Podcast: Play in new window | Download
In our opinion, Petra Page-Mann is one of the top communicators in the self reliance and DIY organic gardening fields.
Join us for a terrific conversation on why personality marketing and quality education can help differentiate you from big corporate companies. As well as some heart felt thoughts on current events in America today.
Head over to Fruition Seeds for helpful tips on gardening and be sure to grab some organic seeds to start growing now! – https://www.fruitionseeds.com/
Transcription
Brian: Petra Page-Mann is the co-founder and storyteller at Fruition Seeds. Growing up in her father’s garden, Petra believes each seed and each of us is in the world to change the world. Her passion, curiosity, love of food and love of people led her all over the world studying seed, song and culture worth celebrating.
In 2012 she co-founded Fruition Seeds with her beloved partner Matthew, to share the seeds, knowledge and inspiration gardeners crave to amplify our individual as well as collective abundance in our short seasons.
Petra, welcome to the Off The Grid Biz Podcast.
Petra: Why thank you, my friend. It’s a joy to join you.
Brian: Awesome.
So how did you end up here? What’s your life story up to this point?
Petra: I really like to eat and I’ve been fortunate enough to eat a lot of wonderful things and somehow it just keeps happening and so I am to share all of those seeds and all of these meals with all the people so we can all keep growing.
I grew up in my father’s garden here in the Finger Lakes of Western New York. And if you’d asked a little seven year old Petra, what she loves to do, I wouldn’t have told you gardening.
I also wouldn’t have told you brushing my teeth. It was just something that we did.
And I took seed saving for granted as well.
Now, if you want to sow some seeds, you should save some right?
So I’ll profoundly be so grateful for that gift that my father gave me my entire life. And as I, you know, became a teenager and became more aware of the world around me and really just deeply concerned by the patterns that I was seeing.
I realized that agriculture was kind of this intersection of a lot of my passions of being outside of eating but I’ve also like soils and justice, and all of these wonderful things and seeds are kind of the seed of it all right?
And seeds are this just epic metaphor to me of just the growth of the potential the capacity to adapt and change, and kind of that like gift of our ancestors and how we can become good ancestors.
So I spent over a decade working in kind of the organic seed world, working on farms and also for seed companies. I’ve worked for some of the smallest seed companies in the world, also one of the largest. And it really galvanized me to know decentralization is so important.
You know, there are oaks all over so many continents, right. But there are so many different genus species. So many subspecies and the Oaks that we have on this ridge above me, are distinctly different even within that subspecies from five miles down in down in the valley.
So we must do the same thing as humans, with our economies, with our businesses, with our hearts with how we communicate and organize.
And so our centralized, highly commodified seed system, food system, you know, it’s not broken. It’s doing exactly what it was designed to do, which is exploit the marginalized people that have been so profoundly exploited for generations for millennia.
Part of what that looks like is decentralizing and really taking care of, you know, thinking locally, thinking globally. But how we started Fruition Seeds and 2012 to kind of respond to our immediate inspiration and also just necessity of creating regionally adapted seeds for short seasons and sharing them widely.
There are so many I used to when I grew up in my father’s garden, I thought our season was too short for watermelons, and that we couldn’t grow peanuts. And turns out, we can totally grow watermelons. And we can totally go peanuts, but we can’t grow most of those varieties. Most of those varieties are developed from peanuts for down south, and for watermelons for California.
Basically, if you live in the Central Valley of California, all of the seeds in the world are regionally adapted for you.
But if you don’t live in the Central Valley of California, you’re probably going to grow up in New York State thinking that you have to short a season for watermelon. And so I’m really motivated for people, especially the little people growing gardens these days to realize that they can totally grow watermelon.
They can totally grow just about anything they want, of course, outside of papayas and of course there are exceptions. But it’s amazing to me, what are the constraints that I thought of as a child 30, 40 years ago, it’s simply they don’t need to be constraints. And so we have dedicated our lives, among other things, mountain biking, dancing, making sure we all have these privileges in the process.
Brian: Absolutely, Oh, that’s fabulous. That’s great.
So you went out you started Fruition Seeds. How did that happen?
Tell us a little bit about that journey when you first started.
Petra: Yeah, I mean, every seed has its own journey, right? For me, I’ve been dreaming for seven years actively, actively passively about starting a business and starting specifically a seed company focused on regional adaptation.
But it wasn’t and you know, I’m a very kind of theoretic, spontaneous kind of creator. And so for me, it’s a like, what are the skills and how do I orient myself inner compass to do this work rather than what’s my you know 40 page business plan.
How do I get my lawyers and our ducks in a row.
So for me it was very heart centered and just like what are the both the hard and soft. The soft being the real skills of developing the relationships and the connections and interconnections that are going to be crucial to moving this forward.
And so then when I met Matthew Goldfarb my partner in life and business and love all the above, he has been in ag for several decades and he has an MBA as well. Business had been a four letter word for me prior to meeting Matthew and one of the many reasons I fell in love with him is that he helps me to see that this is actually right and like marketing too, had been this epic four letter word to me, and Seth Godin, among other people just really cracked open the concept of marketing, and helps me see that there’s so much greater capacity for it.
And in fact, marketing has just changed. How are we being changemakers in the world, and business is just another way to frame a vehicle, right? It’s just another way to house a seed so that it can take root. So yeah, Matthew has so many skills and it was really, it was honestly quite challenging Brian because I was like, am I falling in love with you because I’m falling in love with you the human, or am I falling in love with you because you’re obviously the best business partner I could fathom?
Existential crises ensued. And they only can continue to unfold in new and exciting, terrifying ways.
But all told. He’s an amazing partner and business and marketing, as well as seeds are profound.
Transformative ways to understand ourselves in the world. And if we’re hanging on to, you know, if the seed just insists on staying a seed, it’s never going to fruit, it’s never going to make more seeds.
In the same way, when I recognized that my conception of what business was, was not serving me was not serving the world there. Were not going to be more little girls growing watermelons. So fine. We can change this.
So yeah, other people meet each other. And nine months later, 10 months later, there’s like little person in the world. And Matthew and I met 10 months later, we signed an LLC. And Fruition Seeds was born, if you will.
When people ask us if we have children, we say yes and great, great, great grandchildren.
And you can eat them. If we think they have a sense of humor, which I know you do. Here we go.
So that’s a tiny snapshot.
Brian: That’s fabulous. That’s great. So you guys got everything started. And so many of the things that you were dealing with were the things I think so many people, especially in this space deal with, when they get into that frame.
It’s like how do you take the spirit of where I’m coming from and work it into this this box that I see business as you know, this very confining thing or marketing, you put it beautifully there.
How do you find your first customers?
Petra: You know, there’s a lot to be said, for community. I feel really fortunate because I grew up in this little town in upstate New York in the Finger Lakes.
Our first customer I mean, I gave away I don’t even know how many thousands of packets of seeds that I had saved sometimes for a couple decades.
And then I like made my own packages, you know, just like calendars and other fun things that I like cut out and like scotch tape to make little seed packets. And I like I love to draw.
So I had all these like feudalisms of seeds and like, characters of them. So there’s a lot of hilarious seed packets out there in the world. So I gave away thousands of seed packets to all of my friends and in our community and just well beyond so many rippling iterations out.
I’ve been dreaming about it for years and kind of actively I’m a very passionate person and also an extrovert. So I’m like, what are you thinking about? Here’s what I’m thinking about.
What are you thinking about? Let’s think about these things together.
So it was no surprise to people that Fruition Seeds came into existence. People had been watching me for years, and had been investing in me honestly, for years prior even though I lived in many other places when I would come back to Naples and 25 years ago if you had told me that I would ever live in this town of 2,000, so lily white, and fill in the blank, I would have said, I have prospects, thank you very much.
But turns out…and we don’t all have the profound privilege, which I see and I will continue to see in greater depth for the rest of my days. The profound privilege that it is to come from a place that has relatively intact ecology, and a deep social network and safety net.
The land that we farm on was given to us. No, we couldn’t have rented we tried and we certainly couldn’t have afforded land and just people who knew we were out in the fields farming all day long.
We literally they’d be so many times Laurn would call and be like, I know you’re still working and you probably didn’t eat lunch and it’s well past dinner and the grill is full of beautiful things come on over right now. So so many, so many people, how did I find my first customers?
Just being a part of this community and investing in them and they investing in me for years and honestly, decades, just laid that foundation so that by the time it came to the point where, you know, we had a Kickstarter to, I had $15,000 saved, Matthew also put in $15,000, we raised $35,000 on a Kickstarter, that kind of went crazy.
I mean, not crazy, crazy, but I mean, our goal was $10,000. And it was just amazing to see the word of mouth is such an amazing thing and it’s the slow way to grow a business, right.
It’s the expensive way to grow a business, but I think it’s kind of the only way that actually matters because instead of cutting corners, and just like buying up an email list, and it’s like using those corners as actual connection points to leverage real human needs and risks, respond to them.
If you know Seth Godin, I’m totally Seth Godin junkie, and he has this wonderful, like, what is your smallest viable audience and serve them. And if you’re not serving the smallest viable audience, then probably you’re serving no one, and they’re gonna know that.
We started small and we’re still super small, and I have no, fruition has no ambition of being a High Mowing or a Johnny’s, which are small seed companies in the realm of Seed Company’s. And our goal is to just simply, first and foremost, to feed ourselves and our family.
There’s eight of us here at Fruition Seeds full time. And if we’re not taking care of that pot of people, then you know, we can’t take care of the world. But beyond that, it’s making sure that the people who are sowing our seeds are also surrounded by abundance not only by those seeds, but knowing that they’re not alone in their gardens and that we’re sharing resources and kindred connection with them.
So yes, that was a long drawn out, but first customers for sure was just like this community that I call home being like, wow, Petra actually did it!
Brian: No, that’s awesome. That’s great.
You talked about taking that first big plunge where you put in some money, he put in some money. And you did that Kickstarter. What do you think it was that made that Kickstarter go viral, for lack of a better word? I mean, what made that go further than you expected it?
Did you have a video on there that connected with people? I mean, what was it do you think?
Petra: You know, I don’t exactly know, I would love to ask, it’s a fun question for all of our folks that contributed, I mean, certainly there’s a video and it’s awful.
I literally can’t watch it. And I don’t know, you know, I whether it’s instagram igtv or like our YouTube channel. Our website, FruitionSeeds.com is full of videos, like I’ve made thousands. And like now it’s like wow, Petra, you’re like really natural on video, how do you do it?
I’m like, hours and years of abject pain!
That Kickstarter video was the first video we ever made. It’s just, it’s so it’s like, watch it and I’m like, Oh my gosh, my teeth are getting pulled out of my mouth. Which makes it pretty priceless, right?
But i think that a large piece of it um, Monsanto. So this is 2012, or really 2013. It was, was early 2013 is when the Kickstarter went live and Monsanto and like Glyphosate and all of this and GMOs were kind of really becoming a very public mainstream conversation.
I think a lot of it between like, right, I’m so white, and I’m blonde. I’m a woman and I’m kind of cute and charismatic. So I have all of those things going for me even if I’m really awkward on a video, you’re like, Oh, that’s a cute little girl and she is doing something that means we have an alternative to GMOs great.
Things like Monsanto honestly, has given us a profound advantage in the marketplace. And even though it’s not a like, I can’t tell you, like, so many people and I wouldn’t claim to fully understand GMOs either.
But there’s a great, great misunderstandings around what genetic modification is and isn’t. It’s created a lot of fear in people, that fear we could leverage to be like, yeah, it sucks. You don’t actually have to know that.
The core foundation, we we should think of other alternatives. to write, Okay, we’ve got one, 1,500 of them, really.
So yeah, I think between our community and word of mouth just spreading and having some level of just social grace in kind of, you know, a very modern contemporary America paired with Monsanto, kind of coming into its own as the face of big food, and just industrialism and corporate colonial commodity at its worst. All those things combined really profoundly to set us up for thing like, oh good, where have you been all our lives?
Brian: That’s fabulous. So you’ve done a whole lot of video, like you were saying.
Would you say that’s the main driver for new people finding you right now? Or is there other places that new people are finding you, obviously, via social media and your videos and so forth?
Petra: Yeah, I that’s another wonderful question.
And I definitely am not an analytics person. But yes, so many people find us through our videos, without doubt. I mean, at any given social post, if it’s just a still image, it gets x reach and videos, you know, it’s that much more compelling to watch a person in a video.
So right now, both Instagram and Facebook are really just like amplifying those videos. And at some point that might change, it’ll easily get 10x with a video. There’s a lot of incentive for sure to just be generating that content.
It’s just that much more compelling, right?
Because then you get to actually have a general experience of me and so many people when they meet me, they’re like, oh my god, I feel like I already know you.
And I’m like, well, you do. So many people are like, wow, you actually act like you do on your videos. I’m like, I’m not an actress. I can’t act.
But I can be myself. And that is the genius of the 21st century and I think the opportunity that we have as changemakers as marketers and like the best possible sense, because these big corporations and even mid scaling corporations, they can’t be human.
They’re trying so hard, but they can’t. And so what we have is great and I’m so grateful that I put myself through all of the torture.
I just can’t recommend to all of your listeners being like, yeah, that’s nice that she’s gone through that process. I don’t really like…it’s painful. It’s awful. It’s awful, but do it because it’s so real.
People will connect to you 1,000 times more deeply, a thousand, thousand times.
For me it was directly related to my self confidence as well. And so I think there’s a lot to unpack about how we hide and why we hide. As people who know that the system is not broken. It’s doing what it was, deliberately designed to do which is keep the power in power, and disenfranchise and actively exploit the rest of us, us using our voices and learning to share those voices in as many ways as possible, is so important.
And video isn’t for all of us. Maybe you paint, like so whatever it is, whatever way but keep challenging yourself like comfort is a quality way to maintain status quo. And to not be the change that you want to see in the world. So yeah, finding that discomfort and the joy in that. Just that trick.
Brian: Absolutely. That’s great advice. Very important.
You mentioned previously that you’re playing toward a very small market, small group of people and you don’t need to go too big. You can stay within that. How would you describe your ideal customer person that just comes across you and says, ah, this is what I’m looking for?
Petra: Yeah. So the person that is like, whoa, she’s really excited and like, passionate in a really fun way, and then it’s like, oh, and she’s telling me amazing things that I never thought of, or I thought about, but she just lays it out in a totally different ways.
So like the combination of joy, but like, oh, wait a minute, there’s some serious wisdom being spread. And not just about, like, let’s talk about cucumbers and downy mildew. Let’s talk about how social justice and ecological justice and language justice and how those pieces come out in our work so that we’re bringing our whole selves.
We’re not just thinking like soil carbon is important, but like, whoa, if we’re not hungry, that’s because there are other people actively hungry on this planet. And let’s make sure that we’re feeding them and so like weaving all of those pieces together.
So the ideal customer, I don’t I think of them as just community because customers so transactional. But the ideal person that that we’re speaking to and it’s I mean, we’re like singing to the choir but also trying to be gentle in it for sure. But very invitational to be like, these are conversations that are so critical and so interwoven and I loved like a post pandemic and then like the murder of George Floyd and Black Lives Matter and people are like well wait wait wait wait seeds, why are seeds now political? And it’s like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, I haven’t been doing my work clearly because let’s have a conversation.
So I love that the person that is going to just see us and instantly be hungry for what we’re sharing is hungry for justice, as well as fabulous lettuce and the, you know, earliest ripening watermelon that they can find. Yeah, I could go on and I will attempt keep myself under wraps.
Brian: No problem. No, we love this.
You mentioned COVID and all the things that have happened since the beginning of this year, we’re recording this in July of 2020, tell me a little bit about how that’s affected your business, your life, maybe what you’re talking about in your videos, everything else. How does that play into everything?
Petra: Oh, there are so many. Can we have the next hour to just talk about this? So many things? Where do I even begin I’ll begin with a fun one.
We have these things called seeds and we put them in packets. And the latex that closes the packets only lasts about a year. And so we have this 12 by 12 volts of seeds essentially frozen and like millions of seeds inside right, so we have way more than one year seed supply in our lives. But because the latex only last year we only have so many packets.
And it’s mid March, and people are losing their minds and realizing a lot of things among them that spending time in their gardens might be a really therapeutic, delicious, essential way to spend time not just a hobby, but in fact, deep sustenance and resilience.
We’re selling like 10 x seeds compared to what we had projected. And so as the seed packets are flying off the shelves, we’re like, oh, yeah, we’ve got plenty of seeds. We’re running out of packets.
In the meantime, our printer is not printing, they’re not able to function at the time. So we were able to find 25,000 blank seed packets.
There was about 10 seconds where my heart just sank and was so deflated and sad where I was like, I can’t imagine and if you haven’t seen our packets, the kind of beautiful they have an original painting on them from our friend Elizabeth.
Also a beautiful color photo for our farm and just lots of great growing info. And they’re just they’re kind of, I know every mother has beautiful and brilliant babies, and I’m no exception, but they’re really beautiful.
So the thought of putting our seeds in blank packets was just kind of devastating to me. And then it was only about 10 seconds later that I was like, wait a minute, we have so many amazing friends who are incredible artists who all of a sudden are like, wow, what do we do in this moment?
We paid dozens of artists to create original works of art on all of these packets, and they’re just outrageous. There’s printmakers, and watercolor, pen and ink and all of all across the board and they’re just so beautiful.
It’s the moment we inhabit, right it was like this uh, here’s the blank slate what no one would have wanted this. No one wants a blank packet of have seeds. But all of a sudden, it’s ours to create and breathe life into and to collaborate on, we couldn’t have done that alone.
It was just this community and paying them to do this too, right?
Artists are just like farmers there’s just like so many changemakers in our culture is not expected to be paid for their gifts and contributions. It was a really small and yet really large exercise in how do we make lemons into lemonade? And how do we pivot and make this a beautiful culture we’re celebrating?
Yeah, so that’s, that’s one element. And certainly we’ve been really fortunate in that people are more hungry for what we’re sharing more than ever. There’s a lot of businesses including fellow farmers that we know and love who are not having that experience. And we have many friends who end businesses we know and love who are no longer in existence. Even been a few months into the pandemic. So it’s, it’s been a really humbling time to be sure.
Brian: Absolutely.
What do you like best on the bright side of things…what do you like best about your business and your industry as a whole? The community that you’ve built up, what do you like best about it?
Petra: I can’t do it alone. And of course, I wouldn’t want to, but I literally cannot. There’s that interdependence of just, you can’t grow a garden without just being so integrated into it.
It doesn’t grow itself, right. And we don’t grow ourselves, we grow each other. The thing that I love about it is, you know as a whole, certainly the conventional chemical seed industry is just like any other industry.
The organic seed industry is super collaborative. It’s a really tight knit, awesome community where I can call up all kinds of people from all kinds of companies and ask all kinds of questions, whether it’s a growing question like in the fields, whether it’s numbers in the books on all kinds of friends, we’re just like, we know that there’s this pie and it’s just getting bigger, the more that we all collaborate with each other.
And then just in terms of community, it’s such a joy to share what we love with people we love, whether it’s the physical seeds themselves, or the knowledge of how to grow them of how to seed save, you know, like, I’m happy to give people fish, but I’d much rather teach them to fish and I love that we get to do it all. And that it’s just this beautiful wheel of give and I get to I learned so much from our community, and people reach out to us and want to collaborate with us in all kinds of amazing ways all the time.
I love that it’s so collaborative and interdependent. And just, there’s the sense of collective generation and regeneration that we’re all in this together.
That being said, there’s still so many ways right that colonialism makes us and I love you know, Rowen White, when I first heard her say a few years ago, we are all indigenous souls with imperial minds.
We all have these, juicy, yummy dreams of collectiveness and cooperation. And yet we are have all of these trappings of what it is to monetize. And it’s definitely a daily struggle to see and hold all of those parts of myself.
But also a great joy to see all of it exists and it’s all there and the more courage we have to name them and see where they’re coming from, then we can start to make different choices that might actually begin to dismantle these systems of oppression and ourselves so that we can truly be even more collaborative.
Brian: If there’s one thing that you can change about your industry, your community, what would it be?
Petra: Leaning into that transparency. Into the transparency of collectiveness more so that we would actually hold ourselves accountable in love with those collaborations. And so this is something I really can’t stand about our personal like social media feed and our website, it’s just really, we sought out people quite regularly but I just want to be doing it all the time.
Because we don’t do this work alone, we can’t do this work alone. And we have this culture right of rugged individualism and I pulled myself up by my bootstraps. I invented bootstraps, bull crap!
No.
And yet, you know, like seed companies have this facade of really a century and a half ago, they really were generating growing the seeds that they were sharing and now just see companies are purveyors. Right, you don’t walk into Trader Joe’s and say, wow, thanks for your Joe’s, what a beautiful farm you have out back!
No, you know, they’re a great purveyor distributor, whatever it is that they think you’ll buy. And so mostly companies are that way too. And they haven’t really changed their marketing because it’s just not sexy to say I’m a middleman or a middle woman.
Even though we grow 70% of the seeds that we share on our farm, there’s 30% of our seeds that we’re getting from all kinds of amazing seed growers in our buyer region and a few beyond.
I want to be telling their stories more. So, what I would change in us, which we’re actively working on and changing in the industry, which I have no control over except myself and hoping that any modicum of success that we experience will just inspire seeing that someone else is actually doing it and well and so I’m hoping to be that change. Just to celebrate our interconnectedness way more, because it’s way too easy to be like, yes, isn’t this amazing, this Fruition Seeds that we’ve built?
No.
It’s the farthest thing from Matthew and I, and the eight of us that are working here full time, like the radiating ripples of that and but you would never see it. And we don’t live in a culture that celebrates that level of transparency. We don’t know how to, we don’t know how to share the mic. Long to be challenging myself so that we can as an industry and as a culture, not only share the mic, but be like, oh, right, I stole the mic to begin with.
Or like, okay, it was our ancestors. Okay, this is a 2,000 year old construct is crumbling. So how about we just get rid of it all together and just sing some songs with five part harmonies, okay, I’m in sharing the mic.
Brian: I love that. So great analogy.
If you and I were to get back together, let’s say in a year and we had you back on the show, and we look back over the last 12 months, over everything that you’ve done and experienced with Fruition Seeds, what would have had to have happened in both your business and your personal life for you to look back and really feel happy about it?
Petra: What a delicious question. Um, I am really grateful that our team here at Fruition is really diving deep into how are we colonized and colonizing?
How are we exploiting, extracting, hurting, harming and being harmed by the system?
How can we begin to shift internally in ourselves internally in our organization?
And we’ve been sharing these conversations just in little ways. I mean for years and years actively for the last few months of what does this actually look like. It’s very internal work that you wouldn’t see necessarily in our on social media or like our email list. Shameless plug.
We have a beautiful organic garden email every week with video tutorials and how tos. It’s really fun, beautiful, pithy, gorgeous. So hop on in, I’d love to share it with you.
So you wouldn’t necessarily see that internal work that we’re doing. I think of it as like, we’re in this chrysalis stage, which I mean, Seth Godin says, it’s always the interim.
So I think we’re always iterating, we’re always in that chrysalis stage. We’re always the caterpillar, we’re always the butterfly. But really we’re in a really deep process right now of how do we reorganize and including, like, what does employee ownership look like?
Doing that internal work, so that we can do our work in the world better, externally, that will be subtle.
So a year from now looking back, I’ll be really happy if we’re continuing to do this work, and really challenging ourselves to find those growing edges and not just stay comfortable.
It’s a really dangerous thing to, to be too comfortable, especially as owners, you know, and even though you know, it’s not like Fruition Seeds is a huge business. It’s not like we’ve accumulated like, wealth in a more classic sense, but it’s still ours, right?
And so like, I want everyone….I think ownership is one of the pieces that we’re really needing to attend to in this time. And like, we own this land now. And we’re like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, no, no, no, no, no, this is indigenous land that like if someone sells you a stolen cow, it’s still a solid cow.
I’ll be really happy if we continue to do this internal work, so that we can begin to share it more fully with our community, wider community. So we can begin t do this as a wider culture.
Brian: What obstacles standing in your way of getting there?
Petra: It’s just a lot of time. It’s a lot of discomfort. And also a lot of just people have been trying to decolonize indigenous people have been trying to get us, like, vaguely see them. And like 400 years of slavery, like there have been a lot of people trying to get us to look, see pay attention.
But it’s still, it’s still so easy, especially as white people with a certain with all the privileges that we have. It’s really easy to just stay comfortable in the status quo that we benefit from the system of us not having these really hard conversations, and especially if we’re paying all of our staff to have these conversations, like it’s a lot of money.
It’s putting your money where your mouth is, and it’s a lie, and it’s feel so liberating to be investing in each other in this way. So we are, yeah, we’re constantly the seeds that were planting in ourselves.
Just an analogy that I always remind myself when I’m constantly like, wait a minute, am I really the person for this job?
Right, if you want a tomato, you plant this tomato seed that looks nothing like a tomato. And then it sprouts and it’s this little thing with like green leaves that are kind of hairy and you’re like, I wanted tomato that like I can put on my sandwich.
But you’re like, okay, I get there’s a process. So you’re reading and you’re watering and pruning and trellising and you’re like, what is this, come on, and the whole thing, right when you finally get to the tomato is that it’s not a tomato the entire time. That’s never not been a tomato.
I’ve never not been the person to do this work, but I also can’t just stop and say, okay, I made it. I’m comfortable. You all eat your sandwiches now.
So I’m, yeah, there’s a fun little tangent. But I love remembering. That is the work that we have to do. Just continuing to weed ourselves and maybe I want a tomato, maybe it turns out I’m a cantaloupe. And then I have to get over the fact that when I was actually attached to, in growing myself growing into myself.
Like if you had told me also 10 years ago, almost when we started Fruition that I would be spending a lot of time on the computer and making videos.
I’d been like, wait a minute, I am a farmer. I grow seeds. I wouldn’t always want to be the dream that we’re dreaming of, and being open to whatever it is that our communities are asking of us that our inner is sparking in us. I forget your question, Brian. I’m sure it was a lovely one.
Brian: It’s ok, I think you answered it. (laughs)
Main thing was about obstacles that are standing in your way.
Petra: Oh, yeah.
Brian: Achieving what you want to in the next year.
Petra: Just being afraid of the work totally and not wanting to pay the money that it’s going to take, not wanting to take the time that it’s going to take.
Because it’s uncomfortable to doing this work, it means that you have to change.
We’ve all been benefiting from the system. And that’s Lauren Cordelia growing culture. When he said I heard him a few months ago, say for the first time, that first time he said it, but the first time I heard it, if you’re not hungry, it’s because other people are hungry.
That means that we have to all be more hungry and be willing to eat less whatever that looks like in that metaphor, right?
So it looks like discomfort and being willing to lean into that and be fed by other things beyond the benefits of exploitation and privilege. That we have been socialized to think we are superior enough to just accept wholesale that we have what we have because we’ve worked hard the whole meritocracy or like fill in the blank narrative. But beginning to say, maybe I can, you know, Anand Giridharadas’ says, we We can be told to do more good but not less harm.
And when we’re actually doing this hard work of decolonizing ourselves, we’re doing more good by actively doing less harm. And that means a lot of discomfort. So yeah, that’s the biggest obstacle is just wanting to be comfortable, because there’s so many other things that we want to be doing and sharing and thinking and feeling oh, and not working all the time.
Think about all these challenging things all the time.
But not giving it the obstacle is not giving into the comforts of the benefits of our privileges.
Brian: You’ve weaved in a short period of time a story transformation, really a story of your life and all our lives and how that fits into the whole. Very cool stuff. And we can go on for hours, I’m sure. Is there any questions I didn’t ask that you’d like to answer?
Petra: Hmm, what a fun question. Whatever it is that you are afraid to deliver on, just deliver.
It’s not going to be perfect. The messiness is part of the project, the weeds are part of the garden. I see so many people and it’s part of our culture, this attachment to perfection, especially in an age of social media. And I just would love everyone to have the courage to be themselves and to love themselves and to share themselves and to know that sharing especially the sharing of those imperfections of those vulnerabilities, is the greatest gift that you can give the world and likely one of the greatest gifts you can give yourself.
Brian: Amazing message Petra, thank you so much. What could listeners do if they want to find out more about Fruition Seeds?
Petra: Yeah, hop on social media. We’re on Instagram. We’re on Facebook. FruitionSeeds.com is our home. We’re actually creating a new website as we speak.
When I say we, I definitely don’t mean me. I’m like, ww..what?
But we have an amazing team of local creators. And we’re creating this incredible website that is honestly very much based on Patagonia’s website where they just sweet seamlessly weave in content and products. Yeah, sure, you want carrot seed. We got guaranteed, but like you want to learn how to grow carrots way better? Yeah, it’s not easy, isn’t it?
So like making sure that our content and just so we’re giving you the fish we’re teaching you how to fish all on this beautiful website so that’ll be coming in the fall FruitionSeeds.com.
But of course we have a website now and I tell everyone, I’m like, we’re redoing our website. They’re like, why it’s so beautiful. And I’m like, just you wait.
Certainly we have a farm. And certainly in this pandemic moment, we are devastated to not be opening our farm to humans beyond our pod. But we have lots and lots of events on farm events. One of my favorites is our watermelon party every year.
We go hundreds of organic watermelons just for the seed inside. And so every year we have our watermelon and the dahlias is harty, we also grow thousands of dahlias, are one of the only purveyors of organic Dahlia tubers in the world.
So we have all these dahlias that are going crazy as we’re eating all these watermelons, as watermelon in the dahlias and it’s just all you can eat all day long and all these people come and it’s just delicious.
It’s hilarious.
You can work on your accuracy, as well as distance if you want to spit seeds. So we have lots of great events on the farm. Post-pandemic I hope to share the farm with any and all and we do lots of formal tours as well.
And I do you know tons of speaking whether it’s, you know, school groups or universities garden clubs, book clubs I love to share my passion so don’t hesitate to reach out in any and all of these capacities I love to collaborate as well.
But certainly Instagram I think is probably the most fun way to hang out with Fruition Seeds on a daily interactive engaging basis. So yeah, you’ll find us surprised surprised that Fruition Seeds.
Brian: Petra Page-Mann with Fruition Seeds, thank you so much for being on the Off The Grid Biz Podcast.
Petra: Brian, my huge privilege. Thank you for all that you do and all that you share. It’s sends shivers down my spine and I can’t wait for next time.
Brian’s Closing Thoughts: Wow, Petra is really something else isn’t she?
There’s a whole lot more here to unpack. So I think it’s worth relisting to. But let me just bring up a couple ideas that popped in my head. First thing is she’s got this genuine spirit about her that I think everyone can learn from.
You just see how enthusiastic she is that enthusiasm is just it’s infectious. But that comes from being genuine, and who you’re hearing is who she is. And if you go and you watch her videos, you’re gonna see the same person.
Like she said, if you’re going to meet her in real life, I believe you’ll meet the same person with a you’re sending videos out, or whether you’re writing emails, or whether you’re doing podcast interviews.
It’s the same thing.
You’re putting that out there and people can sense that you are who you say you are. That’s really cool.
Another thing she has is just a fearlessness about how she runs her business, which is really neat.
That doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of regret in her in her voice with all the things that she’s done, I’m sure she’s made mistakes and everything else. But no regret in-terms of the big steps, in-terms of the major moves that she’s making seems to have a very high level of confidence.
The third thing is, I really find it interesting that you have this seed company, but that she has wrapped it around a philosophy and really making it more of a movement or a state of mind, if you will.
You want to talk about something that catches fire with people.
Now it will completely push away people from their thoughts on organic food or anything else, but it will draw toward her everyone that sees things the way that she sees them or anyone that resonates with where she’s coming from.
That type of thing is what you should be looking for in terms of your views of things in terms of who you are, in terms of your confidence, all of who she is is wrapped inside of this business and that is why she prospers and I think we’ll continue prospering.
I don’t think this is the last time we’ve heard from Petra Page-Mann. She’s very interesting and I look forward to seeing what she comes up with in the future.