Bear Butte Gardens offers USDA certified organic produce in Sturgis

Photo curtesy of Bear Butte Gardens’ Facebook page.

Michelle and Rick Grosek have been running their USDA organic certified farm stand, Bear Butte Gardens Farm Stand, for 12 years. The Groseks’ farm is located in Sturgis, just south of Bear Butte Lake. 

According to Michelle Grosek, she created Bear Butte Gardens simply because she loves gardening.

“We have lived out here since 1996, and this was our space away from town to raise our kids when they were little,” said Grosek. “We decided about 10 to 12 years ago to start a business, and Bear Butte Gardens was the direction that I wanted to go because I love gardening. I had taken the master gardening course, I grew up gardening a little bit with my mom and just, you know, absolutely love everything about it.”

While Bear Butte Gardens is focused primarily on vegetable gardening, the Groseks also raise an assortment of livestock on their farm.

“We have the certified organic vegetable gardens, which is kind of the main piece of it, and I grow a variety of vegetables in those gardens,” said Grosek. “And for any given year, I’ll do, you know, a handful of gardens, up to maybe eight or nine gardens, just depending on what else we have going on that year. We also have livestock. We have poultry on the farm, chickens and turkeys, and we have lamb. And then we have a few goats, usually a few head of cattle, beef cattle. And then we do hay, you know, and sell hay and keep a lot of the bales for our own livestock and use.”

The Bear Butte Gardens Farm Stand offers a variety of goods, not only from the Groseks’ farm, but from numerous local producers. 

“Also, we’re very happy to source everything in the store locally and regionally,” said Grosek. “And so we source from over 50 different producers in the area now. Now, some of those reach out just a little bit, some of them are from breweries in Sheridan, Wyoming or Sioux Falls or North Dakota, and we have a couple of local wines and then we get our cheeses from East River. So some things you have to go a little bit further to get them, just because they’re not right here in the Black Hills.”

In addition to selling locally-sourced products at the farm stand, Bear Butte Gardens also hosts classes and events.

“Yeah, we do a lot of different things in the summertime. We do farm to table events, and those are pretty much monthly in the summertime, where we bring in a local chef and they get to choose the menu from all of the meats and vegetables and such that we have here that we sourced from our producers. We do ticket sales for those. We also have cooking classes, and those range anywhere from a specific kind of bread, maybe a French bread class, or it might be meal prepping for a family.”

Since the farm stand is open year-round, the available products are continually changing based on what’s in season.

“We’re open 12 months out of the year, and so our inventory in the farm stand changes constantly,” said Grosek. “Right now we’re just getting into produce season and, you know, we’re just starting to get into squash and tomatoes and that sort of thing.”

Bear Butte Gardens is located just five miles northeast of Sturgis. To find the farm stand, head out of Sturgis on Highway 34 going by Fort Meade, then turn north towards Bear Butte. After that, take Highway 79 for one and three quarters of a mile until the Bear Butte Gardens sign is visible. 

The Bear Butte Gardens Farm Stand is open year round, Monday-Saturday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m.. The farm stand is closed on Sundays.

For more information about Bear Butte Gardens, visit their website here.

For more information about the Groseks’ farm, visit their Facebook page here.

For more information about what’s currently available at the Bear Butte Gardens Farm Stand, visit their Facebook page here.