Bizvox Podcast
Tilling The Greenhouse Dirt: BizVox Visits A Local Farm To Learn About Winter Growing
Host: Scott Leon Smith
Guests: Sam & Jake Rittenauer, The Edible Landscapes
Scott:
Welcome to BizVox, part of the Electric Secrets variety podcast. We are dedicated to small businesses, entrepreneurs, and nonprofits. We're here to build knowledge, spur productivity, and have a few laughs along the way. My name is Scott Leon Smith and I'm your host. Let's talk some shop.
Hello and welcome back everybody. It's been a while since we've done a BizVox segment. This particular episode is a mobile episode. I went outside of my hometown, just outside of my hometown, to the Edible Landscape's farm, where many, many wonderful things are grown even in the winter. They have greenhouses set up with little crops, vegetables that they grow and sell in the spring. And I met the owner, Sam, and her husband, Jacob. They both run the farm and take care of their family. And Jacob works a full-time job, and they are a great model of having a small business when you've got other things in your life that you need to take care of. And the farm is a small piece of land, but they grow a lot on it.
So, I went out there, and I apologize for the poor quality of the interviews, but I had some lavalier mics on them. And as we're going in and out of the different prep areas of the farm and taking a look at the fields, sometimes we'll pick up some wind or some extra noise, or sometimes the microphones will buzz a little bit or crackle. So, I apologize for that. But I cleaned up the audio as much as I could.
And the first thing I wanted to talk about with Sam and Jacob was how they came to be the owners of the farm because it is an established farm in this area. And when they mentioned Bruce, Bruce is the previous owner of the farm. So, here's what we talked about.
Sam:
Our farm has been around for quite a few years. We just took over in September of 2022-23. 23?
So, we're going into our second year. We just finished our first year with all of the seasons and going through all of the adversity that comes with each season. But I started working out here in March of '23 just part-time time just because I liked, I don't know, I was called to do this.
Jacob:
And wanted to get out of the house away from the kids for a little bit.
Sam:
And I had the opportunity to take over and buy the place. And it was a good fit for everybody.
Jacob:
Yep. The previous owners were getting a little bit on the older side and wanted to retire and be able to travel a little bit, spending some more time with their families and all that. So while she was working out here, she'd come home from work and say, yeah, Bruce was joking around saying that I should buy the business. And then about the fourth time she came home, and that’s when I'm like, okay, this guy might be serious. So, then we just started talks. And one thing led to another.
Scott:
I really do love Sam's story and working on the farm and then suddenly getting the opportunity to own the farm. When I toured the farm, it is very obvious that Sam and Jacob have a lot of skills. And it's great to see that there's no hint of like a manufacturing atmosphere. There's no sense of an industrialized process to get your food to you. You know, conveyor belts or automated processing. It's all people and its friends and family of Jacobs and Sam's that helped them out with their daily tasks and they go all year round with their farming. I visited in February, so it was still pretty cold. And I asked them about their process, especially growing in the wintertime. And here's what they said.
Sam:
Our main product is our salad mix. So, we grow a lot of lettuce. But that's our main thing. We also do leafy greens. We have a large leaf lettuce. During the growing season, we do a lot of different head lettuces like Romaine, iceberg, bib, butter crunch, microgreens over there, spinach, kale. And when it gets a little warmer, we do peppers, lots of tomatoes, garlic, a bunch of herbs, kind of anything that I feel like growing that year.
Jacob:
Yeah, and anything a little growing Ohio's climate.
Scott:
So, you're “garden variety,” pardon the pun, vegetables, but non-chemical, not the stuff that you're going to find on the produce in the supermarket.
Sam:
Exactly. Yep.
Scott:
So we're looking right now at this setup, and I'm imagining this is because of the weather. Can you tell me a little bit about the setup that you have here with the lettuce?
Sam:
Well, the lights they help the microgreens grow a little bit, and it's warmer in here than it is outside. So it's really just protecting them from the elements. And I have some in our propagation room where I start the seeds. We grow them in dirt. And I've heard from customers. There's a difference with them growing in dirt versus in a mat of some sort or hydroponically grown greens. Yeah, you can. I think they absorb the vitamins from this little that they don't get. There's a few other materials. So yeah, we start them out there, and then we bring them in here for a little bit. It only takes about a week from the grow. And let me cut them, bag them up, and ship them to a store, a local store.
Scott:
It's a really cool setup that Sam has. Just these shelves with little trays of tiny seedlings under heat lamps. And they nurture those where they are, and then put them in the ground in the greenhouse and take care of them until spring. I went a little further with Jacob and Sam, just trying to get a little bit more detail about how the harvesting process works. Keep your ear out for an interesting little detail about how they prepare their salad mix, specifically the wash baskets.
Sam:
Well, yeah, we harvest in our buckets here. And then we immediately, especially in the warmer months, it goes, it gets misted, goes straight in the walk-in cooler because we're talking about like 200 pounds of salad mix.
Jacob:
Yeah, it went on a single day of harvesting this whole table. We pull with a pile about that tall on it.
Sam:
And we do that about three times a week. So yeah, it goes in the cooler, and everything gets bleached in here before we even have anything touching. Sings get bleached, that gets bleached, that's our salad spinner. Our hands get washed, and then we take the salad mix and then we triple rinse it in here and spin it out in the bucket, and then we put it on the table.
Scott:
So what does the spinning do?
Sam:
Oh, it dries.
Yeah, yeah, you know how you get salad from the store and then you spin it in a little hand-crank one? That's like a big size one.
Scott:
You don't have to give away any trades, secrets. Is this a watching issue?
Sam:
And then we also have the backup for when this one goes out.
Jacob:
We actually inherited this one, so we're going to have to. Apparently, it's easy. We'll see.
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Scott:
In addition to getting help from family and friends, Sam and Jacob also participate in a goodwill program where they bring students out to work the farm at certain times during the year, just so they can get some unique work experience.
Sam:
We participate in the Goodwill program, and they will bring out kids who are interested in working in this line of work. I think it ranges from, they're super young, like 14 up to 23 or so. Yeah, and they'll come out here and get some hands-on learning experience. And it's more than just teaching them how to do parts of the job. It's kind of mentoring them on being a good employee and kind of tackling life, too.
Jacob:
Giving them that workplace experience.
Sam:
That’s a big one.
Jacob:
Yeah, and there's a couple different programs. There's a younger kids who will have an actual job coach come out with them, and then you've got some slightly older ones recently graduated after graduate, things like that that are really just out here to get that workplace experience without entering the larger job market.
Scott:
Now, when I talk to Jacob and Sam about branding for their business, since they've taken over this business, it's already an established brand. It's been around for a while, but they've still got their minds on how they can grow the business using that established brand.
Jacob:
So, I think one big thing that we try to preach is, you know, you're getting locally grown produce. It is a woman-owned business. She is the sole proprietor of this business. And you know, we're really just wanting to provide that nutrition, that healthy dining experience to the local community. And even, you know, it's a little bit regional.
Sam:
Yeah, I guess what they're branding, too. We're kind of, it's mostly word of mouth at this point. If an opportunity comes up for us to get advertising, I just started a website, too. It kind of reached out to more people. But yeah, it's word of mouth. People know the brand. It's been around for a while. And we're here to stay.
Jacob:
So you're kind of asking us a question that we haven't put the most thought into, just because what we put out is about what we can supply. So, we've not really ventured into the realm of advertising and branding and all that stuff.
Hey, did you know BizVox is just one segment in a variety podcast we call Electric Secrets. And more segments are being added as we speak, including Dedicated to the Craft, a segment that reveals the secrets behind the often misunderstood professions of acting and directing. I host that one too. Keep an eye out for more segments in the next couple of months. Now, back to the show.
Scott:
As I mentioned earlier in the episode, it's a small piece of land, but they grow so much there. And my favorite part of the visit was getting a tour, not just of the greenhouses, but of the fields around the property that are about to be seeded for spring once the weather gets better. And I invite you to keep a list of everything that Sam and Jacob plan to grow on the farm. And my apologies again for the sound. We'll be picking up some wind here and there as Jacob and Sam are talking. But here's my tour of edible landscapes.
Sam:
Yeah, this greenhouse just has kale in it. And I think I have a Winter Red romaine. Oh, that was almost frozen shut. So this is not heathen. And there's a little bit of a sign of life in there.
Jacob:
Yeah, this greenhouse has surprised us.
Sam:
Yeah, the kale is still alive, but that's supposed to be a really cold-tolerant crop. It seems to be doing okay now. But yeah, that all needs replanted, but it's ready for the spring. But yeah, with it not being heated, it rose pretty fast this year.
Jacob:
I don't know, it was December and we were both like, I am shocked at how good the spring house is doing.
Sam:
That's true. We were full capacity up throughout Christmas and then January was when it got a little tough. But I'm thankful we had work to do then.
Jacob:
Yeah, you can see the remnants of some herbs over here. We got sage and we got some rosemary bushes right here. Sage is actually starting to come back a little bit.
Sam:
So yeah, this field is set up for two more greenhouses in the future. That's like our five-year plan, maybe one year. So yeah, we have our beds made in here. I do have a tiny little strawberry patch that's going to grow over the years. Yeah, hopefully in the spring, we'll have some peppers out here and squash, quite a bit of lettuce and some beets, carrots, some radishes, green onions. So that's how this is set up in here. We redo the beds every year and add nutrients to them, new dirt, and all that good stuff. We don't look forward to doing it because it's hard work.
Jacob:
One bed takes what, four hours or so? Yeah, we pretty intensive labor. And we've got, let's see, there's 11 beds in here. I think 19 in the greenhouses, so about 30 beds total. That's quite a bit of time to put in.
Sam:
Yeah, but yeah, the front yard has like a bunch of apple trees in it. You can't tell now because they're bare. There's cherry trees, persimmon tree. But yeah, we can walk around or just walk out back. That'll work.
Jacob:
Was walking back by our blackberry bushes and almost got poked in the eye, so you got to watch yourself.
Sam:
Oh yeah, this is one field. You can't see it now, but eventually, it's going to be set up like that other field without all the plastic because I'm leaning more towards no-till to be more sustainable. So and that's where every year we're just going to be piling on good compost and our walkways. I'm going to use straw and we'll see how it turns out. The weeds might be an issue because they were last year, but I think if we do it right and we have the extra hands to pull these, I think it'll be okay. But we're going to have onions and purple sweet potatoes back here.
Jacob:
You can see we've got some of our own compost bin back here, the wooden palette. Thanks. That could be the field behind it, too. And then there's the three-barrel composters. So we try to any waste that comes out of the lettuce and salad mix process. We try to recycle into other places on the farm.
Sam:
There's more if you're not too cold. I don't know how the wind is going to get over here. So yeah, we can do at the moment just because the ground still frozen. I couldn't sow seeds for a while because all my seed-starting mix was frozen. Yeah. It's been fun. So, and here is a bunch of raspberry blushes, like where he's standing like that field. And this is a couple of beds of rhubarb. That's an asparagus field. This is going to eventually be an urban edible flower garden. Right now, it's just a bunch of mud.
Jacob:
Yeah. We tried chickens there last year and something got ahold of them. You can see back behind these two fields right here, there's a row of stakes and wire. Kind of hard to spot with the little red shoots coming up. Those are black raspberry blushes. Put some time into getting those cleaned up and straightened up and trellised for this year. So hopefully they'll have a better yield. And then all along back there are apple and pear trees or peach trees.
Sam:
Yeah. Over there under all that straw is our garlic bed. I forget how many pounds of garlic we used for that, but it was quite a bit.
Scott:
Is it difficult to figure out where to place things.
Sam:
Sometimes. Sometimes part of it. Yes, because we have to, well, we don't have to, but I choose to rotate. So there are crops because if you plant the same thing in the same spot every year or a similar thing, the bugs are just going to eat them or the nutrients won't be there. So when we put over there last year, that was your cole crops We put some cool crops over there. So cabbage broccoli, karabe, things like that. And we had an issue with cabbage beetles.
Jacob:
But I think in the past there have been cole crops there, but I didn't pay too much attention to it.
Sam:
It was a learning lesson.
Jacob:
History is one of those things that it's spotty. So, we got to kind of start our own history with it. We did have the purple sweet potatoes over here last year. The dirt needs some TLC. That's why I've got grass planted there now to kind of get a loosened up and all that. It was pretty depleted when we took over.
Sam:
We have clover too over there too. And we had some peas too. It was kind of a hodge podge.
The one thing that did really well though is sunflowers. We had sunflowers probably seven, eight foot tall.
Line in that hole. I do that field. And then over there you've got to mix of pear trees and European cranberries. They don't taste like normal cranberries, but I guess they're good for like …. I made a batch of wine out of them. It turned out all right.
Sam:
So yeah, there are some planning that goes into it. And next year, where the vegetables are, it will be different.
Jacob:
Yep. And hopefully without here, since it is a lot more space and a lot more time-consuming than that already takes up most of the time, we're kind of hoping to have this mostly perennials. We're going to add some more rows of trees. Like I said, we got the blueberry bushes. Those will come out here.
Scott:
Maybe even some event space.
Jacob:
Maybe. Oh, yeah.
Scott:
That question was on my list. You could put a gazebo off somewhere?
Jacob:
Well, it’s been talking about. Yes. Yeah. Eventually we would like to do maybe like a paint and wine kind of events or even host small weddings or something. Yeah. Options are there.
Scott:
My thanks to Sam and Jacob Rittenauer for their wonderful hospitality and taking me around their farm. Again, it's called Edible Landscapes. And just a wonderful example of falling into a small business and working hard to take care of it and making sure that it stays on brand or to make sure that it takes the brand in a different direction under new ownership.
I'm very much looking forward to revisiting the farm in the spring to see how the fields are growing and to possibly do another episode with Sam and Jacob. So, until then, I am Scott. Thank you so much for listening to BizVox. Let's get to work.
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