Melinda Yeargan
I have always had a passion for good food, and I love connecting our community with nutrient-dense, organic produce grown on local farms. Supporting our local farm families by buying what they are harvesting is my main mission at Melinda’s Market. I love sharing what our family is growing, cooking and eating in hopes of inspiring more people to eat healthy, delicious meals with a focus on local, sustainable ingredients. I maintain our presence by making reels about what we’re growing and cooking how-to videos to help our customers get the most out of their produce. When I am not working, I enjoy fermenting our excess veggie harvests, baking sourdough bread, and walking through our mushroom yards and gardens.
Dave Yeargan
Dave makes sure everything goes as smoothly as possible on veggie day by making all our veggie meet ups in Raleigh and at our farms and does the driving for all of our Melinda’s Market deliveries to Clayton, Garner, and Smithfield. When it’s not veggie day, he loves growing fruits, vegetables, and mushrooms on our homestead. Maintaining a large food forest that is home to lots of different varieties of apples, pears, peaches, and plums plus a large okra patch with seven different varieties of okra takes up a lot of his time in summer . During fall he takes the lead on most of the work during mushroom log inoculation. With years of previous experience cutting trees, Dave skillfully handles all the chainsaw work felling trees and cutting logs into bolts to be inoculated. He also does the majority of harvesting on our homestead.
Veggie Boy
We couldn’t manage our homestead without the help of our son. He takes care of most of the heavy lifting for us during mushroom logging. Along with being our head beekeeper, he manages our goose flock and maintains all our coops. last year he built an extensive set of trails through our wetland to get to the big creek so we are able to hike and mountain bike without leaving our 20 acre homestead. He also makes sure all our produce deliveries arrive safely to the front porches of all our customers each Tuesday. When he’s not helping with our homestead chores, he loves to fish at our big creek and at Oak Island, build things, work on cars, lawn mowers, and whatever else is broken.
Sweet Girl
Our daughter is a homestead go-getter. She is always willing to help harvest our crops, pull weeds, or build new beds. Known as the Chicken Whisperer, she is a natural with our chickens and ducks and knows each of them by name. On Tuesdays she helps weigh and pack our produce and then she runs our pick up table. She looks forward to seeing each of our regular subscribers who pick up each week at our homestead and loves to chat with them. Always ready to chat, you never know what you’ll learn about our homestead happenings from her while picking up. She has a natural entrepreneurial spirit and loves to grow food in our gardens that she sells as add-ons. She loves to hike in the woods, play in our creek, and gardening.
