Farm Description and Practices: What we are about

Since I haven’t been back out to the farmers markets yet this season, I just want to drop a little reminder about what we are all about, the methods we employ on our farm and why we do things like this. I’ll try to be quick bc the actual process is anything but… #slowfood

Located in Ridgebury, Pa., Growen Food is part of the regenerative agriculture movement. In our fifth year back on the farm, we have developed a polyculture of outdoor vegetable gardens and sistered it with indoor mushroom production.

Our mushroom variety includes lions mane, oyster and shiitakes. The latter of which are cultivated on hardwood logs using sustainable techniques that are centuries old. Our veggie selection changes with the seasons, but the quality is to remain crisp, clean and consistent. We use our extensive background in safe food handling systems to ensure that the freshest product arrives to your kitchen

With soil health as our priority, we spray zero pesticides or herbicides–certainly no fungicides either. We fertilize with OMNI certified compost, amend with old mushroom substrate and work to minimize tillage. In fact many of our garden beds are no-till as we strive toward our full-circle goals in regenerative agriculture.

In addition to the vegetables, our niche is specialty mushrooms. Our shiitakes grow on hardwood logs, ethically harvested from the forests surrounding our farm. Meanwhile, the lions mane and oysters are cultivated on certified organic sawdust sourced 100-percent from America. After the mushrooms are harvested and the substrate composts down, we then use it to help feed organic matter to our garden beds, former pasture where cows grazed decades ago. It's there where we grow our vegetables now.

A similar process of decomposition unearthing new life occurs naturally out in the woods. Our belief is that by working with Mother Nature as closely as we can – in the gardens as well as in the mushroom hall – then we will produce a clean and healthy final product for you.

Part of that means we try to reduce tillage in order to conserve the biodiversity of our garden soil. With a healthy life balance at and below the root level, creating an underground community that includes beneficial fungi and bacteria, we get to do away with harmful sprays and chemicals.

We are about delivering the safest and cleanest product to your family and we want it to taste delicious, too! With experience in the food-service industry, we employ techniques for optimal and safe food handling. That is to ensure our products arrive to your kitchen in fresh and clean form. We want our greens to be vibrant, our beets juicy, our kale crunchy. We want our mushrooms to taste and look like ones you don't find at the store, and we want that every time.

If you have questions or thoughts, please feel free to leave a comment or contact us at growenfood@gmail.com

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Growen Food: What's in a name?

Every farm’s name has a story behind it. Ours has a couple. At first it might appear as just a play on words, a straight-forward business description. Like many others, however, there’s more to it than what meets the eye.

Growing up in this beautiful rural area, I remember riding around in my parents’ car, mesmerized by the fields of corn quilting the sides of the road in the summer. I recall many of the neighbors growing a backyard garden, so I figured the farmers, too, were planting food for everyone to eat. I was thrilled. “Mom,” I remember asking. “When do we get to eat some of that corn?”

A chubby-cheeked, food-motivated child who wrestled in the unlimited weight class as a youth, I’d for real get lost staring out into the field rows. Just imagining melted butter brushed across corn on the cob, sweet like Dad grew, with a sprinkle of salt. That was until Mom’s answer snapped me out of my fat-kid hunger trance. 

“That’s not for humans,” she said, her answer disappointing. Not that field either. Nope– not that one neither. Although they all worked tirelessly, perhaps too tirelessly while propping up the economy of our small rural town, almost none of the farmers around us grew food ready for human consumption. Even the small herd of grass-fed beef that wandered the pastures around my house (where our gardens are now) had to be shipped off to the butcher before they reached a dinner table…and never our dinner table.

When my wife and I moved back to get this farm operating again, we wanted that aspect to be different. With Liz’s experience and love for restaurants and her passion for good healthy food, we wanted to grow things that were ready for the kitchen, now.  That was to be paramount to our farm, so in creating a name, we wanted to make that as clear as the spring water that seeps out of the hillsides around here. What are you doing? We’re growing food. For everyone. 

The name became more fitting once mushrooms found their spot at the top of our crop plan. Despite how Pennsylvania grows more than 60 percent of the mushrooms in the United States, the majority of that comes from the southeastern hip of the state. Up here in the Northern Tier, we get a few strange looks at first when it’s learned we grow mushrooms. Moreover, then, our name was a challenge to mycophobia. (The fear of mushrooms… it’s a real thing!) Of course not all mushrooms are food. Neither should all plants be eaten. But the ones that are edible? We should be consuming them more frequently, included regularly into in the American diet. We really bought into that from the start. Growing mushrooms, yes. Plants, too. By extension soil as well. Combined, we are growing food.

We could have stopped there for our name, but we wanted to further pay homage to our past and the history of this community. Meshed into our slang spelling of growing (Growen) is not only our last name but also the namesake of a couple of the first founders of this little township of Ridgebury.

It was in the early 1800s when a Connecticut man Griswald Owen chased his love, a girl named Annis Goff, from Connecticut/Orange County, N.Y. to this hilly countryside. Back then this rural area was known for the bounty of berries that grew along the ridges, and that’s the story of how Ridge(berry) earned its name.

Thanks to great, great, great, great Grandpa and Grandma Gr(iswald) Owen– that’s how we got ours

Mushrooms & Veggies: Here's where they meet

The first seed to go in the ground wasn’t even technically a seed. What we planted first, before ever moving back to the farm, was a clove of garlic. 

Close-up of some late-season spinach

Buried into the soil and under a layer of straw in October, a bed of hard-neck garlic was what we first sowed into Dad’s garden. Our hope was that even if none of our other plans came to fruition the following season, which many didn’t, we’d still have that garlic to pull the following July. Sure enough they grew, marvelously at that, and we still rely on that as part of our seed stock five generations later.

From the initial planning phases, we wanted garlic to be our star. Who wouldn’t? We ate that with everything. In terms of crop management, too, garlic is fairly easy. Plant and mulch at the end of one season and watch those stalks burst through the ground at the start of the next. We wanted our other crops – garden vegetables, flowers, maybe even mushrooms – to complement. Oh, how plans change.

We call that first season “Year Zero” because it was a deep dive into learning, while maintaining full-time jobs. No markets or sales to start. With any previous experience before that strictly limited to backyard gardening, a landscape crew and restaurants, we had a lot to learn about what it takes to grow food for a living. On a rhythm and flow for weekly markets, now that was a-whole-nother lesson. We didn’t solve it all that first year, certainly; it’s an ongoing process. 

The first row of garlic we planted. We space them a little closer nowadays :)

Even if our garlic grew like we’d hoped – and it mostly did – we knew we’d need more variety. So our vegetable gardens expanded down into the barnyard where Dad’s cows grazed in the 1980s and ‘90s and the mushroom logs started to pile up. It soon became obvious that while the garlic was a welcome harvest that mushrooms and vegetables were going to steal the show.

It’s the co-dependency of the two that piqued our interest. The more we learned about the plants and the soil the more we learned about fungi, and the more we learned about fungi the more we learned about soil and the plants. 

Traditionally farms rely on a vegetable-animal interconnection. Animals eat the veggie waste and then veggies grow on the animal waste. After chasing pigs and chickens the entire first season (Year Zero) we began to wonder...what if we replaced the animal with fungus? It wasn’t that we were opposed to proper livestock farming. No, we just found that it’s a better fit for our land, in addition to lower startup and infrastructure barriers. Put a little more simply, mushrooms are cleaner. We don’t have to worry about treading fresh manure through our gardens. With the varieties we handle, you can even grow our mushrooms right in your kitchen. 

The shiitake mushrooms that grow on logs predominately eat fibers from the hardwood as their substrate. Once their grow cycle concludes the spent substrate composts down and eventually goes onto our gardens, gradually adding important organic matter to our soils. When that’s not enough, we import mushroom “soil,” a waste product from larger mushroom farms in the southeastern part of Pennsylvania. That is often a mix of agriculture waste like hay, hulls and manure that is first pasteurized before its decomposed by their agaricus specie of mushrooms. It further ages before it’s spread on our ground.

Diving deeper, we’ve discovered just how important the fungal network below the soil surface is to a healthy plant. It was especially interesting to learn how mycorrhizal fungi attaches to plant roots, strengthening their reach for nutrients and water absorption. To strengthen that underground community, our transplants are inoculated with a mycorrhiza. The top dressing thereafter feeds the microbial life in the diverse soil we’re trying to nurture. Fungi, plants – see they do mesh together well.

Both in the garden and in the frying pan. Similar to how vegetables are a complement to meat or other animal products on our dinner table, there’s a large group of us too that find mushrooms and veggies make quite the pairing as well. 

And you know what really ties them all together? 

Garlic