28 Days into Our Little Leafy Dream

and Why It Means So Much To Us!

In my experience, anything really special and good in life starts with one tiny little step, and then another, and another, and so on until you've built the reality of what started as one little (or not so little) idea. Thankfully, Nick and I are the kind of people who are smart enough to surround ourselves with the "idea people", "creatives" and every other person with any type of creativity they care to share with us!

Leafy is no different! When Nick and I decided that we wanted to start leafy we did an amazing amount of research before we decided on the "vessel" if you will, that we wanted to use for our farm. We knew for sure we were going to work with a hydroponic medien and we really liked the vertical tower set up that we have at home. We talked about just buying a storage container and building it from the ground up, we briefly discussed just adding and building towers and other hydroponic systems in our spare bedroom where we keep our at home unit, but after a couple months of research Nick found what would become the home of our new farm browsing the internet. He found a (very) used freight farm Leafy Green Machine. If you have done any research on this company, they are fabulous. We would have loved to be able to purchase a brand new Greenery S unit from them but the $149,000 ticket price was just not in the cards for our little start up!

We got really lucky, we were able to purchase our used Leafy Green Machine for a third of that price. We made the 2.5 hour drive to a small town in the south eastern part of the state and checked out what would eventually become the site of our little dream. Within minutes of seeing it, we both knew this was exactly what we wanted! It had all the guts that we needed, it was already insulated and had the electrical and water lines already installed. It needed A LOT of work to get it ready for our first season but for the first time it actually seemed like Leafy Dreams might actually be more than a pipe dream.

We went to look at the farm just a couple weeks before we were leaving for a very needed vacation. Nick works full time, he was well overdue for a vacation and for the last 6 months I have been giving my body some real time to heal after over a decade of fighting a slightly complicated diagnosis of Chronic Kidney Disease that resulted in about 16 months of dialysis, a kidney transplant, several complications from said transplant (that please understand still saved my life in every way and I will be forever grateful for my doner and their family!) and a lot of struggling to fight a depression that I didn't understand and convinced myself wasn't really there but the kicker for me anyway, was Covid. Even with my compromised immune system I made it all the way through lock down and the times when covid was running rampid all over the word without catching it! Last July, Nick and I both got covid at the same time. Before that, I thought I had met my match for feeling terrible while I was on dialysis.. I was just so very wrong! Covid landed me in the ICU for about a week and I can tell you truthfully, I wasn't really sure my body would ever be able to truly recover from that. During all of this I was working still working with Nick and we were both working between 50-60+ hours a week and the hours and stress were just not allowing my body to heal (mixed with a couple other factors but I'll spare you those awful stories for now). Nevertheless if I was really going to get healthy and FEEL good, something had to change and it needed to happen pretty immediately.

To say that this was a needed vacation is almost an offensive understatement and it was nothing less than perfection. We had very little cell phone service, very little distraction from T.V.s beautiful beaches, great food, and just time together! We made a "no work" rule prior to boarding our flight and that included any discussion of Leafy, which I would like to add didn't even officially have a name yet! We decided that we would enjoy our vacation and make our decision on our way back home. We just needed to take a deep breath, enjoy the serenity of being together, and just let go of everything else outside of our little bubble of perfection. So that's exactly what we did. I was able to take Nick to some of my all time favorite places in the world and being the perfect (for me) person that he is, he followed along and fully emerged himself in a part of my life that has a lot to do with who I am today.

Nick is the person that I am allowed to be unapologetically myself with. He truly is the ying to my yang in more ways than I could ever explain to you. It causes arguments with our overly stubborn attitudes but it almost always leads us to an agreement that ends up being better than either one of us could have come up with on our own. We had an amazing trip and when we were coming home from the airport, although we were completely exhausted, we didn't even have to say it, but we were both committed to the idea of Leafy and bringing this dream to life, Nick would continue to work full time and my full time job would be our perfect little dream and he would help me out at the farm when he could. But it would be ours, and we would begin our adventure into sustainable agriculture. We would find a way to work with local food banks to do our part to feed our community, and we would provide locally grown, NO GMO, fresh produce to everyone that was interested. He was in, and I was in, and we were buying this thing and we WERE going to bring this little dream of ours to life!

28 days ago, when we watched that Semi coming down with our new storage container farm in tow... I think we both just briefly froze for a moment taking it all in. This was it, there was no turning back and our future was barrelling towards us, ready or not, Leafy Dreams was about to really begin,

This Sweet Man Of Mine, is a Saint!!

*Ladies* make sure you do not settle for anyone that does not believe in you, not only as fiercely as you believe in them, BUT also as fiercely as you believe in yourself!!!

But in a very real way, I am so grateful that we are able to share this passion. When he got me our grow tower for an early Christmas present, I don't think either one of us was prepared for the way he fell in love with it as much as I did but it quickly became a favorite part of our days. Without Nick, I have no idea if Leafy would have ever become anything more than a concept. I have never met anyone that sees me the way that Nick does, and I hope that he knows that I see how special he is too. We have worked together in a high stress environment, we have supported each other through some really tough personal times and I can honestly tell you that there is no one else that I would ever go into business with. He is my person and this little dream of ours is our love. It is a thank you to the world. It is a way that we can feed ourselves and our community. It is a mishmash of him and me, and everything that we find beautiful in this world. It is my purpose. It his purpose. Taking care of people and our world is our purpose.

We have spent the last 28 days in hustle mode. We have put sweat, blood, and tears into this journey and we are well prepared to shed more. We have learned skills we never dreamed of learning in such a short amount of time, every day is research, every day is planning, every day is dreaming, every day is another day of learning how to fulfill our dreams, together.

From laying down gravel to finally getting our electric installed, we still have so much more work to do before we can plant our first crop. We had hoped to be able to start planting in the upcoming week, but we assess things on a regular basis and we want our farm as close as perfection as we can achieve before seeds finally hit the seedling tables. So, we decided to wait. We will give ourselves another 7-10 days to make preparations, sanitize everything one more time, reassemble and test all of the pumps, all of the systems and troubleshoot everything else we can dream up, one more time. It will set us back, but it will be worth it when we finally reach our first harvest! We are so excited to share this dream with you, we want to bring you the most delicious, freshest leafy greens and herbs to you, more importantly, we want to THANK YOU for being a part of this with us! Thank you for believing in us!

I don't know about you guys, but I am so excited to see what we can accomplish in the next 28 days!! There will be more cleaning, painting, preparing, more late nights, and more memories. There will be sweat, tired bodies and sore muscles, there will be more camping, marketing, meetings, and so many more moments where we will sit back in awe of what we are doing.

Stay tuned friends, things are about to get even more leafy!!

Amy

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