had an idea for a farm stand. A friend of Lodato’s in Saugerties had a stand for flowers, which she thought was “the coolest.” Lodato started her own stand during the summer.

Now, just outside of her home, she has a small, rustic wooden stand decorated with a jack-o-lantern for the fall and a chalkboard listing its inventory: cookies, stickers, simmer pots and herb salt. Lodato has also sold produce grown from her garden. Lodato said that as far as ingredients and her inventory goes, she does her best to keep most of it local.

“At first I wasn’t really sure how it was going to go, so I just made some cookies and I set it up and was like ‘let’s see what happens,’ and that was really it, and then I just posted on Nextdoor a few times,” Lodato said. “It really is just supposed to be a fun thing for the neighborhood.”

Funnily enough, the stand she uses for the market came off of Facebook marketplace, where a man and his family in Stone Ridge had also used it as a farm stand. However, one of the family's neighbors did not like it, and tied a chain to the farm stand and dragged it down the street. After a court battle, he was told he could not have it anymore.

“They were really happy to sell it to me, and I felt really bad about what had happened to them,” Lodato said. “I keep sending them pictures and being like, ‘I’m taking good care of it.’”

The farm stand is open all the time, with Lodato saying you can even visit at 2 a.m. It runs on an honor system basis, with customers able to either leave payment in a cash box or scan her Venmo QR code.

Lodato said she has had a positive experience, with one stranger leaving $100 while the road was being paved, and has met neighbors who have become “regulars” at the farm stand. This includes a customer who always leaves a note about how many tomatoes he purchased, a girl who walks her dog by the stand and parents who come with their children.

Unfortunately, Lodato did deal with a thief, though neighbors and police were helpful with the situation, outraged that somebody was stealing from something she worked hard on. One neighbor even donated a solar-powered lamp to dissuade the thief, which was incorporated into the jack-o-lantern, just in time for Halloween.

“Somebody was coming and taking literally almost everything off of it, and it happened five or six times. I posted first. I posted that I had it, and then I posted that a thief came, and then people got invested,” Lodato said. “Eventually, we did catch him because I put a camera up and I caught him stealing.”

With the drama over, Lodato said she changes her inventory based on the season and whatever her interest is at the current moment, sometimes featuring cut bouquets. Lodato also leaves a box where people can leave notes, sometimes having questions on it such as what your dog’s name is or what you like about fall. Lodato is also excited to put a candy bowl on the stand for Halloween.

“I just think it’s nice to be able to do something fun for the neighborhood and the community,” Lodato said. “If anybody comes, leave me a note so I know that you came and tell me what you liked.”