Kelowna resident Curtis Stone spends most of his time growing farm fresh greens at his home-based business called Green City Acres.
“We make a… living out of it, we take four months off per year and there’s two people running the operation,” Stone said.
His commercial urban farm operates on less than half an acre of land in downtown Kelowna.
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“Essentially we are just a farm but we aren’t using big tractors and we are not growing commodity crops. We are growing a sort of specialized group of about 20 different products,” he said.
It’s a full-time job growing all that healthy produce but it also generates a healthy income.
“We have six different lots and we sell to grocery stores like Nesters and Choices and we sell to a variety of restaurants and we sell at the farmers’ market every Saturday.”
Now, Stone wants to plant a seed in other people’s minds.
“I want people to think that there’s so much available here, if they can’t garden it themselves, they can find it from a local farmer.”
He’s encouraging everyone to buy local produce like the kind he grows. He’s also out to teach others how they too can be an urban farmer, a title he gives himself and his new book.
“We are shipping in salad greens and carrots from California into British Columbia when we could grow most of that stuff here.”
A little food for thought from “The Urban Farmer”, who hopes his deep-rooted love for gardening will spark the growth of more yards that look like his.
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