What’s in those containers???

Our Story

  It’s our family’s hopes and dreams and a lot of hard work to create a brighter future for our kids and yours! 

  The journey started shortly after Me (Hi my names Tonda!) and the love of my life Mike met.  We started on this path not even knowing we were on it!

    We began by wanting to cut down one of our biggest bills, our food bill. How can we feel wealthy while we eat a beautiful, flavorful dinner, but not break the bank? Dinner for us is our favorite part of the day when we are all together no matter what’s going on in our lives we slow down for dinnertime.

   The journey to create healthy wealthy food started over 10 years ago.  I fell in love and I wanted to make sure I could care for him and our kids.  Not only giving then some good cooking but I didn’t want them to need for anything.   And as I started researching food I was quickly faced with some of the ugly truths about what I thought food was and what it really was.  The food we are raising our kids on may look the same as the food we were raised on but it’s night and day different and some of it you understand quickly and other parts take time to fully accept and understand but in the beginning for me it was simple.

   If broccoli looses 50% of its nutritional value within 14 days of being cut then it would take twice the vegetables to get 100% nutrition and here I am wondering why my waist line has grown twice as big.  The average produce comes from mass produced farms in other states and countries.

 So from …

cutting the vegetable - a couple of days

 packaging - a few more days

stored in a warehouse awaiting a truck to pick up for transit across country- a few more days.

   By now its been a little over a week since the vegetable was harvested and is now being trucked across the US or in most cases into the US.

Sadly the truck carrying that broccoli will pass another trucks carrying broccoli back to supply the city the other broccoli came from. 

“No!  that can’t be right” you might be thinking right now.  But it’s truer than you can ever imagine.

   Anyway, the point is by the time it gets to your fridge it’s been over two to three weeks.  Now more than 50% of the vitamins and nutrients are gone.  Not to mention the spoilage that is happening from the temperature and altitude change as well as the bruising from it bouncing around on its journey.

One thing that could solve all of that is to meet your local farmers and eat and live local.  Don’t even get me started on the meat production in this country because that is a rabbit hole for another day.

   The research has been started and to this day I’m still learning more and more about why fresh organic food is important from environmental impacts to sustainability and love and care for our future.

But what really sent this home for us was an exciting and terrifying day.

  We went skydiving!  (just a 411 I’m afraid of heights) So the two weeks leading up to that day I just didn’t think about it.  On the day of the jump the tandem instructor tried to interviewed me before the jump, all I told him was I didn’t want to talk or think about it.  I just kept telling myself its only three feet.

    Once me and Mike got up there, I went first because of course less time to think about it.  I thought my mind would race in that moment when I bailed out of the plane but it didn’t everything was silent seeing the curve of the earth and realizing how truly small we are…

   It was the closest thing to a religious experience I could think of.  When we got to the ground I kissed Mike and didn’t talk again for an hour or so, which is unusual for me, and Mike was so excited he didn’t shut up LOL which was unusual for him.  But when I started talking again I told him I don’t know what you’re doing but this is what I am going to do.  From that day on we quit smoking, stopped drinking soda, and started eating over 50% vegetables and stopped eating commercialized beef.

   That jump made me realize how small and fragile I truly was and if I don’t take care of myself and the earth around me then the earth would swallow me up without a second thought.

   Because we’ve traveled for many years for work doing land survey we realized how hard it is to find quality produce anywhere in this country.

   For example right now (07/20/2019) we are in Ohio deconstructing this greenhouse we purchased used and I go to the local grocery store and buy a cantaloupe one of those in a net bag with a label.  No I didn’t read the label at the time, but two days later when I went to cut it up for breakfast. (cantaloupe and eggs yum!)

   Well the melon was rotting so the beautiful smell was the wine inside and as I read the label it had a farm story and the farm was located in Georgia.  Now when it left their farm it was in the peak of its freshness, I’m sure.  But by the time it reached Ohio and was sold to me not so much and I lost out on the 4 dollars and a beautiful breakfast we had all set our hearts and tummies on.

Now back to the WHOA! …….. what?  Deconstructing a greenhouse??  Yes, me and Mike are finally trying to do what makes most sense to us for our family’s gift to the world.

  We have spent our life savings on a 10,000 square foot greenhouse with an Aquaponics system inside.  What is Aquaponics?  Aquaponics is a beautifully balanced environment between fish and plants.

The fish supply nutrient rich water that feeds the plants and the plants clean the water that is sent back to the fish.

  Once we get it taken down, we will be rebuilding it in Louisiana where our home is. We’ve owned our home for 7years but have only spent 1 year there a few weeks at a time so we’re excited for the opperitunity of being home full time. Rebuilding the greenhouse will take a few months to reconstruct and begin to produce locally grown vegies, greens and herbs.  As well as organically grown in ground produce like carrots, radishes, melons and anything else we like to eat and a few new things to try.

  But in the process of this we are losing our day job because we both do traveling land survey and have for many years. In order to create roots and stay home and farm.  We can’t travel for work anymore so if you were touched by our story please share with a friend and donate.  Any amount helps our family start planting ROOTS.

Thank You,

Tonda, Mike and kids