Summer is the time when many Mainers eagerly put produce from their garden or the local farmers market to good use.

But if you’d rather take a hike or go on a bike ride than stand over a hot stove making sauce with homegrown tomatoes, check out the four varieties of jarred sauces Louis Del Conte has been quietly making in Down East Maine since 1996, when he started selling quarts of his Country Style Marinara out of the kitchen at Little Luigi’s, his Bar Harbor restaurant. Fast forward a few years to his next restaurant, Bella Mare in Southwest Harbor, where he developed three more sauces: another tomato-based sauce called Spicy a la Vodka Sauce; a white sauce, Carribeano, that contains spiced rum, citrus and coconut milk; and a second white sauce made with Sambuca.

In 2014, at the urging of his customers, Del Conte started bottling his sauces, first in his own kitchen and later in a commercial kitchen in Ellsworth. Last October, as sales increased yet again, Del Conte moved production to co-packer Pemberton Foods Inc. in Gray.

Del Conte uses local wine in the red sauces, a Barbera from Bar Harbor Cellars. Most of the produce he uses comes from Native Maine Produce, the cream from Hood, and the vodka is Barton Vodka, bottled in Lewiston. The sauces contain no preservatives.

I tasted all four at a food show a few weeks ago and was impressed by how fresh they tasted. Later, I picked up a jar of the Sambuca sauce. This sauce – sweet, but with a little kick to it – would be perfect with mussels; Del Conte told me that’s exactly what he made it for, originally. But I went with a kind of seafood smorgasbord – a handful of shrimp, a few scallops, a lobster tail chopped into bite-sized pieces and a halibut fillet. I quickly seared the scallops and fish, threw them into a baking dish with the lobster and shrimp, gently tossed the seafood with the sauce and baked it for 10 minutes at 400 degrees F. Serve with grilled vegetables and rice, and you have an easy dinner.

Del Conte initially got his products into a couple of stores in Ellsworth. From there, they quickly spread to 27 stores throughout the state. Today, he sells them in Florida, North and South Carolina, and Boston, and has just signed on with Associated Buyers, a specialty food distributor that reaches all of New England and part of New York. In Portland, the sauces are in LeRoux Kitchen, Rosemont markets, and Whole Foods Market, where Del Conte does demonstrations Tuesdays and Fridays from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m.

On the Del Conte website, a 16-ounce jar of the marinara sauce costs $6.99, the vodka sauce is $7.99, and the cream-based sauces are $9.99. I bought the Sambuca sauce at Rosemont on Brighton Avenue, which was charging $10.99 – a bit steep, but maybe worth it for a little extra time in the summer sun.