Growen Food: What's in a name?

Every farm’s name has a story behind it. Ours has a couple. At first it might appear as just a play on words, a straight-forward business description. Like many others, however, there’s more to it than what meets the eye.

Growing up in this beautiful rural area, I remember riding around in my parents’ car, mesmerized by the fields of corn quilting the sides of the road in the summer. I recall many of the neighbors growing a backyard garden, so I figured the farmers, too, were planting food for everyone to eat. I was thrilled. “Mom,” I remember asking. “When do we get to eat some of that corn?”

A chubby-cheeked, food-motivated child who wrestled in the unlimited weight class as a youth, I’d for real get lost staring out into the field rows. Just imagining melted butter brushed across corn on the cob, sweet like Dad grew, with a sprinkle of salt. That was until Mom’s answer snapped me out of my fat-kid hunger trance. 

“That’s not for humans,” she said, her answer disappointing. Not that field either. Nope– not that one neither. Although they all worked tirelessly, perhaps too tirelessly while propping up the economy of our small rural town, almost none of the farmers around us grew food ready for human consumption. Even the small herd of grass-fed beef that wandered the pastures around my house (where our gardens are now) had to be shipped off to the butcher before they reached a dinner table…and never our dinner table.

When my wife and I moved back to get this farm operating again, we wanted that aspect to be different. With Liz’s experience and love for restaurants and her passion for good healthy food, we wanted to grow things that were ready for the kitchen, now.  That was to be paramount to our farm, so in creating a name, we wanted to make that as clear as the spring water that seeps out of the hillsides around here. What are you doing? We’re growing food. For everyone. 

The name became more fitting once mushrooms found their spot at the top of our crop plan. Despite how Pennsylvania grows more than 60 percent of the mushrooms in the United States, the majority of that comes from the southeastern hip of the state. Up here in the Northern Tier, we get a few strange looks at first when it’s learned we grow mushrooms. Moreover, then, our name was a challenge to mycophobia. (The fear of mushrooms… it’s a real thing!) Of course not all mushrooms are food. Neither should all plants be eaten. But the ones that are edible? We should be consuming them more frequently, included regularly into in the American diet. We really bought into that from the start. Growing mushrooms, yes. Plants, too. By extension soil as well. Combined, we are growing food.

We could have stopped there for our name, but we wanted to further pay homage to our past and the history of this community. Meshed into our slang spelling of growing (Growen) is not only our last name but also the namesake of a couple of the first founders of this little township of Ridgebury.

It was in the early 1800s when a Connecticut man Griswald Owen chased his love, a girl named Annis Goff, from Connecticut/Orange County, N.Y. to this hilly countryside. Back then this rural area was known for the bounty of berries that grew along the ridges, and that’s the story of how Ridge(berry) earned its name.

Thanks to great, great, great, great Grandpa and Grandma Gr(iswald) Owen– that’s how we got ours