Your Farmer:
As a child, Nadja helped her grandfather tend the large garden in their urban backyard, nurturing cucumbers, tomatoes, cabbage, raspberries, and more. Her grandparents both grew up on farms in the “breadbasket” of the Ukraine before they immigrated to the United States in 1952. Among her many memories of their old-world traditions, she remembers her grandfather carefully saved his valuable seed each year, laying out on newspaper in the basement to dry, labeling it and storing it away for the coming spring.
Nadja calls herself an “accidental farmer” because she did very little gardening after childhood and began again as an adult with no formal training in farming. She started vegetable gardening on a tiny 10x10 plot in her condo’s backyard with plant starts from the local hardware store. After her first year in the garden, she was hooked on growing her own fresh, healthy food. When she and her husband purchased their home, they began converting more and more of their urban yard into garden space.
Four years later, the yard has been transformed into an urban farm, complete with a strawberry and raspberry patch and three dwarf apple trees. She has now studied many aspects of vegetable growing, including bio-intensive growing methods, natural pest and disease control, and soil health, learning from community classes, farming veterans, her library of resources, and hands-on experience.
As a child, Nadja helped her grandfather tend the large garden in their urban backyard, nurturing cucumbers, tomatoes, cabbage, raspberries, and more. Her grandparents both grew up on farms in the “breadbasket” of the Ukraine before they immigrated to the United States in 1952. Among her many memories of their old-world traditions, she remembers her grandfather carefully saved his valuable seed each year, laying out on newspaper in the basement to dry, labeling it and storing it away for the coming spring.
Nadja calls herself an “accidental farmer” because she did very little gardening after childhood and began again as an adult with no formal training in farming. She started vegetable gardening on a tiny 10x10 plot in her condo’s backyard with plant starts from the local hardware store. After her first year in the garden, she was hooked on growing her own fresh, healthy food. When she and her husband purchased their home, they began converting more and more of their urban yard into garden space.
Four years later, the yard has been transformed into an urban farm, complete with a strawberry and raspberry patch and three dwarf apple trees. She has now studied many aspects of vegetable growing, including bio-intensive growing methods, natural pest and disease control, and soil health, learning from community classes, farming veterans, her library of resources, and hands-on experience.
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