The sound of burbling water catches the ear as one enters a new addition to the Middlesex building that houses the Roots Farm Market, passing a display of lemon-colored von Trapp tulips and an array of raw silk scarves knotted to a metal hoop.

In one corner of the sunny space, atop a large wooden spool, sits a three-tiered concrete fountain surrounded by dozens of potted plants. Their leaves run the gamut from thick and spiky to feathery to delicately soft. Above hang a lambskin rug and a pair of birdhouses strung from a sturdy birch bough.

Refrigerated cases line the walls. One, pungent when opened, houses Vermont’s most familiar and lauded cheeses, seafood spreads from Për’s Smoked of Vermont, Ithaca Hummus, and fondue kits from Québec’s Eastern Townships. Another offers beer, hard cider and nonalcoholic drinks, ranging from Goldthread Plant Based Tonics’ jewel-toned botanical elixirs to familiar liters of Polar seltzer.

Owners Karin Bellemare and Jon Wagner opened the Roots Farm Market at the busy junction of routes 2 and 100B in 2019. When they discovered the Middlesex building — an 1850s structure that used to be the town’s country store — “it spoke to us because it was cheap and dilapidated,” Bellemare said. “We have a deep passion for restoring old things. This building has had so many lives, and it’s cool to give it a new one.”

Now, the couple’s 1,400-square-foot addition is infusing the space with even more possibility. Equipping the Roots Farm Market with a modern loading dock and cooler and 650 square feet of additional retail space, it cements the market’s status as a hub that lends strength to a web of food producers in the area.

Wagner, 39, and Bellemare, 37, originally opened the market as a retail outlet for their Bear Roots Farm in Williamstown. After five years of schlepping goods to the Montpelier and Burlington farmers’ markets, they were ready to transition to a more stationary way of peddling their wares.

With their farm “off in the middle of nowhere,” Bellemare explained, they needed a location that made them accessible to both Washington and Chittenden County customers. Starting in spring 2019, the Roots Farm Market offered locals impeccably clean carrots, beets, potatoes, baby kale and radishes.

In 2020, as the pandemic lockdown deepened and customers shied away from supermarkets, the couple began adding staple grocery items to the shelves: flour, lemons, olive oil, canned tomatoes and breakfast cereals.

“We just took it as an opportunity,” Bellemare remarked.

Soon they branched out even further from the farm-grown-goods-only model, selling charming greeting cards, racks of mixed-metal earrings, kitchen towels printed with ferns or mushrooms, and sets of hand-forged cheese knives.

Now, six years into the market’s life, a dedicated seasonal eater could buy all of their groceries, libations, holiday gifts and household greenery there. Don Wexler of Moretown, who described himself as a Roots customer from “the first day they opened,” said he visits for the “excellent selection of vegetables,” as well as cheese, apples and beans.

“You can find anything from a snack on a bike ride to a present for a friend,” he said.

The newly added retail space — the room with the fountain — ensures that soon you’ll be able to find even more. The couple said they plan to add a bulk section, gardening supplies, and, in warmer weather, perennial plants and shrubs such as elderberries, currants, hearty figs, rhubarb and horseradish, all grown by Wagner.

The remainder of the new construction will make behind-the-scenes tasks easier for the market’s seven full-time and 10 part-time staffers, including those who work in the store’s kitchen, which was built in 2021.

“We added [the kitchen] because of food waste,” Bellemare said. The selection of takeout items, from freshly pressed juices to hearty entrées such as cottage pie, is designed to use “imperfect things that are fine but would otherwise have been given away or composted,” she said. “People need convenience, and [these items are] higher quality than frozen meals from the grocery store.”

But convenience remained a problem for the couple and their team, as they unloaded thousands of pounds of root vegetables onto an uneven, nearly 200-year-old floor and used a walk-in cooler that they had “slapped together just to get this place open,” Bellemare said.

Hence the addition. Using funds from a Working Lands Enterprise Initiative grant, supplemented with borrowed money from the Vermont Community Loan Fund, the pair began assessing how they could add a loading dock, a new and more efficient cooler, expanded parking, and cozier offices. The answer, per their architect: encasing portions of the existing building in a new, energy-saving one. The construction began in 2023 and is expected to end by summer.

If the building has changed over the years, so has the couple’s division of labor. When Wagner and Bellemare started farming at Bear Roots, they collectively planted and dug carrots, bagged greens, and were often found side by side behind their table at farmers markets. Now, Wagner is in charge of land management and vegetable production, with help from two Jamaican employees who have worked with him for the past six years, thanks to the H-2A temporary agricultural workers program.

That leaves Bellemare free to run the store. “Jon loves farming. It’s his thing, and he’s really good at it,” she said. “I was looking for a way not to farm anymore.”

She noted that Wagner has been hands-on in the building renovations, though, “on top of farming.” The stanchions in the new part of the building were salvaged from an old dairy barn. And Wagner milled much of the lumber used from the couple’s own woods.

For Bellemare, maintaining a workweek of about 40 hours is one of the pleasures of the grocery gig. Another, aided by the growing retail space, is seeking out Vermont and New England goods to offer to customers. No longer a glorified farmstand, the market has become a valued outlet for local producers.

Randy and Lisa Robar of Kiss the Cow Farm in Barnard sell their ultra-premium ice cream and organic raw milk to the Roots Farm Market in addition to running their own farmstand, where they in turn offer vegetables from Bear Roots and a selection of other producers’ products.

Randy Robar appreciates working with store owners who are also food producers. “As small farmers themselves, they appreciate the challenges other small farmers deal with,” he explained. And the staffers he encounters are “always smiling and happy to be there.”

Sam Walsh of Martin Family Farm in Williamstown, which began selling organic beef to Roots in 2024, said, “Karin and Jon’s commitment to supporting small and local means farms that wouldn’t normally be able to sell retail are able to offer their products.” Walsh called the Roots Farm Market “a game changer for us” that “gets our name out into the community in a broader way than we could do alone.”

Robar noted that Bellemare and Wagner buy from and support hundreds of local food producers, spreading awareness about those businesses. They also “offer food when fragile industrial ag breaks down,” as “during the pandemic,” he said.

For casual shoppers who are concerned less with the health of the food system than with buying groceries or a gift, Roots might simply seem effortlessly charming. Rough, rustic wooden crates and totes mingle with polished boards in the décor. You can buy a frozen pizza, blocks of tofu, young Thai coconuts or fancy bars of chocolate.

Displays are organized with whimsy and an artistic eye: A single beeswax pine cone candle sits among bottles of maple syrup. Pickle-making kits occupy a shelf beside potted cacti, highlighting the similarities in shape between cucumbers and succulents. A single card with a print of a candy heart reading “Squeeze Me” sits just behind bottles of locally produced massage oil.

Even as they work to complete the expansion, Bellemare and Wagner are looking to what the future holds, thinking about how Vermont agriculture needs to evolve as the climate shifts.

Bellemare said 2023 “was our worst year ever [on the farm]. We lost a significant amount of money.” As heavier rains fell, crops that used to be easy-to-grow staples, such as lettuce, were devastated by snails, slugs and dirt that was nearly impossible to remove. At the market, they switched to using spinach in the salads. On the farm, Wagner’s interest in perennial crops was piqued.

“These challenges aren’t going away,” Bellemare suggested. “If anything, they’re going to become more present. From a farming perspective, our goals are to make our system as flexible, resilient and diverse as possible.”

The Roots Farm Market allows Wagner and Bellemare to do that for their own farm while also making the system more stable for every single business that sends yogurt, bread, flowers or beer to be sold there. “It’s kind of an ode to Vermont, in a way,” Bellemare said.