Our Story
We're Jim and Michelle Garman, and we grow USDA certified organic produce in Middletown, Rhode Island for our retail and wholesale customers.
We became professional growers for two principal reasons. First, food is our passion. Our principal criterion for selecting the varieties we grow is not the plant's ability to yield or survive disease, but rather how it tastes. We're always on the look-out for hard-to-find tomato varieties, unusual Italian winter squash, and heirloom French lettuces.
Our second reason is even more straightforward: we had come to believe (and still believe) that cultivating local food is our only way out of a deceptive food system that refuses to acknowledge the problems of genetically-modified organisms. Whether you're looking for vegetables, fresh herbs, honey or flowers, we pledge to provide you with the freshest and highest quality produce we can grow.
Our Principles
Everything we do on our farm is guided by three simple principles.
We are completely committed to using organic methods, open-pollinated seed, and sustainable practices. We're big fans of our Italian walk-behind tractor, which leaves much less of a footprint than a conventional tractor. We plant into woven ground cover, which requires less cultivation (and less fuel!) And when we do have to cultivate, we love our growing collection of wheel hoes, which we power with our arms.
We think farming is just as much about community as it is about plants. We love what we do, mostly because we get to share our passion with produce buyers, chefs, and people who are enthusiastic about food. Our goal is to put the community back into Community Supported Agriculture. We encourage interaction during Farm Share pickups, we exchange recipes each week, and we thrive on banter about food.
We believe local food is authentic food. We sell only crops that we produce – everything that we sell comes from the farm. And because our soil is clean, we produce food that is, to borrow Elliott Coleman’s term, "fresh, ripe, clean, safe, and nourishing." Our customers are always welcome to come walk around the farm and see what we do firsthand.
