Located in Ridgebury, Pa., Growen Food is part of the regenerative agriculture movement. In our fifth year back on the farm, we have developed a polyculture of outdoor vegetable gardens and sistered it with indoor mushroom production.
Our mushroom variety includes lions mane, oyster and shiitakes. The latter of which are cultivated on hardwood logs using sustainable techniques that are centuries old. Our veggie selection changes with the seasons, but the quality is to remain crisp, clean and consistent. We use our extensive background in safe food handling systems to ensure that the freshest product arrives to your kitchen
About us…
Liz and Tim Owen
We like to keep things simple around here.
What are we doing? Growing food.
How? By putting good in and getting out.
Simple, sure, but certainly not as easy as it sounds. Rarely does simple translate to easy on this farming adventure we’ve chosen. Rather, simplifying is a constant goal, a way of life toward which we’re always striving, a model of agriculture that we’re trying to pursue. From the start it’s been about making the best of what we have and of what’s right in front of us.
Work with nature, not against her– it’s a common phrase you’ll here around here. It’s why growing mushrooms in our farm’s forests made so much sense from the start. It’s how after four seasons of call it “research and development” we’ve narrowed down our garden crops to a select variety of species that grow best in our native soil– no matter how much compost we add. It’s why the idea of creating meat alternatives out of mushrooms that grow on wood makes more sense than soybeans that grow in vast mono-crop fields. Discovering time and time over the true meaning of that phrase has been one of the most rewarding aspects of this adventure. Work with nature, not against her. Simplify.
“Work with nature, not against her.”
This whole thing began in 2016 when career opportunities allowed us to move back to Tim’s hometown where his parents owned a family farm as the fifth generation. Beef cattle was last raised on the property in the 1990s. Other than Dad’s backyard garden that seemed to grow in size by the season most other agriculture activities had seized by the turn of the decade.
While living in State College, attending their wonderful farmers markets and growing some peppers and tomatoes on our back porch, we had read a few books and watched some food documentaries that caught our attention. (Oh, the effin’ documentaries!) We found ourselves considering our food choices differently. In turn, we were eating differently and buying differently. We were thinking differently. When we moved north to our rural town the options, however, became even more limited. How to change that, we thought? It wasn’t so simple.
When we started, there were pigs and chickens and four garden beds. To our surprise, they were highly productive, too – even if the livestock tested our patience regularly. So productive were our garden beds that we quickly became overwhelmed by the harvests. Giving it a try on a homestead basis first and not yet selling at farmers markets, we found ourselves eating salads three meals a day. We were peeling cherry tomatoes for canning because we wanted to avoid waste as best we could. Again, not always a simple solution. That first year – we label it, Year Zero – was a lesson unlike anything we could’ve purchased.
Then just as the sun started setting on that first season, our initial group of shiitake logs began to fruit after a year of colonizing. We watched them pinning through the bark and forming into full cap-and-stem mushrooms and could barely contain ourselves. There were no weeds to pick, no broken fences to fix, no manure to avoid. Then we tasted them. Quite simply: delicious.
We needed more of those, we thought, and we’ve since been multiplying our production each season. By the end of this year we’ll be above 2,500 outdoor logs. We’ve also moved indoors cultivating lions mane and oyster mushroom, and every time we scale up we’re realizing just how challenging farming mushrooms en masse can be. Not as easy, nor simple, as it first seemed but we’re working to streamline it.
And not to oversimplify, but our tagline at the top there? We believe in it and found that if we keep putting good in – into our effort, our land, our community – that we’ll keep getting good out. That’s our mission at least and we’d love for you to join along