Bowdoinham announces July 26 Open Farm and Studio Day

Bowdoinham’s farm-and-maker economy will go on display across 10 venues when the 14th annual Open Farm & Studio Day returns Sunday, July 26. The town-wide event will run from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m., giving visitors a full day to move between local farms and studios, buy fresh flowers and farm goods, watch live demonstrations and meet the people behind the work.

The day is built as much for shopping as for sightseeing. Farm and studio tours will run from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., creating a route for residents and visitors who want to see where Bowdoinham’s produce, flowers, crafts and handmade goods come from. The town has framed the event as an annual celebration of its farming and creative community, and the setup gives small producers direct exposure to customers who may come back later in the season for repeat purchases.

Mailly Waterfront Park will anchor the evening program. From 4 p.m. to 6 p.m., the celebration will continue there with a Bowdoinham Food Pantry benefit pulled chicken and pork barbecue, followed by live music from Rough Sawn. That makes the day part open house, part local fundraiser and part tourism draw, turning a summer outing into direct spending for farms, artists and the food pantry.

Bowdoinham has spent more than a decade building the event into a signature piece of its local economy. The town says Open Farm Day has been celebrated statewide on the fourth Sunday in July, and Bowdoinham has organized its own town-wide version since at least 2012. A separate Open Studio Day began in 2014, and the two have been combined in recent years, tying the town’s agricultural base to its creative businesses in one coordinated outing.

The event’s scale has grown with that identity. The town said 24 farms, artists and community groups participated in 2025, and this year’s 10 venues will again give visitors a concentrated map of Bowdoinham’s rural roads and workspace doors. In 2023, the town also paired the day with an Open Farm & Studio Bike Tour organized with Merrymeeting Trailblazers and the Maine Kennebec Estuary Land Trust, a roughly 25-mile route that visited up to five farms and studios, showing how the event can pull in both car traffic and cyclists.

The Bowdoinham Historical Society has also been part of the mix in past years, reinforcing how the day links the town’s present-day farm economy to its civic memory. On July 26, the focus will be squarely on current production: what Bowdoinham grows, makes and sells, and how a single summer Saturday can still send customers home with flowers, food and a reason to return.