The tin barn at the corner of Bay Avenue and Montauk Highway in East Moriches spent decades as a leftover from the duck industry that once defined this stretch of the South Shore. Since last spring it has been a farm stand again, and it is open again now for the late-summer stretch, Thursdays through Saturdays into the fall. The farmer who runs it is a teenager named Matt Gartelman, and the newest thing on his tables this season is honey from hives that stand a short walk from the register.

A farm that started in a backyard

Barn Again Farm did not begin on a farm. It began at a family home on Bernstein Boulevard in Center Moriches, which the Gartelmans bought in January 2022, when Matt was 10 years old. The animals accumulated the way animals do around a kid who wants to farm: pigs first, then goats, chickens, rabbits and horses. By June 2023 there was a farm stand at the house, selling what the property grew.

The operation was real enough, and unusual enough, that the Long Island Farm Bureau gave Matt its Young Entrepreneur Farmer Award in August 2024. He was barely a teenager, running a working stand in a hamlet where farming is mostly something that happened two generations ago.

Then the old duck farm called

The move that turned a backyard project into a landmark tenant came in the spring of 2025. The Ann Smith Duck Farm sits on 10 acres inside a Brookhaven town park in East Moriches, part of the hamlet's historic district and one of the last physical traces of the duck farms that once lined the Moriches bays. The town acquired the property in 2013, and the Ketcham Inn Foundation, the Center Moriches preservation group best known for restoring the historic Ketcham Inn, has been stewarding it since: clearing debris, keeping the grounds, and slowly stabilizing a cluster of historic farm buildings.

One of those buildings is the Tin Barn. In April 2025, after months of work, it opened as the new home of the Barn Again Farm Stand, with the corner of Bay Avenue and Montauk Highway giving the young farm something its backyard could not: a storefront on a road everyone drives.

The arrangement works in both directions. Purchases at the stand help support the Ketcham Inn Foundation's restoration work on the site, which means the farm stand in the old barn is quietly helping pay to fix the buildings around it. A duck farm that had been a maintenance project for a decade now has a reason for people to pull in.

Five hives and a chance meeting

The honey is the new chapter. In May 2025, a customer conversation at the stand connected Matt with Brian, an experienced beekeeper who brought the first hive to the property. The partnership became Barn Again Apiaries, and the apiary has since grown to five hives, including a Kenyan-style top-bar hive, a design the farm notes is rarely kept this far north. The farm says the apiary side of the operation opens this August, with a substantial first harvest expected from hives that spent the summer working the property's gardens and the surrounding hamlet.

Honey made on site joins a stand that already sells produce and flowers from the farm's seasonal gardens, along with lemonade from a family sideline. The animals are part of the draw too. This is a farm stand where the farmer is often the one at the register, and the livestock that made the farm a farm is on the property behind him.

Open through the fall

The stand runs Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays through the fall at 1 Bay Avenue in East Moriches, where Bay Avenue meets Montauk Highway. The season stretches toward the holidays: the farm has run a festive stand later in the year, and the fall is when the produce tables and the new honey shelf will be at their fullest.

There is no shortage of farm stands on the East End, but this one is different in a way that is easy to feel standing in front of it. The building is a piece of the South Shore's duck-farming story, saved by a town purchase and a preservation group's patience. The tenant is a farmer who was not alive when the ducks left, selling vegetables and honey out of a barn that was supposed to be a relic. If you are heading east on Montauk Highway on a weekend between now and the holidays, it is worth the stop, and the honey is worth asking about, because the hives it came from are right there.