We were lucky to catch up with Sidney and Tory “The Nakid Gardeners” Holland recently and have shared our conversation below.
Sidney and Tory “The Nakid Gardeners”, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?
We both lost our mothers and found therapy in the garden. Our passion for gardening kept expanding because we shared a passion as foodies. We have been health-conscious people & share a distrust of the commercialized food system & spent a year as vegans prior to obtaining our own property to grow our own meat & produce sustainably.
Our name “The Nakid Gardeners”
(intentionally misspelled to avoid being dinged by social media formats once we became monetized)
We were not raised this way, we were in church listening to a story about Adam & eve naked in the garden knowing nothing (like us) and once they bit into the fruit they gained knowledge. We decided that it was appropriate for us to be called The Nakid Gardeners coming from no knowledge in our journey and growing and sharing with others our successes & failures.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
We had been quite ignorant about branding and discovered shortly after deciding on our name and documenting our journey on youtube that there was a legitimate day “World Naked Gardening Day” that falls annually on the 1st Saturday of May. After Our 1st year & discovering that we realized we needed to get our logo, colors, etc together for any future business options if we grew to the point of actually having products or services to share with others.
We’d love to hear about how you met your business partner.
We have known each other since 8th grade & graduated high school together. We moved on, married other people, had kids & rediscovered each other after divorces over food posts that we both made, and realized we had commonality and passion about similar things that drew us together. (Tory) would buy fresh herbs often and most would go bad before being used so (Sidney) decided to grow some to save some money…lol
Have you ever had to pivot?
We initially thought when we got our property that we would grow lots of produce & sell it at the farmer’s market. On the sidelines, we were also starting to have poultry for different reasons (mostly sustainability) and to feed our compost and fertilize the land. We have ended up being quite good at poultry farming and have become breeders for the Queen of all meat chickens “The American Bresse” and we raise poultry on pasture, rotating them to contribute to regenerative agriculture. Our animals have jobs, they fertilize the land, they mow the grass and they only have one bad day here, processing day. Our birds live in sunlight & on grass absorbing what nature intended.
Contact Info:
- Website: http://thenakidgardeners.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_nakid_gardeners/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thenakidgardeners/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCSFMfq1ktuNA_KgnOVeS7GA