Listen to the full episode here:In what ways can transforming our front yards into edible landscapes impact our local food systems and communities?
On this episode of the Thriving Farmer Podcast, Michael is joined by Laura Fernandez who is the visionary behind Front Yard Foods in South Carolina. Laura’s journey began with a simple garden at the age of 12 and has blossomed into a mission to reconnect people with their food through personalized garden designs, educational courses, and a passion for community-driven sustainability.
Tune in to hear all about how Laura built this thriving garden operation from the ground up!
You’ll hear:
How Laura started getting interested in plants 0:59
How Front Yard Foods got started 5:09
About Laura’s biggest surprise in how the business has grown 7:54
What Laura does for marketing 13:25
How Laura runs the books 19:30
About what Laura would change if she could start again 29:06
What Laura’s advice is for new gardeners 36:09
About the Guest: Laura Fernandez founded Front Yard Foods in 2022 in order to help people develop uniquely designed gardens and edible landscapes. Laura’s passion for food first sprouted when she built her first garden with her grandfather at the age of 12.
Food, farming and community are of the greatest importance to her. Through Front Yard Foods, she hopes to inspire others to find their own connection to the earth and its value. Laura uses custom designs, individualized consultation and personalized education to build the confidence of each gardener and equip them with knowledge to accomplish their unique goals.
Resources:
Website – frontyardfoods.com Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/FrontYardFoodsSC Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/frontyard_foods/
The Thriving Farmer Podcast Team would like to thank our amazing sponsor!
MyDigitalFarmer.com was created by CSA farmer and marketing specialist Corinna Bench to help farmers learn the marketing fundamentals — so you can stop feeling uncertain, frustrated, guilty, or inadequate when it comes to selling your products. In the My Digital Farmer podcast, you’ll be exposed to the fundamentals of marketing theory and practice so you can apply them to your own farm and business. She’ll cover marketing funnels, copywriting, website messaging, CSA marketing, lead generation, brand building, social media, customer retention, Facebook ads, sales pages, Facebook groups, YouTube, Instagram, email marketing, and stellar customer service.
She also interviews other farmers to find out what’s working (and not working) in farm marketing so you can feel more confident in your ability to convert leads, increase sales, and build a strong brand for your farm.
Subscribe to her show at https://www.mydigitalfarmer.com/podcast
Welcome to the thriving farmer podcast I’m your host Michael Kilpatrick our mission is to inspire educate and celebrate sustainable farming we believe that you can build a profitable sustainable farm that gives you true Farm Freedom join us as we talk to Farmers innovators Educators and entrepreneurs to glean their top
Takeaways in business and life hey thriving Farmers Michael killpatrick here with yet another episode of the thriving farmer podcast and today my guest is Laura Fernandez who is the Visionary behind front yard Foods in South Carolina Laura’s Journey began with a simple garden at the age of
12 and has blossomed into a mission to reconnect people with their food through a personalized garden designs educational courses and a passion for Community Driven sustainability Laura welcome to the podcast hi thanks so much for having me glad to be here absolutely so how did you get started in being
Interested in Plants oh man the day I was born I suppose um I’ve always loved plants loved being outside my mom was a you know a fairly kind of standard Southern Gardener um you know I remember planting bulbs out with her as a very young child
And just being amazed that they came up every year you know we did the kind of typical you know pansies in the winter and spring flowers and I just always loved it um but I started being really interested in growing food when I was about 12 yeah okay so when you started growing
Food did you actually at that point like have your own garden or start growing in pots or yeah so I as The Story Goes I just kind of randomly one day told my mom hey I want to I want a garden I want to grow food and she wasn’t super
Familiar so she had her father so my grandfather come over and he Ted up a little spot in our backyard I would guess now looking back you know it was probably like a 10 by10 area but it felt ginormous for a youngster and I very distinctly remember mounding up the soil
For the squash and running um twine for the beans to climb up and planting tomatoes with him it was a it’s a very clear memory it was a really big um time for me and then um we got it going the first couple weeks were great but you
Know as a 12-year-old in Georgia in hot summer yeah didn’t have any clue of what I was doing so it it didn’t maybe produce what uh it could have but it did produce a little seed inside of me that’s just continued to be just wowed by food growing and that understanding
Of the human connection back to the soil it’s you know I have really only truly been a major food grower for about the past 10 years but I’ve um ever since that Gard my with my grandfather I have steadily grown something and um yeah so it’s just been it’s just been a
Great part of my life and then you also had an experience in your 20s where you’re able to spend time in Italy tell us about that yeah so I have kind of these spots in my life where I look back and I realize they were all adding up to
What I do now and I went to Italy for grad school I went to study Renaissance art but what I really got a lesson on was food and what it might look like to Source food locally daily right not just a Saturday Farmers Market but where that
Is just part of the culture that you go down in the morning and you get you know fresh meat from the butcher coming or you know from the farm coming in or fruits and veggies or whatever they are and you’re eating seasonally and extremely fresh and that that’s
Not it’s not a big deal it’s normalized and I came home with a deep respect for that type of food culture and really wanting to figure out how to do that here you know I was in my 20s and you know fresh out of school and trying to
Get a job going and all of those things but it was a really important part of my life to see what a different kind of culture could look like and I’ve I’ve been pretty blessed I’ve got to travel a lot and I will say as much as I love
This country we we kind of um I think we’re missing the boat on the availability of fresh food and we do so many things well and there’s a lot of us that’re making big efforts to change that and um so you know I hope to be a
Part of at least a small part of that yeah there’s something different about really good really fresh food and it’s just a whole another level of culinary delight absolutely well and health too I mean I it’s all so linked I don’t think you can talk with one about one without the
Other absolutely so talk to us a little bit about then how front yard Foods got started so you know it was kind I think so many of us that are kind of entrepreneurs or small business or whatever you want to label us you know I think they all start years before they
Actually become anything and the idea came to me I love to cook um I I like the link between growing and cooking and and that’s really a big part of front yard foods but what I thought about years ago would wouldn’t it be cool if I
Could just do like front yard Pantry or something and you know once a week kind of say hey this is what I’m cooking up this is what you could come and pick up and that was kind of this little idea that I had and then it just kept going
And we moved into our house it’ll be five years ago this Christmas and immediately started putting in fruit trees and berry bushes and you know plotting out the garden and I I was surprised by how many people were interested in our neighborhood what we were doing and then 2020 hit we moved in
In December of 2019 and then 2020 hit and you know we all know what happened then but I got a call from a friend of mine who said hey don’t you know how to grow tomatoes and I I laughed and I said well absolutely she said would you show
Me how and it just kind of spiraled from there I put together a little CL CL how to grow uh fall uh roots and brasas and I could not believe how many people signed up and showed up and so that eventually led me to write the veggie course which I teach
Twice a year it’s a three-month course and it’s everything from seed starting to what to do with your Harvest I teach it in the fall and in the spring and it just kept going from there and now I go out to people’s homes look at their
Space you know some people just kind of want to say hey this hasn’t gone quite right what might I change and some people are the very beginning I was meeting with a woman this week who just bought an acre and a half moved out of an apartment to this house with a little
Bit of property and you she’s starting right at the beginning so we kind of come in wherever you are and help people just get get started and understand how important just the little steps can be yeah you more guide the on the journey yes very cool so let’s break
This down so you do you grow transplants um you teach classes you do the souro classes as well and then you also do like um you almost like Garden for people what would you say kind of like was your biggest surprise in like how your business has
Grown I think my biggest surprise and and I don’t know if it would be necessarily a surprise but I I told my husband the other day I’d had several really positive excited clients call me over the course of the afternoon and just with some what they
Felt like were some big wins and and I got off the phone and I was talking to him and I said you know I don’t think I’m in the gardening business I think I’m in the encouragement business I think that I’m just somebody who is kind of giving people permission
To step outside of the box and do something different and you know I thought my job would be very much like you plant this with this type of soil you water it x amount of times you get this product and really it’s just telling people you can
Do this you’re so much more capable than you’ve been led to believe and where I in my opinion we’ve been raised in this culture where unless you purchase it it doesn’t have much value and I really want to swing the pendulum back the other way and be like no what you create
Is the most valuable and how important that is and so I’ve been I think I’ve been surprised that it’s been much less about fundamentals and much more about meeting people where they are something you said there too that you know what we create is worth money I
Mean how many people do you know who grow a garden and then just give away the tomatoes or give away the beans when you know every farmer is going to charge for those and people that do that at home really should realize the value of that um their time their effort their
What they put into that yeah yeah and you know and whether they sell it or whether they keep it like you know I ALS I teach canning and preserving because I want people to be able to eat your round and we do a lot of community focused
Things and so I do encourage people hey you know if you have an abundance with of something at least trade it you know and understand the value that you have put in it um you know but I think the best stories or when people say Hey you
Know I grew this and then we all sat down at the K at the dinner table and ate together yeah I actually had a gentleman stop me at Whole Foods and he said um are are you the girl that teaches the veggie classes and I said I
I am he said my wife took your class and it’s been lifechanging for our family and I said well please tell me more and he said you know she’s out there and she’s growing this thing and she’s feeling accomplished and we all sat down and ate you know dinner with broccoli
From the garden and to see her be able to express her love for us in that way was so special and I was really moved by that because that you know it’s such a wonderful gift to be able to do that but I didn’t think about that when I started this business
Yeah so of your like four areas or five areas what is the biggest one is it the transplants that or is it the gardening class CL well that’s an interesting question I guess it depends on whether you mean was the biggest for the bottom line or the
Biggest um the biggest bottom line is 100% the garden installations um that’s really what keeps the company afloat I mean they’re all money makers I’ve I’ve dropped some things to be honest that didn’t bring in money that really weren’t that I wasn’t excited about and they weren’t profitable and so you know
Obviously we’re going to drop that and I think a lot small business owners find themselves just you know they start and they just throw everything at the wall to see what sticks correct so definitely removed some of those things and try to to increase um I I didn’t start out
Doing a lot of plant starts but I realized that profit margin was going to be very high for me especially because I was purchasing so many four installations that if I’m already growing those you know that’s just that’s a much higher margin for me but the but the garden installations are the
The big ticket items for us gotcha okay and then what is the average Garden installation look like is it like two raised beds is it an entire backyard what do people look what are they looking for it definitely varies I would say you know on average it’s three to four
Raised beds but I’ve done um as many as 14 this was actually a very cool project she had an old um tennis court and they it it was unusable as a tennis court but it made the perfect space for raised bed garden and we did those really high and
Large because there wasn’t the drainage of the soil and there wasn’t everything underneath and and we talked about what that would look like going forward as far as the capacity of that soil but um and and I’ve done everything as small as just really help some people tuck some
Things in to their walk in front of their house you know we’ve just snuck a cabbage here or put a basil plant there um so it’s it varies pretty dramatically but I would say on average is three to four race beds and I’m assuming like during the
Pandemic there really wasn’t a need for marketing but I’m assuming now have you have you just built up your um your kantel or what do you focus on now to to get the word out um I go to farmers markets and that’s really helpful I’m a regular at a
Couple of our different local farmers markets and so I get to meet people and often times you know they won’t call for several weeks but they’ll or they’ll shoot me an email and say hey I met you at such and such market so for me um I’m
Kind of an extrovert and I like to be with people um and so for me being in a booth and talking or being an events is really probably the main way that I attract clientele I I have a social media Pres presents I have a website all
Of those things but either word of mouth of the farmers markets are are really what has led me to my businesses okay so at the farmers markets you’re typically selling plants in season and then like middle of the summer you’re just selling other plants yeah so everything that I sell has to
Fit into the criteria that it’s either an edible plant medicinal plant or it’s specifically um attractive to pollinators and or just highly pollinator friendly I guess is a better way to put it um and that it is appropriate for That season there’s nothing that frustrates
More than going to a big box store and and I live in South Carolina and seeing broccoli for sale in June you know someone is gonna purchase that it’s going to fail and they are going to suddenly decide they’re a bad Gardener so everything that I sell is going to to
Live right then and that’s also challenging education wise you know I had a bunch of stuff set up this past week and everybody like oh do I need to take that Rosemary inside do I need to take such and such inside and like they they’re they’re all you know cold hearty
For our area anyway certainly not everywhere but for where we are and that’s a really important piece of it for me is to educate people on what grows when and the best techniques to get it to produce and you mix a lot of different things in your garden too because I’m
Looking at you’ve got some pots in there that have the herbs and then some of the raised beds you got you know different things but on the edges you’re doing more flowers sure yeah I try to do a little bit everything I would say my front yard is
Uh pretty messy because I test a lot right I don’t want to teach anything that I haven’t tried um you know I W to try to speak based on my own experiences with a particular plant and um so it can it can look like a little
Bit of a hodge podge yeah but I love it and I’m always always trying something new we just did a big clear out we actually took out a number of the raised beds that are out there created a much larger inground area which I’m excited
About um and I have two green houses in the back I have um kind of an annual Greenhouse that is heated and cooled properly and then I have a um like a cattle panel just plastic coated greenhous it just adds a little bit of protection in the frost but it’s not
Heated in there and your transplant house is that the one made out of Windows yes I well I use them both for transplants but yeah okay yeah that’s a cool house thank you um so let’s talk a little bit about um the business side of this it’s just you who
Does this or do you have people that help you with installs or I do I’m very fortunate I have a young woman named Leslie that works for me um I have to come up with a better term than assistant because I think I’d fall apart
If she she we not here and she does a little bit of everything you know this company has it’s has its reach in a lot of different areas and so you know you just never know what’s going to happen and she’s very good at pivoting she’s
Been with me for about a year and she does a lot of the grunt work and a lot of behind the scenes things as well um I often enlist my son and lucky for me he is 16 and on the football team so he knows lots of really strong young men so
My Saturdays during the school year anyway my Saturdays are are nice because they’ll come out and throw Mulch and do some of the things that I need done um and then you know if it gets too much I could I also enlist my husband so it’s still very much a family
Operation um so that’s that’s really it I would love to be able to expand and I hope by next year that I’m able to to do that but I feel very blessed that I even have one person on the payroll that’s a that was a big a big uh step forward for
Me yeah absolutely so with lesie then how did you find her was she a former student or um actually I just she was a friend of a friend we met that way she just kind of walked over to the room and we started talking and our interest just aligned
And she was looking for some work and I said hey I don’t know how you feel about being outside but I’ve got this big job coming up and she came and like day one we just just it worked and um she’s learned a lot and um just she’s very patient I can
Be a little bit um I can be tough sometimes she’s yeah very patient and very willing to learn and she’s really creative and so it’s somebody that I can bounce ideas off of so I just got really lucky I don’t I wish I had some great
Story but it just happened and she I was willing to ask her and she was willing to say yes and it it just worked out really beautifully yeah finding that right person especially that first hire is such a key aspect you know once you start adding more and more people they
Don’t have to be quite as good a fit because there’s more people to work with them but right at the beginning it’s got to be just the right person yeah I got I I got extremely lucky there’s no other way to say it yeah so then let’s talk
About the backside of the business like are you using QuickBooks or how do you run all your your book for the business so I will say this was a big learning curve for me and I I wish I had gotten it a little more organized early
On so I would say to anyone who’s starting out like do this upfront um but I was I did I do use QuickBooks um and I have someone that helps me with it just because the first year the first couple years I tried to do taxes it was a disaster with me and
Spreadsheets and I mean it was days on end of just endless receipts and things um so I’m much more organized this year and I do use QuickBooks and I have someone that will help me go go over all of that um numbers are not my strong suit but I have
Learned that it doesn’t matter I have to do it and I’ve got to stay organized and so that’s something that’s really been um a a new practice for me uhuh um and then what’s what kind of vehicles do you need for this business my poor car is so trash um I
Have a work truck I just have an old Toyota Tacoma pickup truck and she is the Workhorse of everything and then I have a large SUV that we carry a lot of plants and um my husband also has a pickup if if I can’t handle everything
In the Toyota but that’s really you know we kind of are on a wing in a prayer I’m I have um some big events that I do and so so I have to look at whether I want to rent a car um I do Rory fe’s Homestead Festival in June and this past
Year we took two vehicles but this year we’re looking at renting a box truck just um it was really tough squeezing everything in and um I had a lot of plant damage when we got there and gotcha you so that’s it’s something you have to consider um and you know a plant
For seven eight nine hours in a car bent over is just not going to be beneficial correct so um yeah so that’s kind of new for this year us looking into the into the vehicle situation we actually the SUV that I bought was hilarious we were
I didn’t care about the engine we just kept measuring the the length and the width of the inside the guy thought we were crazy but um yeah will it fit will it fit yeah will it fit and you know and can I fit an 8ft table for markets and
All of those things that a lot of people would not think about when they’re purchasing a vehicle yeah we’re starting to do more festivals and shows too and we’re looking at you know one of those um Sprinter vans and obviously those things are not cheap but it would
Be it would allow us to do a lot of things locally that we haven’t been able to do so far and we wouldn’t have to we would stop we would have we wouldn’t have to borrow our friend’s truck anymore because we actually don’t have a pickup for the farm and they when laughs
At us but I have a father-in-law and a uncle with nice pickups and then a friend that has a nice pickup so I just I just don’t need it yeah no I mean and I think that’s a really valuable Point like only have what you need you know
There’s there’s a lot of things in this business that people have that you know you’re were talking about tractor earlier I just that’s just not something I need I consider myself an Urban Farmer but I’m just not at a place where some of the large equipment is going to be
Necessary for me I hope to grow into that space at some point um but yeah we we make do with what we have mm do you even have like a BCS like a small walking tractor no I don’t have anything like that okay okay so you basically
Your beds are typically hand dug or hand managed oh yeah everything is done by hand yep okay very cool um so then what would you say like I mean like when you’re sharing your customer stories I mean do you try to talk about what your customers are doing on like your um
Instagram or Facebook at all um so sometimes I’ll share you know like some progress pictures um especially with some of our really big jobs um and it just kind of depends on the client too sometimes they get excited when I’m taking pictures and they’re like oh you gonna share that on
Your social media um and so then I definitely want to make sure that I do because I can tell that they’re excited about it um we’re the website I um have been working really hard on our website the last I guess about three months and so we are actually designing a page
Where you can go on and see the designs you can see the before pictures you can see my sketches um and my renderings for the designs and then you can see what they look like after so hopefully in the next several weeks that’ll be that’ll be
Part of the website as well very cool and what software do you use for those designs uh Just Me Myself and My pencils I was a studio art major and um I learned how to I took a really early on I took a landscape architect class I mean I did not go in
That direction oddly enough but um yeah so I I just do everything by hand I guess I’m kind of old school in that way I’ve looked at a couple of software designing programs I just haven’t found any that I really like yeah well if you’ve got that experience
To do it by hand why why change I guess I would like to get some sort of nice large scanner though to actually be able to put them um onto the computer I think that would be really helpful that might be that might be a future purchase yeah yeah Yeah Karina we all love a good acronym and we’ve got a couple here today the aov versus lcv all right what are we talking about so a stands for average order value and lcv stands for life time customer value these are two data metrics that you should absolutely be
Tracking in your business and I didn’t know about these until a few years ago and it’s been a GameChanger now that I’m studying them and trying to get them higher so the average order value it’s tracking the average dollar amount that’s spent each time a customer places
An order right at the point of sale so if your average client is spending $20 with you whenever they come to the farmers market you know that’s just a a good number to know the higher you can get that average order value in general for all of your customers the more
Revenue you’re going to make and so we can try to increase the average order value by trying to get people to buy one more thing or put one more thing into their C right so that’s one way we can grow our Revenue when we know what that
Aov is then we can make business decisions we can kind of make income projections for um the next year or we can set goals uh for how you know how to increase our Revenue the lifetime customer value is the amount of Revenue that’s generated by the average client
Over the entire lifetime with your business so the way that you figure out what this is is you try to track what does the average customer spend in one year with you and then you multiply that by the average number of years that a customer is with you and that’s usually
A really high number like for us when I kind of did the math and saw that you know my client Tracy is is bringing in over $110,000 uh by the the time she’s done with our farm all of a sudden I had a completely different perspective on how
Much I was willing to spend to acquire that customer in the first place so I think this is a really powerful metric to become aware of well and I think too with that second one is Lifetime customer values there’s certain people that you going to give a
Little bit of special treatment to like maybe when they sew up you’re going to say hey you know what I was thinking of you this week here’s a flower or something like that because again they are the are spending the larger amounts and you are going to work a little bit
Harder to make sure that they are very happy and that’s something too is that we’ve noticed with increasing our diversity is one of the easiest ways to up our average spend per visit and so you know now that we’re offering you know Breads and milk and milk and meat
And stuff like that U obviously we’re not producing those we’re just adding those to our store but I think that’s a great way to up your average value you can also just grow different types and more different types of products but that also gets to be more challenge in
Production so yeah one of my best tips that I’ve recently learned is that I like to drop a new product into the online store like on the second day so I don’t release it with everything else at first I announce that I’ve added something in and it causes all of those
Buyers to go back again and you know buy that product and while they’re there they usually add in one or two other things from the cart so that’s another you know kind of little trick you can try to increase the number of times that they frequent your store that will also
Increase your lifetime customer value interesting we’ll have to try that one because I haven’t tried that one yet but very cool if you want more Farm marketing tips like this check out my top rated weekly show the my digital farmer podcast I teach marketing concepts and interview lots of farmers
To find out what’s working and not working in farm marketing to help you find more customers increase your sales and build a strong brand for your farm look for the my digital farmer podcast on your favorite podcast app if you could go over and start the business over again what would you say
You’d do differently that’s a great question I don’t want to say I wouldn’t change anything because not because I’ve What I’ve Done has been perfect but I’m really happy with where we are and I feel like all those steps have kind of led me that way
Um I I think if I could go over again I would have just been more organized upfront and little bit less dreamy and romantic about it okay you know where it was and I got a little bit more um into the nitty-gritty of the business aspect
Of it which oddly I really enjoy I was staying away from those types of things I was like H I don’t want to get bogged down but I love pulling reports and seeing what’s going on and and seeing where our shrinks are and where we could tighten things up um because overall it
Just it’s going to make the company better so I think if I if I had to answer that question question it would say you know to be a dreamer and to be excited but to also look at it from someone who wants a successful operation absolutely um and in your mind what does
A successful operation look like H well money in the bank is a simple answer but that we can do what we need to do you know that I if I need to hire somebody for a job I’m not sweating it you know that we are that our that our clients are pleased
With the output that the greenhouse is producing good quality plants that we can stand behind that we’re able to continue to expand um you know my goal in the next three or four years is to have a freestanding building that’s you know that I’m not working out of my house
That we can really grow into something and so I think just to be successful along the way is to be continuing to move in that direction and I think it also looks like letting go of things that aren’t serving a purpose for us too and being able to understand the
Difference yeah yeah um what what do you see in your future do you see just to continue to do the same thing do you feel like there’s a part of your business that will continue to expand faster than the rest yeah I think I’ve been really surprised
By the plant sales that was a really small just kind of just not even idea little notion that I had one of the events the markets that I went to I had U because I originally got into the markets and the events just to be out
There and to tell people what we did to talk about my classes and to tell them we would come out to their Gardens it wasn’t ever about selling anything and I had a bunch of plants that I had not planted out in my own garden and so I
Just stuck them in the car with me and I took them to the farmers market and they sold in like I mean not even 30 minutes and I was like whoa and so I thought well maybe I should try this and so in the last 18 months that has just
Skyrocketed and people are calling and meeting me places and wanting because they want a good quality plant that’s been started here in South Carolina that you know I’m not certified organic and nor do I think I ever will be but I use only organic practices and I also offer plants that
Are a little bit more interesting you know a little bit more diversity um heirloom quality and things like that so that’s that’s definitely a part of the business that I am loving and I’m enjoying but I didn’t know would be such a big part of it at the
Beginning yeah and then you do a fair amount of unusual ual plants too you don’t just do your tomatoes and peppers you have things like olives and figs and all of that yeah pomegranates um I do blueberry blackberri raspberries we do Goji berries um we do all kinds of different
Herbs um you know the the tomatoes that plants that I sell are going to be yellows and oranges and striped and all kinds of fun things um you know I do Tulsi which people love and you know have a hard time finding starts for we sell a lot of cingula and edible flowers
Yeah we try to do just just a little bit just a little bit of the more unusual things yeah now with a lot of those like blueberries and stuff is that where you’re bringing in bare root and potting up or you’re actually taking cuting uh both both just depending on what they
Are yeah yeah yeah some of them are just super easy to do cuting and some of them are not right like we we just got in a ton of um of strawberries but I actually got the those from be root from a grower that I know um and yeah and yeah so we
We poted up oh my gosh so made strawberries and we’ll have those ready but we kind of do those throughout the year so we’re lucky here we can grow just about 36 365 days a year here so it’s nice yeah you are guys are pretty warm down there yes we
Are it does make my job easier I will say that yes I mean I guess I would say in the summer it’s a lot harder to keep things alive because it’s so hot and humid oh gosh yes nasty but you almost have like a three Monon season thre
Season um you have like a fall winter spring is really where it’s at yes definitely yeah yeah yeah my the The Olive Tree I got from you is still sitting in the bench in the green house um I ended up getting a bunch of seab berries from Oregon so there’s now with
The seab berries and the Autumn olives that I have in there so very nice yeah yeah yeah we just picked up additional six acres of land to lease um so I’m not I’m still trying to figure out where things are going it’s an 8year lease so we can actually put some um shortlived
Perennials on it nice so um we’ll definitely be moving our comfy production over there because we produce a tremendous amount of comfy route um that we ship all over the nation and um yeah that needs to go over there because we’re running out of rotation here on
The farm for it yeah comfrey is I get asked I don’t produce currently any comfrey and I get asked asked about that all the time it might be something that we have to uh to check out but yes um yeah just I mean you just
Need a 100 pack and um I mean your markup on that is incredible I mean we sell at the farm store with the farm market here we sell like a one gallon for like 15 or 20 bucks oh wow yeah very easily people have no problem at all
Paying that because it because it takes 3 four weeks and those things just explode right up up and look like a full full one gallon wow that’s awesome so all right what would you say to someone who’s you know starting down this journey for the first time I would
Say you follow your passion like let let yourself dream you know without um without stifling yourself at the beginning at least you know maybe you have to tailor things as you go along but I do think the reason that I’ve been successful is because I just allowed myself to fully
Walk into what I was excited about um but like I mentioned earlier also you know marrying that with a business mind um I I don’t think I think you can be too structured in the business area and you lose your passion right so then you’re not really doing
Anything that excites you and so your creativity is going to die or you can be on the other end where you’re just being creative and excited and oh who cares we’ll sell it for this or we’ll sell it for that right and then you end up kind
Of taking a nose dive um and so just just being able to bring those two things together um but there’s a there’s such a market for for food growing and you know I’m a little bit different because I don’t sell the product of the plants right you
Know I’m not at the farm market selling tomato and I started the markets thinking that that was who I was right or or having that as my understanding and and really having to Curel that and realize like I’m showing up very differently at these markets and um just seasonally my my
Product is going to look very different than um than selling the actual tomato so I think it’s finding your own Niche and finding what is unique about your business and exploring and then exploiting that yeah and I think you’re opening up a whole new um part of farming and just
Agriculture that um has long been relegated to the large Nursery that doesn’t have that Personal Touch so um I mean anyone can compete with Lowe’s because Lowe’s has no clue what they’re selling right right so yeah I mean I I’ve been happen I’ve happened to U if
We going to Lowe once in a while for their usually their their 75% off Corner um because I know I can save some of the stuff they throw they pretty much throw away I know it’s so sad oh my gosh I my husband was just rolled his eyes at me
One day because I was out there with the hose like watering plants because you know in the middle of the summer you go over there and I mean nobody cares nobody’s doing anything to help those poor plants yes yeah yeah yeah I I I had
One that I think was I think they were 50% off and I took them up front and I crackled the top and basically and I was like can I get more and she’s like okay fine 10 bucks each but I knew that down at the base of the plant it had had
Green wood so I knew I could save it we did but it’s just funny yeah but yeah I just I want to let everyone know like that all their efforts are are valid and worthy and you know I love when people have 40 acres that they’re
Able to farm but the reality is most people are not there and some people have no desire to get there right so if we can connect to someone who’s in a you know regular old subdivision or in an apartment on a balcony and let them feel like what they’re doing is valid because
It is then we’re we’re going to change the dynamic of our food system we’re going to change the dynamic and the culture that we think about food um and and that we have around food and that ultimately is my goal it’s for people you know not just to put Rosemary
In the ground but to cut it and bring it into their kitchen and see what they can do with it um and just to to complete that that Circle yeah and create a recipe with it create some memories with your family with it um I think you’re
Right is that yes the the 40 acre farmers are great and the Thousand Acre Farms are great but I think the real change can happen at the quarter acre the tenth of an acre the balcony you know yeah um pot well and when you grow something even on a
Tiny scale you immediately well in my opinion immediately have more respect for those on the 40 acres and the Thousand Acres because you start to have an understanding and a link to the work that goes into that you know when when you are um you you just your food
Becomes more valuable and so when you go to the farmers market you know even if you’re not growing it but you can ask questions to the farmer you can understand how they got that tomato to the table you know and you you value it and you go home and you can make a
Recipe and enjoy it with your family with a whole different perspective on it just because you decided to grow one in a five gallon bucket and that may seem really simplistic But ultimately I think it’s there’s a lot of truth to it no absolutely you’re right there that
Respect that now I have done it once I respect what goes into creating that yeah absolutely well Laura thank you so much for coming on today really appreciate your time and uh excited about what you’re what you’re up to and all the change you’re making in your
Little part of the world thanks so much I really appreciate you having me on it was nice talking to you so there you have it another episode in the books so I’d love if you would hop on over to iTunes and leave us a rating and a review those mean everything to us
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