Our farming journey began in 2007 when we apprenticed at Hill & Hollow Farm, a biodynamic and certified organic vegetable CSA in Edmonton, Kentucky. Through their educational component, they host overnight school field trips, Bret was offered a job teaching at Abintra Montessori school in Nashville, TN.
After falling in love with the rewarding, hard work of farming, we wanted to try it ourselves and find out if farming was really for us. Shortly after moving to Nashville, we had the opportunity to rent our friend's small farm - Bramble Hill Farm. At Bramble Hill Farm, we put what we learned from Hill and Hollow, as well as from the incredibly supportive small farm community surrounding Nashville, to work and began our market farming career by selling to local restaurants, attending a small farmers market, and starting our first, tiny, CSA.
We loved farming and we loved Nashville, but our intentions were always to return home to Northeastern Pennsylvania. So after three years in Nashville, we returned to Susquehanna county in 2010 and started farming at Skoloff Valley Farm. In 2012, we transitioned from hired farm managers to owners of our own farm business, Hemlock Creek CSA. In our time at Skoloff Valley Farm, we expanded the garden from just over 1/2 acre to nearly 5 acres, started our CSA program, and attended farmers markets in Clarks Summit, PA and Binghamton, NY. It didn't take us too long to discover that we needed more land to grow vegetables on in order to have a more sustainable crop rotation, healthier soils, and increase our production.
In April of 2014, we purchased a 46 acre farm in Cortland County, NY and began our journey as Shared Roots Farm. As we prepared our new fields for the coming seasons, we continued to produce our certified organic vegetables in Pennsylvania. 2015 was our first year farming full time at Shared Roots Farm in the town of Solon (our mailing address is McGraw). We love being in the middle of a farming community and are glad to continue supporting the Binghamton area as well as the Cortland area with our summer and winter CSA's, providing year-round nourishment.
We have expanded our production to nearly 20 acres for this year, with a third of it in cover crops. Our 2020 season will be our 10th Summer CSA!