Find fresh produce, trees and more at Baumhoefener’s Red Barn Market in Cedar Rapids

CEDAR RAPIDS — Fresh out of Iowa State University with a degree in landscape architecture, Augustus Baumhoefener put down roots just west of Cedar Rapids in 1928.

“This was the Lincoln Highway out here back then,” John Baumhoefener said one morning this past week, “the main highway across Iowa. It was actually a gravel road back then.”

The Baumhoefeners built a Tudor-style home on 40 acres that would become their landscape nursery and design business.

“His wife, Helen, my grandmother, was an English teacher,” Baumhoefener said. “They studied English architecture, so the grounds around the house have that English look, with the hedges and the different elevations of the gardens.”

Baumhoefener worked for his father’s landscaping business in California for about five years after earning his own degree from ISU in aerospace engineering. He returned to Cedar Rapids in 1976 to take over his grandparents’ nursery.

As the city moved west, the family sold parcels for a housing development and Concordia Lutheran Church, and the nursery now occupies six acres.

“We grew more back then,” Baumhoefener said. “We actually did propagation of seedlings and nursery stock because it was so expensive.

“We’ve transformed to more of a retailer. We have five or six wholesale growers that supply us. They have much more ground than we do.”

Baumhoefener decided against selling off the property and moving the business beyond the city limit.

“We’re comfortable with the location,” he said. “We’re just off the beaten path enough that people don’t know we’re here because Edgewood is the primary thoroughfare.”

Nine years ago Baumhoefener’s wife, Leslie, launched the Red Barn Market, selling fresh vegetables on ground that had been cleared of nursery stock.

“That was my wife’s passion, and it’s been really good for us,” Baumhoefener said. “She’s always a stickler about quality and variety.”

The market’s late-summer produce stock includes tomatoes, zucchini, peppers, lettuce, cabbage, cucumbers and kale grown on-site, along with dill for pickling and eggs from the family chickens.

“We’re not certified organic, but we use organic practices,” Baumhoefener said.

“People want to know where their food comes from and how it’s grown. You don’t have the shipping cost, and it’s fresher.”

Drawing on his suppliers, Baumhoefener specializes in oak and maple trees, usually more mature than saplings found at most nurseries. In California he often moved century-old olive trees and 60-foot palms.

“I’m experienced with craning and moving big trees, and we were equipped to handle them,” he said.

Which came in handy after last year’s derecho.

“People lost trees that we had sold them 40 years ago, and they were not going to put back a little tree,” he said. “They wanted something big. There was a glut on the market from our grower, so we were able to bring them in at a discounted price.”

It takes seven to 15 years to grow 30-foot-tall oak or maple with a six-inch diameter trunk, about the largest that’s practical to transport.

“I have a truck coming once a week,” Baumhoefener said. “Tell me what you want and we can do that.”

In 2020’s last fiscal quarter Baumhoefener sold more trees than he usually does in a year — a boom he expects to continue with an estimated 65 percent of the city’s trees lost to the derecho.

“People were waiting to get trees taken down, stumps removed, the house repaired,” he said. “Trees are the last thing they’re going to spend their money on, so that’s continuing and probably will for the next five years.

“You don’t miss it until it’s gone.”

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