A person could leave Mikado, Michigan, and ramble around rural America until they ran out of road, and never find another place like Nedo’s Farm Market, back where the trip began.

Nedo’s is really four places in one: greenhouse, grocery, museum, and driving range.

This time of year, the greenhouse is the main attraction. Aromatic, illuminated, and colorful, it’s a sensory carnival. Vibrant geraniums, promising tomato seedlings, flats of strawberry plants, lettuce and spinach that looks ready for dinner … a gardener wishes he could ask the nice young lady to load up the car until there’s no more room!

The grocery is the anchor of Nedo’s Farm Market. The foodstuffs for sale seem roughly balanced between human fare and feed for wild animals. Birds and whitetails must love to shop there! The museum is to be seen on the upper shelves of the grocery. It is an eclectic collection, comprising vintage tools, old signs, boxes, bottles and tins that once contained products familiar to the Depression generation, beer cans from long-vanished breweries, a long row of kerosene lamps, a taxiderm menagerie, and all kinds of other curios.

In the meadow behind the greenhouse and grocery/museum lies the driving range. At the driving ranges I’ve visited, the patrons dress like “Caddy Shack” extras, ready to head for the links. The folks swinging away at Nedo’s look more like they have just finished turning the soil in the north 40, and were unwinding with a bucket of balls. Nedo’s is open daily until 9 p.m., an hour when the sun is still shining in the summer.

But the most unique aspect of Nedo’s Farm Market is Coco, the golf ball retriever.

Coco is cuckoo for fetching the drivers’ drives!

Owner Wayne Nedo testifies to Coco’s devotion and accuracy. When she races to retrieve a little white sphere when a golfer drives it, as it lands and bounces in a meadow dotted with small dimpled balls, she comes back with the prey “99% of the time.” Wayne says Coco, a model Cocker Spaniel, is rarely to be seen without a golf ball in her maw. Yet she still barks articulately, like Demosthenes orating with his mouthful of pebbles. Coco can fit two golf balls in her mouth, which her species evolved to hold a plump woodcock. (Cocker Spaniel — get it?) One wonders if Coco is working on getting a third golf ball wedged in there!

If Coco were willing to relinquish her amateur status, and join the PCFL (Professional Canine Fetching League), I believe she would dominate the golf ball division. (Of course, the Frisbee division gets all the press.) But even though she’s only 9 years old, in the prime of her fetching abilities, I don’t think she will be joining the PCFL circuit. She’s already learned a lesson that many humans take much longer to learn — there’s no place like home!

So, the next time you need flowers and vegetable starts, a few pounds of suet and sunflower seeds, kielbasa and a six-pack, a walk down Memory Lane, and a little time hitting some golf balls, Nedo’s Farm Market will offer one-stop shopping.

Coco can’t wait to see you!