Lucinda Bailey – Texas Ready

Lucinda Bailey
Lucinda Bailey

Texas Ready

Lucinda Bailey, (aka, The Seed Lady) is a Master Gardener and Certified Crop Advisor specializing in the cultivation of heirloom vegetables from seed.

Join us as we talk about how “old-time pioneer skills” are quickly becoming the hot new desire for many Patriots in our changing economy.

From the value of saving seeds to teaching Mittleider gardening, Lucinda was a joy to chat with and we know you’ll be blown away the wealth of information she has to share.

It’s easy to see she has a passion for the work she does.

Head over to Texas Ready & pickup a Liberty Seed Bank today! – https://texasready.net/

Texas Ready - Liberty Seed Banks
Texas Ready – Liberty Seed Banks

1:51 Beginning of Texas Ready: Taking Back The Reins of Food Production

3:05 Why This Business Gives Me A Personal Connection to My Customers and Community

3:44 Perfecting Our Message – By Going to Gun Shows

      • Building Relationships by Putting on Classes at our Local Community Center
      • Why Quail Is An Ideal Option to Raise for Practical Preparedness and Homesteading

7:21 Heirloom Seed Shortages

9:08 We’ve Seen a Huge Influx In People Wanting to Grow Gardens and Be Better Prepared

10:33 Ideal Customers: Family Oriented and Preparedness Minded

11:33 Top Selling Products: Liberty Seed Banks (Ammo Cans)

12:30 Lucinda’s 3-Skill Sets that Revolve Around Gardening

13:38 Knowledge Is Power: Giving Confidence to Patriots

18:55 The Inside Baseball of the Seed Industry

      • Just How Long Do Seeds Really Last?

22:12 Quality Food Production: The Mittleider Garden Course

24:49 10 Week Hands-On Class: Teaching Family Homesteading Skills

27:07 Follow Your Dreams: Work With a Standard of Excellence and Integrity

29:10 Where to Find out More About Texas Ready (https://texasready.net/)

Transcription

Lucinda: I think we’re moving in that direction. As a society, I think that we’re going to see the importance of networking, and connection, and of helping our neighbors. I’m seeing that happen.

And that breaks down all the barriers, whatever political party, whatever, religious institution, you come from whatever color you are, we are members of the human race.

That’s our first and only group that we need to be.

Intro to show: If you’re someone who refuses to go along to get along, if you question whether the status quo was good enough for you and your family, you want to leave this world better off and you found it and you consider independence, a sacred thing. You may be a prepper, a gardener a homesteader, a survivalist, a farmer or rancher, an environmentalist or a rugged outdoorsman. This show is for those who choose the road less traveled the road to self reliance, for those living a daring adventure, life off the grid.

Brian: Lucinda Bailey, aka “The Seed Lady” is a master gardener and certified crop advisor, specializing in the cultivation of heirloom vegetables from seed.

Her interest began as a teenager in Michigan, where she grew posts in her backyard to sell to neighbors. She now spends her time traveling the country attending shows and presenting seminars on the Mittleider gardening and food production.

In addition, Lucinda also enjoys playing the piano, tending to her livestock and working with Texas Ready test gardens.

Lucinda Bailey, welcome to The Off-the-Grid Biz Podcast.

Lucinda: Oh, this is such a privilege. It’s good to connect with other fellow patriots and people that are like-minded and concerned about where our country is.

Brian: Absolutely.

So why don’t you let us know a little bit about what it is that you do and how you ended up here?

Lucinda: Years ago, I was in financial services and I realized all of a sudden, there was no good news coming out of the United States or Europe or anywhere else.

I thought, well, you know, there may be something to the need of preparing my family, for whatever might come? That’s how I personally got involved, I thought I was the only one thinking like that. Of course, that wasn’t true and I finally did connect with many others.

My business partner and I realized that God has given us the responsibility of taking care of our own food needs. And when Kroger’s or any number of other big chains, don’t pull through like they should for us, or GMOs are suddenly in our food supply, well, then we may need to take the reins of food production back.

That’s really how we started this doing it for our own family.

But in short order, our neighbors, our church buddies, and relatives all said, Hey, would you pick me up some speed collections as you guys have because we can’t find what we need at the box stores.

And that’s how we began.

Brian: Fabulous.

So you started in 2012. Have you ever owned a business up until this point?

Lucinda: Both my partner and I are extremely entrepreneurial. And so this is about my sixth or seventh different situation from a restaurant to a mortgage company to you know, three real estate companies and so forth.

Secretarial service company, a print company, etc.

But this has actually been the most personally fulfilling because I really feel a direct connection with my customer families and the direct ability to help them get better food, better health, lower bills, and confidence about the future.

Brian: Oh, that’s awesome.

Besides your friends and family and people you already knew how were you able to find the rest of your first customers?

Where was it, just by word of mouth or do any form of advertising, how’d you find those first customers?

Lucinda: That was a great question.

I knew one thing you need to have a 32nd elevator pitch and we’re better to practice this than at a gun show. Boy, if you don’t have a good message and you don’t catch their attention, they’re down the hall and they will not give you the time of day.

So I figured this will be great. And yeah, the first several gun shows you’re making a mess of everything you want to say but you get that message down. Then that’s how we began was just doing gun show, after gun show, after gun show.

And garden shows, you know we’re a little step up and survival shows up with that. Now, all those things have virtually gone away since COVID. So we’ve had to do some additional internet marketing now and you know, some other platforms.

For example, once a month I lease out the community center and I go to feed stores and tractor supplies and farmers markets and drum up attendees, and then I tried to build community within those attendees over the course of the next year.

So they come to an initial gardening class, we teach them about heirloom seeds, if they don’t know anything about it, we let them come on to the ranch rent our space to grow out some chickens, many of them have never held a chicken.

We teach them how to do egg-laying and meet birds and then at the very end, we teach them butchering if they wanted to attend that, so it’s really kind of a neat process.

Then we go back to an orchard item. So we’re alternating agriculture and animal husbandry.

We can teach them anything from quail, turkey, ducks, pigs, goats, sheep, and cattle, in order that they might be able to prepare, we know that not everybody is going to do everything.

They may not have the acreage, but you can run quail on a square meter and produce between 10, 15, 100 pounds of meat, that’s more meat than you’re going to get off of what cow. So it does not require a lot of space, rabbits are also very good for small situations. Rabbits and quail are very, very quiet and a lot of subdivisions would consider those pets and no prohibition against doing them.

We do understand that roosters, you know, are not liked by all the HLS we get that. But we can show you how to have an egg-laying flock that doesn’t even have a rooster in it, that will be very beneficial for the family.

So these are the kinds of things that we’re now teaching. And it’s really true, homesteading, staying away from the pharmaceuticals, expensive eggs, and also the grocery stores if you so desire.

So we’re teaching people the old-time pioneer skills.

Brian: Wow, fabulous.

So that’s all one-on-one, you’re saying that’s just the local community center?

Lucinda: Well, it’s a local community center, we rent that out. So we were hopeful of getting 40, 50 people there. And then from there, we have Friday night classes on our ranch, then we just develop long-term relationships with people, and word of mouth and things like that, or how things are spreading now.

COVID did change our business plan, no doubt. But I think it’s worked out for the better.

Brian: Tell us more about how COVID has affected things for your business.

Lucinda: You’ve been mostly meeting people at shows and so forth.

You know, we were an essential business being that we were in agriculture. So we never did any shutdowns, we know that there were tremendous and still are tremendous seed shortages, especially in the heirloom field, I believe nine out of 10, heirloom seed companies are out of business now.

And that’s because they just could not access it now, some of it was blamed on crop failure. I’ve never seen so many crop failures. So I don’t know, really, you know, we’ll never know the truth is that one.

I’ve never bought seeds from China and never will but was really stunned at the amount of Chinese seed that is in our culture. I don’t feel too comfortable about that, because I don’t believe in nice soils, and lead and all the things that we might find from the Chinese products.

But we realized that things were like celebrated, we had felt like the things economically, politically, socially, were like celebrating and not in a good direction.

We really ramped up our concern and our teaching schedule. And so we have had 10 families that are crack, come through our programs on the weekends and so forth. It’s very hands-on.

So if you’re in Texas, we would love to have you, you know, be part of those kinds of workshops.

But if not try to find somebody that’s doing on studying in your local area. And there’s lots of resources now, very popular to be a homesteader now or get on the internet, and start listening to several of the podcasts you will learn a lot as I certainly have.

And I’m so thankful for the variety of people training on goats, or rabbits or sheep or whatever it is. I’m really trying to listen and I encourage others to do the same.

Brian: Sure.

And with all the growing global chaos and so forth, have you seen a huge desire from the public to learn more of this more so than in the past?

Lucinda: They said that 50% of America is now growing a garden. I don’t really believe it’s that high. But yes, we have seen a huge influx of interest in growing.

Our view is that buying a seed bank that the proper seed bank is step one, that is not where it needs to be. You don’t need to be putting that on your pants yourself and leaving it there.

You need to be practicing this skill. It’s not an easy set of skills.

But we believe I’ve read over 300 AG books, and I believe that we’ve narrowed it down to the five or six most pertinent, most usable, most productive, you know books, so we’re going to have the best canning book out there.

We’re going to have the best.

I didn’t really want to The Amish. But guess what I’m studying Amish books. That’s like an encyclopedia of Amish skills. It’s called the Backyard Homestead. And it’s hilarious.

If you have a short attention span, as I do, it’s just perfect two or three pages on a certain point. But they’re demonstrating what I thought to be impossible initially, that on one acre, you can grow everything that a family of four to six would need.

Brian: Wow, that’s fabulous!

How would you describe your ideal customer for the people that come to you and they’re just it’s just right up their alley?

Who is that person, what’s our mindset?

Lucinda: Well, that’s a person who has begun to get awake or is awake understands that we can’t always depend on Kroger’s, H-E-B, or some of the chains perhaps to supply food, that there perhaps will be trucking shortages and so forth.

A person that wants a better quality food for their family, and the more nutrition’s less pesticides more control over that, that would be a great customer, us and someone that knows that there’s going to be a little bit of elbow grease involved in the production of food.

Whereas in the past, they may not have done that.

I really love it when we have kids, because their eyes are so sparkly when they grow a vegetable that they did not think possible.

They never knew where carrots came from, for example, or how a chicken even lays an egg. These are things that really brighten their experience. And we’re happy to do that for the families. We really want to be family-oriented.

Brian: Well that’s great.

What would you say is your top-selling product?

What’s the main thing that people purchase from Texas Ready?

Lucinda: Yeah, they purchase an ammo can that is full of seeds that will work in their area, we give about 75 varieties of vegetables, herbs, and fruit. That will definitely grow in your geographical area.

And we teach them if you are going to let cousin Joe and the boyfriend from college and the neighbor down the street participate in your food needs, then you need to buy seeds to cover all those people.

Because if you’re, you know not going to long your four-person kit, but now there are 10 mouths to feed, we don’t want you to be in a position of all of you can starving equally.

So buy seed for the number of people that you anticipate being able to help out. And then maybe if you’re not experienced as a gardener by a little bit more, ultimately we say that gardening revolves around three skill sets.

The first is buying plants, I’m okay with us buying plants in a box store or whatever, and popping them in the ground feeling good, keep them alive for 90 days, give yourself an A-minus report card at the end of that experience.

The next year, we want you to learn the skill set of starting seeds in your seed trays, and bypassing the payment of those costs for seedlings, do it yourself grow your own food, that is an entirely different skill set.

Now, in the third year we want you to learn to save properly so that you can keep this circle of life going and never have to buy produce seeds or seedlings again, to a great return on investment from these ammo cans. boxes that come into a person, four-person, six-person 12, and oh my God the church 30 people, 30 person kit.

We size them according to the number of people that you intend to feed.

Brian: Wow, that’s incredible!

Who came up with the ammo can design?

Lucinda: That’s a classic. I was tasked with finding good packaging. Okay, so I spent a week going here there, whatever. And I came back with a couple of nice little Chinese plastic containers, a paint can that we could customize, or this or that and I presented them to my partner.

Oh, he did not like any of it, which really ticked me off after a whole week of work on this right?

And so I slam my fist down and I go, well, gosh, darn, you’re not going to be happy until they’re in ammo cans!

At which point we both fell off the chair laughing because we knew that ammo cans came in various sizes and it worked out. We went down immediately to The Army Navy Surplus Store and bought every size cam they had.

When we put together the kits we don’t just throw in Oh, well it looks nice, yeah, 35 of these seeds 100 of that. No, we did it all on a nutritional model.

So how many calories would your family can we maximize out of the backyard?

We did this nutritionally and agriculturally. We’re the only Seed Company that’s ever done that you back engineer, what will I need? What does my family eat? How much space will it take to grow the number of plants it’s going to require for me to have one cup of beans, once a week for the whole year?

That’s how we put our kits together. And coincidentally, based on the number of the two for the small kit, the four for the average kit, etc, the size of the ammo cans matched perfectly, which was crazy.

So we just said, this is God, we’re doing this and that’s how we got started.

Of course, now we’re buying by the tractor trailer load, you know, a huge amount of ammo cans at a time.

Brian: Great.

Overall, what do you like best about your business and industry?

Lucinda: I’ve really loved the fact that we can help a lot of people. And if they don’t see the immediate ability for us to help it, let’s just wait and see where this economy goes, I believe that they’re going to be saying, I feel a lot more comfortable.

I am sure that I can feed my family and I really like that because we should not be living in fear, fear debilitates us it stops our creativity.

God hasn’t given us a spirit of fear, but of wisdom, power, knowledge, love, and a sound mind.

If you’re in fear, that’s just simply not the right energy way that you should, you know, have your mindset.

So I believe Texas Ready is one of the things that takes a big serious problem off the table and gives confidence to the Patriots. I mean, after all, the pioneers do the thing of all this, they were given a handful of seeds from the groom’s family and a handful of seeds from the bride’s family, hence, heirloom seeds and they knew they had to make a go of it.

That was going to be the way they fed their family much of the time, except for hunting.

So they couldn’t afford to be making mistakes, and they didn’t make mistakes and they could do it as pioneers and settlers. I believe those of us can do it.

During World War Two women and children produce 50% of the agriculture of all America. So tough times bring out tough attitudes, and they bring the strength of character.

I believe that that’s the kind of time and season that we’re moving into.

Brian: Oh, yeah, the Victory Garden model. That’s very cool.

Lucinda: Exactly. Good job.

Commercial Break: Okay, let’s take a break from that conversation. I want to bring up a question for you, during these crazy times, do you feel like your business is indestructible?

Most people don’t and if not, the real question is why?

And what can you do to make it as indestructible as possible?

Well, that’s the basis of my new book, 9 Ways to Amazon-Proof Your Business. I’m going to talk about the second way, which is called being consistent.

I covered this all in chapter two. And I’m not talking about being consistent in a very generic way, I’m talking about specifically being consistent in your communications with your customers, not just customers you’re looking to have but customers you’ve already had, and getting them to know like, and trust you. Now, you could be doing this through paid advertising.

But you could also be doing it organically through social media, via videos, via blog posts via podcast like this, getting out there so that people can get to know like, and trust you so that when they do become customers, they don’t just become customers that enjoy and love your products or services they know like and trust you as a person that’s a value they can’t get from big companies.

I also have eight other ways to Amazon proof your business. Basically the idea of making it competition proof to even someone as big as Amazon.com. So if you’d like to get your hands on a free copy of my book, go to AmazonProofBook.com sign up and you will get a free copy and get the chance to purchase a physical copy of it for a special price. And now let’s get back to our show.

Brian: On the other hand, if you will fit your business or your industry as a whole, if there’s one thing you can change about it, what would it be?

Lucinda: I would like people to be honest, they always say stand over those well diggers and watch how many rows of pipe they put in because that’s what they’re charging you by.

Don’t trust the well diggers, you know, is the model and I know the inside baseball of the seed industry, and I am alarmed at the stupidity and gullibility.

I’m just hoping that these were not dishonest people but misguided promoters, saying the seeds can last 10 years 15, 30 I’ve even heard 50!

No, that is absolutely bogus.

First of all, that is possible in a nitrogen-based refrigeration system, something that you and I will never own to their $1 million starters. They’re expensive and the US government only has 30 day supply of nitrogen to run them.

So I do not believe that that is a good expectation to take something that works in one venue and say that will reasonably apply to my backyard when it absolutely will not. If you have no refrigeration, you will have a shortened life expectancy of foods.

Oh, well, I’ve heard that they have these giant warehouses.

Yes, they have seven giant warehouses in the world. But if your name isn’t Oprah Winfrey or Bill Gates, you are not getting speed out of there.

So the average person needs to have their own personal feed bags. I would like it if the nongardening Seed Company owners would be honest about how long seeds last at 40 degrees.

The US Department of Agriculture says that they will last four to six years. That’s what we have, and always will tell our customers, we’re going to tell them the truth. We give a five-year guarantee on our seedbanks on our seeds, and we will sell people all my peppers didn’t work, I bought your kit. If it’s within that five-year deal, will send you fresh pepper seeds.

We’re a little different than the average company. We want integrity to be something that’s stamped everywhere. Excellence.

And this is something that we are feeding our own families with. We’re growing, I’m in the garden today, pulling weeds. We’re living the dream.

This isn’t corporate America saying you know, I think we can make a buck here. No, we’re homesteading, we’re patriots, we’re sacrificing just like you are.

We’ve had the fear function debilitate us for several months. But we’re on the top side of that and now we want to share and testify to you how you can get your confidence level back.

I’m reminded that in Genesis six, God says I gave you the seed, you know, he gave it to us. If he said that he gave it to us, he gave us absolutely the means of production.

It also says in Scripture, my people perish for lack of knowledge.

And we would agree that you do something foolhardy or stupid, or you skip a step or you don’t know what we don’t know, that can really hurt us. That’s why we have the training program.

The Mittleider Garden Course is the most productive, survival-oriented growing system that’s in the earth.

Today I taught 40 methodologies of gardening at the college level. This is by far the only one that I can recommend with no integrity. It’s been around for over 50 years. It’s a proven, quantifiable system.

And if you’re concerned, you know, hey, thanks might be disrupted for five years, you can get right now, all the trace elements and minerals that you would need to keep your plants healthy for whatever period of time you’re anticipating there to be unrest.

You cannot do that in an organic system because a family of four would need a literal shipping container full of compost to refresh his beds. And he’s always going to be playing catch up. He is not getting a dump load of manure from past farmer Jones, who’s not coming to your house because there’s no diesel to drive his wagon.

So there’s no way that you can compost enough to refresh your beds. On a annual basis. We require shipping containers not logically not going to happen.

Yet all the minerals and all of the nutrition for your plants that are needed per year will fit under one card table. It is we can stockpile security items.

We all know what that is and we recommend we stockpile the nutrition that your garden will meet. And nobody’s jumping the fence to steal your minerals and your rocks, they’re just not going to do that that would not be considered value valuable to them.

So we believe that a prepper, someone that’s concerned about the economy wants to have better tasting foods, more nutrient, nutritive dense food, once a great family activity wants to save money.

Any of these or all of these reasons would be great causes for you to go and get your own seed bag and begin using it and grow it now.

I’m out here today and I’ve harvested three times three weeks on my cucumber row 20 feet. I have harvested today. 158 pounds of cucumbers. I think garden method works a lot better than anything I’ve ever tried.

So we can really with a clear conscience, recommend it wholeheartedly.

Brain: Wow, that’s great.

That’s really good stuff.

Lucinda: I hope you like pickles. Pickles and sweet butter chips are going to be Christmas gifts this year.

Brian: If you and I were talking a year from now and if we were to look back over what had happened over the past 12 months, what would you say happened that leave you feeling happy with your progress, both professionally and personally?

Lucinda: It’s a great question. And at the beginning of the year, I wanted to take our training a step higher, I realized that sitting in a classroom for three to five hours on any of our topics. While we think that’s good, it’s interesting, it’s really the hands-on experience that people need.

So at that time, I said, Hey, it will be a successful year, if I’m able to take a 10-week class and take 10 families, and train them in animal husbandry, all topics chicken.

And then I wanted to rinse and repeat, give myself three weeks of reprieve, and then beef up the class or whatever I have learned as an instructor, and then, you know, do that again.

So I want to do four classes, I will have trained 40 families in my immediate area, in how to have an egg length block or a meat flock, and then how to butcher if necessary.

So for me if that if I can get that done, I’m on track to do it.

If I can get that done, I will consider this a marvelous year.

Brian: Oh, that’s great.

So what are the obstacles that stand in your way of getting there?

Lucinda: Always finding the right people and making sure that well, I can’t make sure of anything, but that their schedule would allow them to come to all 10 classes, that would be good because we have a lot of people making commitments.

And skipping out on half the classes, you get what you invest, and we realize that but I think with the kind of class size because we can families, that would mean an average of two kids per family.

So you got a lot of variables swimming around there.

If a family actually gets to the point where they’re competent, can go into Tractor Supply, or get online and order the right breed and, you know, do it order for chicks and let’s just see how this works, I will consider that a success.

But I am finding a lot of acceptability to the hands on approach as opposed to the lecture approach.

Brian: That’s great.

This is The Off-the-Grid Biz Podcast, so we have a lot of people that have an interest in business, and enjoy kind of the self-reliance into that.

What advice would you have to older business owners listening there, if you have any blanket advice that you could pass along?

Lucinda: Yeah, whatever you’re passionate about, you are going to be good at you are going to be able to help others in that. So don’t do something that you don’t like Gods designed it a certain way.

You built certain interests and desires within you for a reason, that’s a wonderful thing.

Follow your dream, follow your heart, and work with a high standard of excellence and integrity. And you will be surprised my customers from all around Texas, they look if you are driving into this little Podunk 500 person town, will you stay in our guest room when you come by?

This is craziness. I sold them a seed bank at one gun show. But we develop long-term relationships because we have compassion and love for that family.

We want to be givers but we can not out-give God. So that’s what I would say to a person that, you know, wanting to start a business it’s a very wonderful aspiration. And it’s really a little bit more in alignment with how God organized society back in the day, right?

Somebody was a carpenter, their son generally was considered a future carpenter himself, a carpenter in training or there was an apprenticeship with the neighbor across the way, but there was a lot more community.

I think we’re moving in that direction. As a society, I think that we’re gonna see the importance of networking, and connection, and of helping our neighbors. I’m seeing that happen.

And that breaks down all the barriers, whatever political party, whatever, you know, religious institution, you come from whatever color you are, we are members of the human race.

That’s our first and only group that we need to be thinking of.

Brian: That’s a great message I appreciate you saying all that.

What could the listeners do who’d be interested in finding out more about Texas Ready and your products?

Lucinda: Oh, we’d love them to go to our website, www dot TexasReady, that’s one-word spell Texas out dot net (www.TexasReady.Net).

And that’ll give you a lot of places to go.

It’ll give you some book reviews, some things that you’re going to want in your library. If this thing goes down or goes away, you’re going to need some reference material, because gardening is not intuitive. So we’d love for you to hit the site.

The other thing we offer that no other Seed Company does is you pick up the phone, you have a garden question, I will direct you to the proper book that’ll answer that, or I’ll solve the problem.

If I don’t solve the problem, you get yourself a free book.

But there’ll be a very good question because, in 10 years, I’ve only sent out two books but I think I can help you in three to five minutes. If I’m not cheating, then I’m going to work with you.

Even if I’m out in the field, I’ll stop what I’m doing and we’ll try to fit that in. That’s for customers or noncustomers, I don’t care. Any patriots that wants to be growing, we want to be of assistance to.

Brian: Awesome, that was a fabulous conversation within the thanks so much for being on the podcast.

Lucinda: It was my privilege, I look forward to hearing from some of your constituents.

Brian’s Closing Thoughts: That was a really great talk with Lucinda, she made a lot of great points that I’d like to try to tie things back to and point out, and hopefully, you could see how you can use something similar in your business.

One, it’s the ability to not make it too much about the end product itself.

Yes, she has a lot of knowledge about the seeds that they’re selling. But it’s more about the reason why someone would want the seeds and then she has the education, or information tied along with it, that people can take and run with.

So the classes that she puts on the information that they make available through their website, and so on and so forth. And they don’t just tie it to seeds, they tie it back to the reason why someone would want seeds, if you’re concerned about basically the structure that’s in place, being able to stay in place through all the craziness that can happen.

Like so much of what we saw through the COVID-19 Pandemic, these types of things lead a person to want to do homesteading, to want to do all these other items. And so she plays into that she gives the audience what they’re looking for if they’re able to sell seeds off of it fabulous, but it’s all toward the same end, which is really cool.

She really goes into psychology without getting too deep. She goes into the psychology of what they’re trying to promote.

They’re trying to push people away from the fear mindset from the fear energy, and more towards being confident being self-reliant, knowing what you’re doing, having the knowledge, and having the skills built around the knowledge to actually be able to do what you know that you can do. That’s really cool.

I also like the way that she discussed how they were able to build the business, just from one person to one person just from one event to the next. Building up that 32nd elevator speech.

If you’re able to do these simple ideas in marketing, you can apply it anywhere it you don’t have to go to gun shows, you don’t have to go to live events, you can do the same thing. Online principles are the same.

People are the same whether you’re communicating with them in person or via the internet.

Really great stuff across the board from Lucinda, I’d love to see what Texas Ready does in the future. This conversation is definitely worth re-listening to.

Outro: Join us again on the next Off The Grid Biz Podcast brought to you by the team at BrianJPombo.com, helping successful but overworked entrepreneurs, transform their companies into dream assets.

That’s BrianJPombo.com.

If you or someone you know would like to be a guest on The Off The Grid Biz Podcast, offthegridbiz.com/contact.

Those who appear on the show do not necessarily endorse my beliefs, suggestions, or advice or any of the services provided by our sponsor.

Our theme music is Cold Sun by Dell. Our executive producer and head researcher is Sean E Douglas.

I’m Brian Pombo and until next time, I wish you peace, freedom, and success.

Julia Coffey – Seeds Trust

 

Julia Coffey - Co-Owner of Seeds Trust
Julia Coffey – Co-Owner of Seeds Trust

 

SeedsTrust.com
SeedsTrust.com

Come on down and have a fun time with us as we talk with Julia Coffey from Seeds Trust about a range of topics, such as…

Helping to educate Backyard Gardeners in getting started in seed and seed saving.

Why plugging into your local community is important.

Why Seeds Trust is committed to helping to combat Disappearing Biodiversity

What you’ll find in Seeds Trust Newsletter

And finally, what you’ve been waiting for, just what is Julia’s favorite seed!

Thanks again to Julia and Seeds Trust for joining us on the show, and be sure to check them out at the links below. 🙂

Website – https://www.seedstrust.com/

Top Selling Product – https://www.seedstrust.com/seed-cans-buckets/bucket-of-seeds-high-altitude

Instagram (@seedstrust) – https://www.instagram.com/seedstrust/?hl=en

Facebook (@seedstrust) – https://www.facebook.com/seedstrust/

Transcription

Brian: What would you say you like best about your business in your industry as a whole?

Julia: Oh man, I like best that it matters.

Not everyone has that, as far as what they do in life. And I’m really, really lucky that I believe in seeds, I believe in their power to change the world for the better.

I believe in their capacity to connect human beings.

And I find that really fulfilling, in something that I do is my livelihood.

It’s a beautiful industry, and seed people are incredibly friendly and generous, and hardworking.

Podcast Intro: If you’re someone who refuses to go along to get along, if you question whether the status quo was good enough for you and your family.

If you want to leave this world better off than you found it and you consider independence a sacred thing.

You may be a prepper, a gardener, a homesteader, a survivalist, or a farmer or rancher, an environmentalist or a rugged outdoorsman.

We are here to celebrate you whether you’re looking to improve your maverick business or to find out more about the latest products and services available to the weekend rebel.

From selling chicken eggs online, to building up your food storage or collecting handmade soap.This show is for those who choose the road less traveled the road to self-reliance for those that are living a daring adventure, life off the grid.

Brian: Julia Coffey is co-owner and Director of Operations for Seeds Trust.

Handling the daily order fulfillment, inventory management, grower relations, sourcing logistics and graphic design duties. Julia apprenticed closely with seedsman Bill McDorman to learn the seed industry ropes.

After graduating from one of Bill’s first seed school programs, she moved down to Cornville, Arizona to run Seeds Trust with him, eventually purchasing the company and moving it home to Colorado in 2011.

With a decade of experience running the business, Julia is an extremely knowledgeable about growing for seed, seed storage and seed saving techniques.

She’s currently completing her Colorado State University Master Gardener certification, Julia Coffey, welcome to the Off The Grid Biz Podcast.

Julia: Great, thank you, it’s great to be here.

Brian: Besides what we heard from your bio, why don’t you tell us a little bit more about what it is that you do?

Julia: I started getting interested in seeds when I lived in France, when I graduated from college. And I was really impressed with some more sustainable models in everyday life over there that I didn’t see as much here.

I was super interested in what kind of sustainable agriculture projects was going on in Colorado where I’m from. And when I came home, I actually ended up finding Bill McDorman giving a seed talk in Lyons, Colorado.

I went to hear him and I was so inspired, I went up to him and I was like, hi, can I come apprentice with you, and go to your seed school?

He was like, sure, sure. He’s like, just ask Belle, who’s is Bills wife, and Belle was like well, let’s see here.

Cuz I was like, oh, and by the way I have no money.

And they’re like, oh yeah, sure we have scholarships.

She’s like, see what you can do and then hit me up.

So I was a big acapella nerd in college. So my acapella group helped me put on a concert, actually in Lyons. And that was a fundraiser to send me on down to seed school. And then the deal was, I would bring the knowledge back to the library in Lyons.

So that’s kind of like the start of how I got interested in seeds in the first place.

Brian: Oh, fabulous. What’s been the difference from just being involved and working in the company to actually purchasing it and owning it, and then running it from that point on?

Julia: Well, wow, there have been a lot of things that have been different.

Honestly, one of the biggest things that I’ve had to cultivate as a better sense of self discipline, I got a lot of energy and inspiration from Bill as my mentor, and the people that I was lucky enough to work with when I was apprenticing with him, before I bought the company.

And I was really thriving with learning so much about seeds and about growing and about the seed industry. But once I was on my own, it was incredible. I felt amazing. But I did lose a little bit of that collaborative feeling and sort of the the human touch and inspiration of why seeds were important to me, if that makes sense.

So one of the biggest challenges was staying connected to the seed world, as I was trying to do my own thing running this business by myself. So yeah, honestly, it felt a little bit lonely initially. So that was the biggest change.

Brian: Absolutely. And can you tell us a little more for people that don’t know what Seeds Trust is?

Julia: Seeds Trust is a regional seed company and essentially, we exist to combat disappearing biodiversity, so we encourage people to save their own seeds, and contribute to diversity out there.

Like, even if you’re just saving a few items that you are selecting for, and they adapt to your tastes, and your specific region and your than just your backyard. We’re stronger for that. So we’re all about regional strengths, trying to diversify our seed supply, and hard to grow areas.

Brian: Oh, excellent.

And how do you go about doing that?

How do you get the word out about this, and what’s your main way of getting contact with people initially?

Julia: So we are a mail order seed company, as most seed companies are, actually. And I’m really lucky, because Seeds Trust was founded in 1987, so it’s as old as I am.

It already had foundation of customers.

What I have done, as I’ve taken over the company in the past 10 years, is try to transition into more technology forward types of communication ways, you know, some of the social media stuff, trying to cultivate visually stuff that’s appealing for folks on Instagram, and Facebook.

We have a great newsletter we send out and a lot of folks sign up for that. So we do have a large readership for our newsletters. That’s huge for us.

Another thing that we’ve done is, we’ve hosted and participated in educational events.

So I teach seed saving classes, so that I can talk to people about not only the techniques, but different ways to source, how to just give it a go and be excited about it.

We’ve partnered up with a lot of a lot of folks on the front range so far, since just actually moved to Grand Junction last year. so we’re now on the western slope. And we’re diving into the community here as well.

We do a lot of community outreach, and try and get people excited about growing and saving seed.

Brian: Where are you finding most new customers that when you’re getting in contact with with people brand new nowadays? Where are you finding that that happens most of the time?

Julia: Well, there are two different answers, I have to that one is post-COVID, and one’s pre-COVID. A lot of our new customers were coming from events and promo that we did with discounts if you signed up for our newsletter, and we got a huge boost in folks signing up for the newsletter.

A lot of its SEO to just simple, like search capacity stuff. So we do high altitude mainly.

So that’s a big search point for seeds just we’ve gotten our SEO pretty tight, but then post-COVID. Seeds were in such demand last year, it was not until we got an influx of a whole bunch of new customers because they weren’t finding what they’re looking for at their normal sources.

The main thing that we’re up to now is trying to keep all those new customers happy supplies, the seeds expired, or just trying to keep them around.

It was just worldly circumstances that brought a lot of new customers more than we’ve ever seen in one go last season.

Brian: Well, that’s great, and talking more about that, or digging in a little bit deeper.

How else has the whole COVID situation for those of you listening, we’re recording this in March of 2021, we’ve gone through a full year of the covid 19 pandemic. So how else has this affected you and your company?

Julia: Well, it’s been invigorating, because our message is even more important, it’s even more essential that we’re prepared. You know, we don’t really engage too much in like scare tactics and whatnot.

And I try and keep the messages really light because the “doom and gloom” about where we are genetically with our seed supply is precarious, to say the least.

So it has been scary to see such like frantic purchasing, and such grab and go styles because people are feeling it like, yeah, we do need to be prepared.

Okay, how do I start a garden?

What do we need to grow?

And I think it’s a really great time to think about that. It’s a perfect time to engage folks about how we can all contribute a little bit better, to being more sustainable and more prepared.

Brian: No, that’s fabulous. And you had mentioned your newsletter. Tell us a little bit more about what people would find in your newsletter.

Julia: Well, we can give people a heads up if there’s any local events that we’re putting on, or participating in.

Seeds Trust has a wide array of sourcing. So we grow a lot of our own seeds. We have growers in the Rocky Mountain regions and on the western slope. And so we’re always having new varieties come in, and we’re trying to feature more of our local growers.

So we give folks a heads up on what’s new, what’s limited, what’s going on. And we try to give people kind of a slice of life of seeds. Tips on when to plant how to plant.

It’s lighthearted, but it’s pretty information dense.

Brian: All right.

Who would you say is your ideal customer?

Julia: Definitely, backyard gardeners, anyone who is even interested in starting a plant from seed or who has even garden with starts before really, actually, it’s quite fun to start with the seed, grow it out and circle all the way back around to seed.

But it’s fun, it’s like really completing that circle.

We have the skill set to do it, we have tons of information to share about how to do it.

The backyard gardeners who want to jump into a project, they want to know more to like it’s fun to talk to them. They’re curious about how to start from seed, how to save seed.

All in all, it’s a really positive interaction with someone out there in the world who’s attempting something really important. Actually, it’s kind of funny how important seed saving is. It doesn’t seem like it, but it’s essential.

Brian: Absolutely. And you have, it’s funny, you keep going back to this this idea of of getting the information out and educating people.

Do you feel like that’s a whole nother level to what it is that Seeds Trust does?

Julia: Oh, yeah, absolutely.

If we’re going to grow, then we need to be incorporating even more educational outreach to folks. If we’re doing it right, then fewer customers come back to purchase from us.

And more of them save the seeds that they purchase already, because they’re all open pollinated anyway. But seed saving, it takes money, it can get quite complicated.

There are ways to start in really basic manners that are acceptable to most people. But there’s a whole world of seed saving knowledge that, yeah, easier to expand more through seed just because that’s, you know, it’s our backbone.

Brian: What would you say is your top selling product at Seeds Trust?

Julia: Our top selling product is definitely our High Altitude Bucket.

It comes with a seed saving booklet, and 32 different packets of seeds for a basic, productive garden at high altitudes.

So they’re all short season varieties and they have short days to maturity. They are your tried and true. So you can get a really nutritious, well balanced garden.

You wouldn’t have to save your seeds, but the book went inside. So they’re an awesome gift. They’re a great starter garden product. People love those.

Brian: Fabulous.

Commercial: Okay, let’s take a break from that conversation. I wanted to bring up a question for you, during these crazy times, do you feel like your business is indestructible? Most people don’t?

And if not, the real question is why?

And what can you do to make it as indestructible as possible?

Well, that’s the basis of my new book, 9 Ways to Amazon-Proof Your Business.

Let me talk about what we discussed in the third chapter.

The third way for you to Amazon proof your business, which is be different.

In the third chapter, I go into, really, how do you put yourself out there and be seen as unique, where you really don’t even have competition. And there’s ways of doing this. In fact, I talk about two specific books that you should go out and get.

And these are difficult books to read.

These are fun books, books that will inspire you and give you creative juices necessary to be able to really stand out and be different, you don’t have to be wacky, you don’t have to be outrageous, but you do have to appear different. And if you can appear different from everyone else out there, not only will you not have the competition of amazon.com, you won’t have any competition.

But I also have eight other ways to Amazon proof your business, basically the idea of making it competition proof to even someone as big as Amazon.com.

So if you’d like to get your hands on a free copy of my book, go to AmazonProofBook.com sign up and you will get a free copy and get the chance to purchase a physical copy of it for a special price. And now let’s get back to our show.

Brian: That’s really cool.

Here’s an interesting question. If you could change one thing about your business or your industry as a whole what would it be?

Julia: That’s hard because I feel like as a business owner, I am changing things all the time for it to be better.

So it’s funny like this, this question almost seems like if a genie came down, and you know, could grant me a wish, because all the other stuff, I guess I wish that people valued seeds a little bit more than they do.

That would be wonderful.

And I wish that it was more so incorporated into the curriculum of our use. I would love to see that in schools more, more and more. Seed saving, not just growing like all of it.

Brian: Yeah, makes sense.

What would you say you like best about your business, in your industry as a whole?

Julia: Oh, man, I like best that it matters.

Not everyone has that as far as what they do in life, and I’m really, really lucky that I believe in seeds, I believe in their power to change the world for the better. I believe in the capacity to connect human beings.

And I find that really fulfilling in something that I do is my livelihood. So I feel lucky, like really, really lucky. It’s just, it’s a beautiful industry.

And seed people are incredibly friendly and generous, and hardworking.

They’re awesome.

Brian: How about your life previous to Seeds Trust, what took you in this direction?

Did you always see yourself in a position like this, or how did that all come about?

Julia: Oh, absolutely not. I had no idea seed companies even existed as like, way up until I graduated, I was just, I started doing local performance. And when I was doing journalism, and I ended up majoring in linguistics and French, I’ve always felt sort of compelled to engage in my environment in a way that that made a better, I feel like a sort of a crusader in a way, like always having some kind of mission.

And this one, just really stuck, when I looked around.

Now I was living in France, I wasn’t well, it seems to be an inherent value that this culture places on not only more localized items, but like values, the history of how they eat and how they cultivate food and their agricultural systems.

I just, I’ve always been searching for meaning. And I just really got lucky. Like, I don’t know how, I just stumbled upon it.

Brian: Fell in your lap. That’s great. Fabulous.

So if we were to talk again, like a year from now, and we were to look back over what had happened over the last 12 months, what would have had to have happen for you to feel happy with your progress concerning your business and your in your personal life?

Julia: I would want to have kept as many customers as possible, happy and thriving, I would like to have hired more staff to have a collaborative friendly atmosphere of teamwork in the studio.

And then I would like to be spending less time in the studio and more time consulting with customers who have questions about their gardens, and how to plant seeds.

So I’d really like to grow that way in the next 12 months.

Brian: Awesome.

What are the obstacles standing in your way from getting there?

Julia: The obstacle would be balancing all of the day to day responsibilities and the seasonal changes, or the changes that are going to happen in the coming seasons.

You know, because order fulfillment it now and then we’re going to be growing our seeds and then processing our seeds, doing all our inventory stuff.

Yeah. And I can’t get lazy over here. (laughs)

Brian: That’s important.

What advice would you have to other people that are looking into owning a business like Seeds Trust, they’re looking to either either purchase one successful one like you have, or to jump in from scratch?

What advice would you have?

Julia: Oh, my advice would definitely be plugging to your community.

Because there are so many people who do complimentary things that can help everyone’s business grow. And I would also encourage small steps that are solid, because you can’t get from point A to point C without being like, be patient.

Take the steps that are necessary and do them in a sustainable manner. Like each step is a step.

So incremental, sustainable and connect with other people who have similar passions because you’re happy and you’re feeling good and you realize is that what you’re doing?

I think that translates really well to business success.

Brian: That’s really well said. That connection point is so important and especially doing it at a local level, more important now than ever.

Out of all the questions I asked, Is there anything I did not ask you that you’d like to answer?

Julia: Um, yeah, what’s my favorite seed?

Brian: What is your favorite seed?

Julia: I love, Calendula Seed.

So calendula is a flower you can plant in your garden that’s great for it’s a different Kenyan plants will help breeding beneficial insects and ward off non beneficial ones.

So it looks sort of like a marigold. But the crazy thing is the calendula seed actually looks like an octopus tentacle currently, and has little suckers on it is wild. It’s like sci-fi.

It’s awesome.

Brian: So will that grow just about anywhere?

Julia: That’ll grow just about anywhere, Yeah.

Brian: Yeah. Very cool. Very cool.

What can the listener do who’s interested and wants to find out more about seeds trust?

Julia: Well, they can certainly visit our website, which is SeedsTrust.com.

We have a lot of information on the website, like a lot.

And people are always welcome to directly email me.

So I’m at J****@seedstrust.com.

And I love chatting with people and talking about their garden talking about seeds.

Brian: Yeah, I love it that you’re so plugged in with your customer base, and that you’re open to be able to be reached out to a lot.

A lot of owners don’t, they either don’t have that desire, and they don’t have that connection initially with their people. So that’s really fabulous that you’re doing that.

This has been a great conversation Julia, thanks so much for being on the Off The Grid Biz Podcast.

Julia: Thanks for having me. It’s been awesome.

Brian’s Closing Thoughts: Wow, it is really great talking with Julia Coffey.

There was a couple things that I caught from the conversation. These are useful ideas that you can use in your own business.

I love Julia’s attitude of being just straight to the point, no nonsense. She just knows her stuff. She knows what she’s talking about and she doesn’t add a whole lot of fluff to it.

It’s just really straightforward.

She obviously knows enough about her business, you listen to all the different things that she does, that I was reading about in the very beginning of the handling daily order fulfillment and inventory management.

And her talking about spending a lot of time with customers. That’s all huge.

Well, she is definitely running the show there and that’s great.

I love how she mentioned her ideal customers being backyard gardeners.

And a lot of people being very focused on high altitude seeds, then dealing with that region. And her talking about being a regional Seed Company and having a real focus in saving seeds.

This is such a very specific area and at the same time, look at how well she’s done during the covid 19 pandemic.

Because Seeds Trust is such a specific company, and plays to such a specific field of person. That’s really important.

Don’t downplay the power of having a niche. Because when there’s times when people aren’t paying attention to it, yeah, you may have a tougher time. But when people are paying attention, you’re one of the only games in town, not that she’s the only one that’s involved with seed saving, or in offering seeds by mail, or doing all the things she’s discussing.

But the way they do it is different from everybody else. And they’re able to stand out and she’s been able to reap the rewards, which is really great.

Another thing I wanted to point out, is just her overall passion, her passion for this and her belief that it’s bigger than just a nine to five job or just a business that she happens to own.

This is something that is changing lives and making a difference from her perspective. That’s important. That’s so important that you have that if you aren’t involved in something that has that you should search that out.

Because it could make such a big difference in your life.

You could hear it in her voice in what she’s discussing.

And the final thing I wanted to point out is, as I mentioned during the conversation, that focus on education and information, having an information side of your business is so huge. Not only in terms of marketing, because that gives you the ability to have content marketing across the board, online and so forth.

But also being able to have something that you might even possibly be able to produce a product out of the information and the contacts. And knowing that world of seed saving, the reasons why the process of it, and how you go about doing all that.

Just the knowledge that Julia has, can be passed on, and is a product unto itself.

It’s really exciting seeing what Seeds Trust’s has done, and with Julia is a co-owner.

It’s really great. I can’t wait to see what they end up doing.

Outro: Join us again on the next Off The Grid Biz Podcast brought to you by the team at BrianJPombo.com, helping successful but overworked entrepreneurs, transform their companies into dream assets.

That’s BrianJPombo.com.

If you or someone you know would like to be a guest on The Off The Grid Biz Podcast, offthegridbiz.com/contact. Those who appear on the show do not necessarily endorse my beliefs, suggestions, or advice or any of the services provided by our sponsor.

Our theme music is Cold Sun by Dell. Our executive producer and head researcher is Sean E Douglas. I’m Brian Pombo and until next time, I wish you peace, freedom, and success.

Petra Page-Mann – Fruition Seeds

Petra Page-Mann – Fruition Seeds

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.