Happy Coming to Fruition Day, Friends!
It was this day, in 2013, that Fruition truly came to Fruition. One month earlier, Matthew and I had signed our LLC papers, but this was the moment. It’s a pretty funny story, with the gentle resilience of retrospect, though I definitely cried and woah was it existential at the time.
For seven years before Matthew and I signed LLC papers, as I worked and played in the world of organic seed world, I dreamed of starting a seed company dedicated to sharing its own saved seed, well adapted to its bioregion. Which sounds nice and all, and let me tell you: That is a radical notion. There is only one seed company in Oregon we know of, Wild Garden Seed, that actually does this. Well, I was obsessed with doing this in the Northeast. The transparency, the integrity, being the change we want to see in the world. I was obsessed.
Beginning to design our first crop plan in January 2013!
So we sign Fruition Seeds’ LLC papers in December and one afternoon in late January, I’m crunching numbers and sharpening my dull pencil (again), creating our first crop plan. Our first crop plan! A crop plan is a farmer’s map, their blueprint of the season, taking into account planting dates, harvest dates, yield estimates and other data, so you have a framework for decision-making, including ball-park projection of revenue. We had two acres of land about to be certified organic and after working out our crop plan for days, I finally burst into tears, announcing to Matthew that there was just no way we would ever make a living doing this.
Matthew, making supper (I do love his Shepherd’s Pie), came over, touched my shoulder, and over the next half hour, we talked.
Here’s what we learned: My deepest values were actually masking my very deepest values.
Here’s the thing: I wanted to grow all our own seed not because I believed I was the only person capable of doing this work; I was so fixated on this because that was the only way I had conceived of having the integrity, the transparency, that the work deserves.
And Friends, it was in that moment that we realized the deeper expression of integrity is, rather than doing this work alone, was to share it with others.
If we could collaborate with other organic seed growers in the Northeast, suddenly we are amplifying that value rather than diminishing it.
And we all can make a living doing what we love, by doing it together.
So now we collaborate with 20+ organic seed growers, all of us learning and sharing and supporting each other, building a more resilient network of relationships with both plants and humans in our bioregion. Stay tuned for more of their stories soon!
Happy Coming to Fruition Day, indeed!
‘August Ambrosia’ is a collaboration between farmers, gardeners & eaters tasting & selecting fruits together for six years before naming and sharing her seed with the world! We’re especially thankful for Nathaniel of Remembrance Farm and the thousands of people who came to our annual Watermelon in the Dahlias party to taste and shape this new watermelon, brilliantly adapted for short seasons.
Truly, we come to Fruition when we all come to fruition.
So yes, Coming to Fruition Day celebrates the fears we face and the difficult work of asking deeper questions to find deeper values.
The fear of failure is so real, Friends. It takes different forms at different times in our lives. Whatever the form you’re experiencing in your life right now, large or little, I see you.
I’m grateful to have taken the plunge and you, reading this, are no small part of why I still jump out of bed each morning.
Whoever you are, whatever you love, no matter what you do: Let’s do it together.
Don’t be shy!
Sow Seeds & Sing Songs,
& the whole Fruition crew
ps
Admittedly, to date, I’m not at all pleased with the trumpets we sound about the collaborators we work with, because I want to share those stories way more than we currently do. We cannot do this work alone and we don’t. In the coming seasons, expect a lot more of their stories to be shared and celebrated. Cheers!