How We Grow

We're Alex and Tyler, and we grow vegetables on a small farm just outside Woodinville. We started the farm because we were tired of grocery store produce that doesn't taste like anything. It turns out that when you pick a vegetable at peak ripeness instead of shipping it across the country, it tastes completely different. Here's how we do it.

We harvest at peak ripeness. Flavor is mostly freshness, and freshness is mostly distance. Our vegetables travel a few miles, not a few thousand. Produce shipped up from California can't match that. By definition, it can't be as fresh.

We choose varieties for flavor. We've grown over 700 varieties. Each year about 150 favorites make the plan, alongside 50 or so new experiments. Most years we grow over 50 kinds of tomatoes alone. Why the obsession? Flavor, and finding crops that thrive in our unique climate and growing systems. Many of them you simply can't find in a store.

Nothing is sprayed. Ever. No pesticides, no herbicides, no fungicides. It's as clean as produce gets.

The soil comes first. We farm regeneratively and don't rely on tillage for weed suppression. We're experimenting with some initial tillage to improve the soil before a bed goes into our no-till system. Set it up healthy from the start. Then build it up, season after season, instead of wearing it out.

Everything is planted, weeded, and harvested by hand. The whole farm runs on small hand tools and battery-electric equipment, like our new Farm-ng Amiga. It's a little slow. We think it's worth it. Every plant gets looked at by a person who cares. Hand harvest also lets us grow varieties the big producers can't touch. Too tender, too full of sugar, impossible to pick by machine.

The short version: we cut all the right corners. No trucks, no warehouses, no growing for looks. We get to grow for one thing. Flavor. We'd love to grow it for you.

— Tyler & Alex