The cars begin rolling up before dawn every Saturday at Grovers Park in northeast Phoenix. Quickly, and without any instruction, their passengers — middle-aged couples, young families and a few fit and healthy-looking seniors — line up on the sidewalk toting empty laundry baskets, cardboard boxes and reusable canvas shopping bags.

At precisely 7 a.m., a woman with a clipboard begins taking names and making checkmarks, and suddenly, it’s Christmas morning in the Valley of the Jolly Green Giant. Mothers and grandmothers scurry past hundreds of white and blue plastic baskets, deciding which of the nearly identical cornucopia of fruits and vegetables to load into their own carry-home containers. Fathers and their young sons hoist the heavier cargo — watermelons, apples and today, Hulk-sized husks of corn — into the back of their waiting SUVs, while the most ardent foodies just stand for a moment and marvel at the long rows of fresh strawberries, peaches, apples, bell peppers and spinach awaiting their creative recipes. By 7:30, just like Christmas morn, it’s all over, as the recipients rush home with their treasures.

“You never know what you’re gonna get — but that’s half the fun of it,” says Holly Houk, a neighborhood mom who, like thousands of other savvy food buyers, has discovered Bountiful Baskets, a community-run co-op that has exploded in its brief four years, growing from a neighborhood experiment started by two East Valley moms to an all-volunteer, non-profit franchise covering nearly 100 locations, from Apache Junction to Buckeye and from Rimrock to Yuma.

The concept is simple: People pool their money, by means of a secure website, and organizers are able to buy fruits and vegetables in bulk, from the same farm distributors the grocery stores use. Orders have to be placed by Wednesday night for the following Saturday morning, and volunteers who help run the distribution sites get a basket’s worth of food for free. There are no contracts, and no monthly fees.

“You pick the weeks when you want to do it, go online and say, ‘OK, I wanna get a basket this Saturday,’” explains Houk. Baskets of conventionally grown produce cost $16.50; organics, $27.50. In return, most Bountiful Baskets devotees say they get a bounty that would easily cost between $30 to $50 at the big grocery chains.

And a fresher-looking bounty at that. “The strawberries look wonderful!” raves another woman peering over a basket of organics. “They were about $2.50 at Fry’s, but they didn’t look anything like these!”

The catch is that none of the folks who make the online payment on Wednesday have any idea what they’ll be getting Saturday morning. Could be a bushel of apples; could be a pack of brussels sprouts and radishes. Oddly, most people relish the surprise.

“What’s nice is, I would probably never go to the store and buy, say, this much spinach,” Houk says, pointing to the huge broad leaves protruding from her bag. “But since it’s in the basket, I have to figure out how I’m going to cook it and how I’m going to use it in a meal. It makes you go online and look up recipes and say, ‘How am I going to make my kids eat spinach?’ It gives my family a wider variety of healthier foods than I would normally buy.”

These surprise mixes wouldn’t keep the faithful coming back, however, unless the buyers in charge knew a thing or two about cooking, and cooking for families. Not coincidentally, just about everyone in line at the Grovers Park site knows the phenomenon is headed up by “two regular moms,” and can even detect when their particular sense of humor is included in the basket.

“Sometimes they’ll do, like, a guacamole basket, where inside the basket is everything you need to make copious amounts of guacamole,” says Houk, with a laugh. “And you just go, ‘Well, OK, then! Guacamole it is!’”

Kitchen Magicians

Tanya Jolly and Sally Stevens never set out to become the greens gurus to a statewide network of devotees. At first, the two were just looking for a cheaper way to buy quality veggies, and figured getting their neighbors to pitch in would allow them to buy greens for the whole block at wholesale prices.

“Tanya started a co-op near her house first, and then I started one near mine,” explains Stevens, a former Wells Fargo employee who was laid off last January. “And eventually we thought, ‘Let’s make a bigger group together. Then we can leverage our buying even more.’”

Information about the co-op spread by word of mouth, and soon Stevens and Jolly were hearing from people in other parts of town who wanted to do the same thing in their neighborhoods. Initially, the two resisted. “But after a while we thought, there’s no reason why they couldn’t,” Stevens says. “So we showed them how to do it, and let people contribute over the website.”

Today, even with their distributors’ trucks heading off to a little over 90 locations simultaneously each Saturday morning, the operation runs amazingly smoothly. “The trucks are here at about 4:45 a.m., and that’s also when I show up with all the baskets,” says Connie Weglarz, organizer of the Grovers Park site, one of the co-op’s bigger locations. “The volunteers are here by 5, and then we take all the food and distribute it among all the baskets. Tanya and Sally break down the list, so we know exactly how much to put in each basket, and how many people we’re going to have.”

Stevens and Jolly mostly man the phones on Saturday mornings, making sure that the trucks get to their destinations and that nobody gets any moldy grapes. By noon, every organizer has faxed back the forms confirming the customers’ receipts, and then it’s on to planning next week’s harvest.

“We try to buy as close to local as possible,” says Jolly — like Stevens now, a stay-at-home mom who’s accidentally grown into a skilled produce buyer. “Down towards Yuma, they grow a lot of greens. Out west of Phoenix, they grow carrots. Around central Arizona, they grow corn and watermelon and cantaloupe. We have been buying tree fruits from Utah because, let’s face it, we live in the desert!”

More prized than the pair’s knowledge of what’s in season, however, is their knack for nailing food combinations that make for good, healthy family meals.

“Tanya and I know what most families eat, because we are most families,” Stevens explains. “We’re pretty average, on the whole. We’re moms, we each have three children, and we know what’s easy to cook.

“We also throw a fun item in every basket or so,” she adds. “Last week, pomegranate was the fun item.” Pomegranates, fun? “Hey, there’s nothing funner than cracking open a pomegranate and watching your children be amused for hours playing with the seed casings!”

Viral Veggies

Bountiful Baskets’ self-made website (bountifulbaskets.org) may be decidedly low-tech — the ladies appear to have gotten a hold of an HTML template from the ancient 90s — but the co-op itself has become a virally-growing social network as hot as Twitter to its followers, and with roughly the same seat-of-the-pants business plan.

“Yeah, there’s kind of been an effort not to go that direction,” says Stevens, when asked if the two envision a time when they might turn their rapidly expanding model into something that could actually put groceries on their own tables. Because the goods are distributed mostly in city parks, no cash money is allowed to change hands onsite, and Stevens and Jolly insist all the “contributions” made over the Internet go directly to the wholesale purchases, with $1.50 from each transaction covering the costs of shipping.

“It’s something that we do because we really want families to have good options for affordable, healthy food,” Stevens says. Adds Jolly, “Processed and packaged foods are not usually the best things for families to be eating. That’s kind of the other epidemic we should be worrying about, besides the swine flu!”

Altruistic missions aside, the two admit the operation has been consuming more and more of their time.

“It has kind of gotten overgrown,” says Jolly, using an appropriately farm-friendly turn of phrase. “We didn’t think this was going to be how we spent all our time. But we can’t really walk away from it, because now people kind of depend on it.”

Indeed, Bountiful Baskets’ legions have come to rely on not only the inexpensive greens, but also Stevens’ and Jolly’s personal produce coaching. The website includes an active forum, where participants share recipes using the peculiar mix of ingredients they each received that week (sample subject line: “What do I do with all these apricots?”) and engage in their own sort of Hell’s Kitchen contest — without the screaming British chef.

“We have a message board where people post what they make with what’s in the baskets,” Stevens says. “They’ll do everything from complaining about what’s in the basket to sharing 50 recipes that use pomegranates.”

Of course, if the co-op keeps growing the way it has, someday its founding mothers may actually be able to step aside.

“We don’t really know how this grew so fast,” says Jolly. “Saturday mornings, we don’t require people to volunteer, but random volunteers will just show up and unload boxes of produce.”

“People like helping other people,” Stevens offers. “And I think we’ve given them a really concrete way to do that. And that, more than anything, is probably what made this happen.”