After their first summer in Maine, (the founders of Carrot Signs) Alan & Brenda Buonaiuto loved it here and decided to stay the winter. When their friends and family back in Massachusetts warned them about Maine’s “10-foot drifts of snow, and weeks stuck inside”, Alan & Brenda thought they needed to prepare! So, like any self-sufficient hippies from the 60’s “back-to-the-land” movement, they bought bulk food and filled the freezer for the long winter ahead. One of these preparations was to head out to a vegetable farm in Bowdoinham, called Prout’s Farm. After getting permission to keep all the carrots on the ground that the picking machine had missed, they filled the back of their Volkswagon (pictured above) and returned home where they stored the huge haul of carrots in sand in their root cellar.
That was the winter Alan & Brenda decided they needed a sign for their small, but growing business. They wanted a sign small enough to hang from their mailbox, and knowing it would need to be vertical, they began to toss around ideas. With a cellar full of carrots and surviving on a steady diet of this root veggie, it was no wonder when they looked at the piece of wood that was to become their sign, they saw the shape that they did! They proceeded to carve the wood into the shape of a carrot and the word SIGNS vertically down the board (pictured on the left). A version of this sign still hangs at our shop to this day! The only task left to do, was name the business….