When You Keep Hurrying Up to Slow Down… But...You Never Actually Slow Down

We all know the feeling.. we run around like crazy people just to hurry up and wait.. having a start up farm is sort of like that, except not really at all! 👩🏼‍🌾🧑🏻‍🌾

We started this little venture of ours in the middle of July. Since that time we have been cleaning, replacing, sanitizing, researching, starting, stopping, recleaning, switching products, ordering seeds (Shout out to Bakers Creek!) fixing problems we should have seen coming, building, creating, applying for LLCs, purchasing domains, learning how to build websites, researching costs, researching better ways to grow, healthier ways to grow, washing, rinsing, and repeating, I think it's fair to say that we have both learned more in the past 4 months than either one of us learned in our college years combined! Bonus!! All of that was just to get us to a point where we could start growing... and wow, are we growing! It has been so special to watch our seeds grow into little seedlings, monitoring their root growth, tracking how long to keep them in our seedling nursery before we get them into the towers and all of this is basically trial by fire for us, In many ways we have succeeded our own expectations for where we find out little business today and in other ways, it still feels like we have a very, ver long way to go!

At the very end of September we were finally in a place where we were able to start our first round of seeds, in the past 3 weeks.. we have 111 towers filled and helping our seedlings grow to maturity with another 400 that will be ready to transplant in the next week at most and we are waiting on one more order of wicking strips (a felt cloth that helps the water feed down the towers evenly to ensure every plant gets all of the water and yummy nutrients to grow the very best produce for you!) so we can out our final 38 towers back into the farm and reach 100% capacity! We have been adding in towers spacing out when we start our seeds so we constantly have a rotation of fresh produce.

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There is such a sense of awe that comes over me when I'm walking through the farm, looking over every seed, leaf, herb, or head of lettuce. I randomly catch myself staring at all the beauty in our little container farm and and I can't help but think "We're actually doing this, we're actually making our dreams come true!" And I look over and see Nick replacing a doser or adjusting a nutrient or finding a new app to make the overhead lights dance with the music blaring through our unnecessarily awesome speakers and realize I have the biggest smile on my face! How lucky we are to be doing this..how lucky am I to be doing this with him!! I think maybe that's the least expected thing about dreaming, that every once in a blue moon, they come true, but I can speak from (a surprising amount of) experience...dreams really do come true!

Not to say we haven't earned this dream and paid our dues with blood, sweat, and tears but seeing where we are today, just a short 4 months since we brought our rusty, beat up little farm home, makes every bruise, scratch, and argument worth it's weight in gold (or should I say green 🥬). Leafy Dreams has become our favorite place to spend our days. Just like the earlier days when the idea of our own farm was just giggly conversation while we talked about our days, trimming our little garden in my office. I think if we told those giggly love birds what they had coming, that in just a few short months that dream they dreamed up would be their biggest reality.. they would laugh in my face, but as life happens to go, here we are, in the thick of it.

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It really wasn't all that long ago that that Nick and I were dreaming up a way to move back to Iowa from Omaha. Just a couple of completely burnt out restauranteurs with a passion for people and a passion to build something for our community. A passion for life that we both thought we were missing out on, desperate to live our lives as big and as loud as we could. We wanted so much more than we were getting and we are just stubborn enough to go out and find it. I can't say that this is what we were looking for when we finally moved back to Iowa, exactly 1 year ago today, but Leafy Dreams is so much bigger than anything we were searching for and having this opportunity to share our fresh produce with all of you, year round, is the best possible opportunity that we could ever ask for.

So for all of this, and everything we still have to share I have to say, one more time, thank you! To all of you who have followed along with us since day 1 of this adventure, and every one yet to join us for your unwavering belief in us and our little Leafy Dream!!

Until next time Friends,

Stay Leafy 🥬