What is Context?

At the core of it all, context is everything that influences and matters in your operation. At The Chef’s Garden, our context looks different than the context of a conventional farming operation. With regenerative agriculture at the forefront of all of our decisions, everything we do is rooted with deeper intention and care.

While context varies for everyone, a few notable key components the Noble Research Institute share that follow us in our every day farming practices are:

• Soil health parameters
• Climate, region and environment
• Our individual backgrounds, educations, experiences and knowledge bases
• Family and employee dynamics
• The history of the property
• Influence of neighbors and others
• Willingness to learn something new
• Our belief system

While these components shape our daily practices, they are themselves shaped by an overarching factor in our operation at The Chef’s Garden: sustainability.

Sustainability as our Foundation to Context

We work hard to provide chefs with the best in-season vegetables and we consider our produce to be at a higher standard than most not just because of what we’re growing, but because of how we’re growing them.

The Chef’s Garden treats sustainability as the foundation, not the finish line. While many think sustainability as being “green” and “eco-friendly”, we see it as something broader and more holistic.

For our farm to be truly sustainable, we believe that it must meet three essential criteria:

1. Environmentally Friendly
2. Socially Responsible
3. Economically Viable

CEO and Co-Owner of The Chef’s Garden, Bob Jones Jr., often compares these three pillars to three legs of a stool. Keep all three strong, and you create a stable foundation that can support long-term success.

We take pride in caring for the land, but we take even greater pride in caring for the people who live on it as a direct impact of our work with the land. When we work with nature rather than against it, the Earth responds in kind—with healthier soil, more nutrient-dense vegetables for our customers and a farming system that supports over 150 dedicated team members.

Sustainability isn’t just part of our context—it is our context. It’s how we grow, how we think and how we ensure that both our farm, our food and our community has a future.

Context Matters in your Kitchen

Those who understand the care and intentionality behind their ingredients create dishes with deeper flavors and meaning. Having the context behind your ingredients allows you to respect and highlight the ingredient, not just cook with it. This context can include anything from the importance of sustainability to your business or home, how or where your vegetables are grown, or seasonality of your produce.

Take, for example, a carrot. To some, it’s just a humble root vegetable, pulled from a bin at the grocery store. But to the cultured cook, it’s a product of living soil, nurtured through regenerative agriculture not just for flavor, but to restore the health of the land itself. These carrots are grown in ways that deepen the richness and sweetness only truly healthy soil can offer. They aren’t grown just to fill shelves or pack boxes—they’re grown to nourish people, steward the earth and preserve the story of where our food comes from.

This context brings purpose into your craft, a connecting conversation with a guest and a flavor that’s remembered well after the meal has been served.

Context Shapes Everything We Do

Context makes every farm and kitchen unique. When bringing context into the picture it forms a lens through which your actions gain meaning. For a farmer, it guides the choice of methods to nurture soil for exceptional vegetables. For a chef, it informs the selection of produce, prioritizing the best for guests and the environment. Regardless of your role, The Chef’s Garden remains committed to working in harmony with nature, providing kitchens everywhere with vegetables that are full of meaning and purpose.

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That’s the big picture: from seed to plate but, of course, there are many steps in between.

Sustainable Farming Versus Regenerative Farming

First, a word about sustainable farming versus regenerative farming. We did a deep dive on the subject back in 2019 titled “Sustainable Farming Versus Regenerative Farming.” As a short version of our article, the term “sustainable farming” was used for many years—until people began noting how that implied keeping the ecosystem stable, as it is right now.

At The Chef’s Garden, we go beyond sustainability, ensuring that our soil becomes even more healthy to grow farm-fresh vegetables with even more flavor. Plenty of discussion—both within the farm and in the overall agricultural industry—ensued about what to call farming that went beyond sustainable agriculture. The term that rose to the top? Regenerative agriculture or regenerative farming. For the purposes of this post, though, we’ll use the terms “sustainable farming” and “regenerative farming” interchangeably.

Journey: From Seed to Plate

As we incorporate regenerative farming practices and philosophies in all we do, we grow our farm-fresh vegetables slowly, gently, and in full accord with nature. And, before we plant the seeds that grow into flavorful vegetables for your diners’ plates, we plant something called cover crops. These aren’t grown for consumption: human or animal. Instead, we’re feeding the soil, enriching and protecting it. Soil is a living, breathing organism that needs to be treated with care and attention—and when it’s healthy, it’s vibrantly alive– providing the foundation needed for healthy crops.

At The Chef’s Garden, we plant four to six species of cover crops, using cover crop seed grown on the farm to ensure that it has an affinity for the environment. After we grow our cover crops for a relatively short time, we gently work it into the soil, repeating this stage as many times as needed. Here, you can find out more about cover crops and our processes.

Once the soil is ready, then—and only then—do we plant seeds for the crops we’ll grow. We care for them with the same degree of attentiveness that we provide for our cover crops, never rushing through any of the steps. After all, we grow our vegetables slowly and gently in full accord with nature.

Then, when you place an order, we carefully harvest the best of the day’s crops. In the processing, packing, and shipping room, we follow all fifty-four standard operating procedures (SOPs) for food safety, along with an additional fifty-eight optional SOPs. This includes PCR testing of the water we used to wash the produce; fewer than one percent of U.S. farms conduct this additional step. All of this happens in an environment that uses a cutting-edge Extreme Microbial Technologies air purification system that sanitizes anything that’s touched by air molecules. We take safety seriously!

We then ship directly to you so your restaurant and diners receive the freshest vegetables possible. Finally, you create your fabulous masterpieces with our vegetables to the delight of your diners!

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By World War II, however, farming had become what is often called “conventional.” Two ways that conventional farming differed from methodologies of the past include how farmers grew for high yields and used chemical fertilizers to help achieve this goal.

In recent decades, it’s become apparent that conventional farming has stripped the soil of valuable nutrients, and crops grown in this environment don’t impart as many nutrients to people who eat them. 

As more farmers have returned to regenerative agriculture, though, by planting multi-species cover crops to enrich the soil instead of relying upon chemicals to kill off weeds, and as they use other regenerative techniques, the soil is regaining its health and ability to produce healthy crops for healthy people. 

Benefits of Regenerative Agriculture

Healthy soil is at the heart of this farming philosophy with positive soil health leading to more nutrient-dense crops to feed the human population. At a macro level, it can also play a key role in capturing carbon in the soil to contribute to a healthier climate and, therefore, the planet. As noted in the World Economic Forum in 2023, if 40 percent of global cropland used regenerative farming techniques, this would counteract the effects of 600 million tons of emissions. This is approximately the footprint of the entire country of Germany. 

Said another way, healthy soil leads to healthy crops for healthy people and a healthy planet. 

Feeding a Growing Population

Using information from the World Resources Institute, the world’s population will be nearing ten billion by 2050, which is about three billion more than it was in 2010. Solutions are clearly needed, and relying on the high yields grown through conventional farming has been problematic.

Fortunately, regenerative farming uses resources more efficiently because of the higher nutrients in the crops being grown and the land use efficiency. This, in turn, boosts water efficiency, which lowers the burden on the planet’s water reserves. Reduced pesticide use will allow for healthy biodiversity in a planet whose climate we’re nurturing.

Regenerative Farming at The Chef’s Garden

At The Chef’s Garden, we embrace the regenerative philosophy throughout the farming process. So, we invite you to join the regenerative agricultural movement by choosing crops grown this way to feed your family. The beauty of this action is that our farm-fresh vegetables are incredibly delicious as well as nutritious. 

We make this easy by creating fresh vegetable boxes where you receive and can enjoy the best of the season. You can also build your own box, which is a rewarding and eco-conscious way to connect with your food while supporting regenerative agriculture.

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Historical Decreasing of Nutritional Quality

A landmark study led by Donald Davis of the Biochemical Institute at the University of Texas in Austin gathered USDA nutritional content data of forty-three fruits and vegetables from 1950 and contrasted them from data about the same crops in 1999. The result: six out of thirteen nutrients being examined declined anywhere from nine to thirty-eight percent: phosphorus, iron, calcium, protein, riboflavin, and ascorbic acid. Similarly alarming results came from a 1997 study titled “Historical Changes in the Mineral Content of Fruits and Vegetables” published in British Food Journal. Plus, Australia has chimed in with its own distressing study.

The messaging is clear. Nutritional levels have declined when compared to foods eaten by our grandparents’ generations. So, what happened?

Information provided by California State University shares that growing for higher yield and the “decline in soil quality due to certain agricultural practices” are factors in nutritional decline. As more plants per acre remove more nutrients out of soil, the health of the soil becomes depleted unless it’s appropriately managed. 

Meanwhile, “crops grown in healthy, biologically active soils do not have lower nutrient levels.”

Healthy Soil and Regenerative Farming

Explanations found in the California State University material remarkably echo what Bob Jones, Jr. from The Chef’s Garden says about the three-legged stool of soil health. For healthy soil that leads to healthy crops for healthy people and a healthy planet, it’s important to regeneratively grow crops in ways that take the soil’s physical structure, biological activity, and chemical balance into account. Each of these factors is important all by itself and, when all three optimally interact with one another, exponential improvements happen.

At The Chef’s Garden, we’ll continue to use best practices backed by solid agricultural research as we grow farm-fresh vegetables with the maximum of flavor and nutrition—veggies made available to you and your family through our farmers market: Farmer Jones Farm.

Now, here’s another huge benefit of this type of agriculture. 

Regenerative Farming and Sustainable Food Production

Regenerative farming practices produce healthy soil for healthy crops for healthy people—and also contribute to a healthier climate as it sequesters carbon. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), in 2021, carbon dioxide, all by itself, accounted for two thirds of the human produced greenhouse gasses with a heating effect. In other words, global warming.

Regenerative farming helps to capture those gasses, removing them from the atmosphere in ways that dovetail with nature. Take a key facet of regenerative agriculture: multi-species cover crops. This technique alone, when planted across twenty million acres, could sequester approximately sixty metric tons of carbon dioxide annually. This one action could offset vehicle emissions of nearly thirteen million vehicles. 

Become Part of the Regenerative Agriculture Movement!

Quality information is good to have—but, then what? Plenty of people no longer grow their own crops, so regeneratively farming isn’t an action for them to take. Choosing regeneratively grown foods to feed your family, however, is a simple and highly effective action. We make it easy at Farmer Jones Farm at The Chef’s Garden where you can build a box of farm-fresh vegetables for your family’s healthy and delicious meals!

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At The Chef’s Garden, we are passionate about regenerative farming. The core of our philosophy is the use of cover crops, specifically multi-species cover crops, to maximize the benefits.

What is a Cover Crop?

First, here’s a definition: a crop grown to protect and enrich the soil. Cover crops can include grasses, legumes, and related plants. At The Chef’s Garden, we use oats, rye, buckwheat, alfalfa, and sorghum. 

Benefits of Cover Crops

Cover crops can improve the health of the soil. When grown and then tilled into the soil, important organic matter is introduced into the soil and broken down by microorganisms to serve as food for the plants. 

As Bob Jones, Jr. explains it, “It’s kind of a composting process when you look at cover crops. It’s the flow of energy from the sun to the cover crop, from the cover crop to the soil, and from the soil to the microorganisms, from the organisms to the vegetables. The organisms are feeding off of the root exudates that are a product of photosynthesis, converting soil chemistry to a form that the plant can take back up. We’re putting a diversity of plant organic matter back into the soil to be decomposed by the organisms that are in the soil naturally, as long as you haven’t put something on the soil to kill those.”

Other benefits of cover crops include erosion control, weed suppression, and providing habitat for beneficial insects.

Benefits of Multi-Species Cover Crops

According to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), you should “Implement a multi-species cover crop to add diversity and increase biomass production to improve soil health and increase soil organic matter.” For these benefits to take place, the USDA notes that the “Cover crop mix must include a minimum of 4 different species.”

At The Chef’s Garden, we plant a strategic mix of cover crops in a field and let them grow for a relatively short period of time. If oats are included, for example, they might reach a height of six to eight inches before we harvest the plants and gently work them into the field’s soil. We repeat this process as many times as necessary.

While the soil is benefiting from the organic matter provided by the multiple species of cover crops, the farm team is laying out what’s called stale seed beds. We monitor those beds to allow weeds to germinate but not emerge. Then, the team will shallowly till the soil, which disturbs the weed hairs.

For success, the farm team must be masters of timing and connoisseurs of knowing how deeply to dig. If they wait too long, allowing weeds to emerge, it becomes much more challenging to kill them. Instead, they must be addressed when they are simply white root hairs that can be softly tilled and allowed to desiccate in the wind. If dug too deeply, a whole new set of weed seeds would emerge. So, handled with a delicate touch, this process is also repeated multiple times. 

The results of this time-intensive process and the farm team’s discerning touch are farm-fresh seasonal vegetables, herbs, and microgreens. We believe you can truly taste the difference, and we invite you to order the box of your choice to find out!

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Instead, the team spends time with each cauliflower plant, reaching between leaves until a luscious head of cauliflower welcomes them. To add to the harvesting adventure, each head of cauliflower must be harvested at precisely the right size.

Tedious? Sure! Worth it? Absolutely. The result is a farm-fresh vegetable that we guarantee is worth the wait.

Mystery of Cauliflower

Although we know how to regeneratively grow cauliflower and harvest it at the moment of perfection, its origins have a swirl of mystery about them. Some people swear that they came from Cyprus, which is why cauliflower has been called choux de Chypre (Cyprus cabbages), while others say that people of Arabian heritage kept this marvelous vegetable growing while Europe was experiencing its dark ages.

Which is true, we may never know with certainty. What we do know: there are SO many incredible varieties of this flavorful cruciferous beauty.

Cauliflower Varieties

In addition to adding delectable flavors to the plate, our farm-fresh cauliflower adds plenty of visual appeal, with hues ranging from traditional white to green to purple and mulberry. Then, of course, there’s our Romanesco variety and marvelous mixed cauliflower. Our cauliflower varieties are ideal for whole roasting, shaving, and micro-planing, offering a wonderful yield.

Farmer Lee adds that if you want to capture the essence of fall on a plate, then cauliflower presents an awesome opportunity to do so! Just let your product specialist know what you need.

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Now that we’ve answered the question of “What are cover crops?” we’ll focus on how they work and why they’re important.

How Cover Crops Work

We plant multiple species of cover crops in a field that’s currently fallow. Then, we allow them to grow—at least for a while. With oats, we might let them grow until they’re about six to eight inches tall. Then, we’ll gently work the crop into the ground to feed the soil and control weed growth. Our farm team will, in fact, repeat this process as many times as needed.

At this point, our farm team is also busy with laying out stale seed beds where we plan to grow this season’s vegetables. We monitor these beds to give weeds time to germinate—but not giving the weeds time to emerge. The farm team will shallowly till the soil at this time, disturbing the hairs of the weeds.

Timing is crucial, and here’s why. “If we dug too deeply,” Bob Jones, Jr. explains, “we’d only be bringing up a whole new set of weed seeds. Or on the other hand, if we waited until the weeds emerged, it would be much more difficult to kill them. So, we address the weeds when they are nothing more than white root hairs because we can gently till them, so they’ll quickly desiccate in the wind.” This process is also repeated a couple more times.

Why This Labor-Intensive Process is Important

By following this admittedly repetitive process, we have much less competition from weeds, which means that we have eliminated the need to use chemicals. Instead, we focus on our regenerative farming techniques—cover crops, gentle tilling only, and so forth—to build healthy soil for healthy crops, healthy people, and a healthy planet.

Because we grow our vegetables slowly and gently in full accord with nature, you benefit from deliciously healthy, nutrient-dense, farm-fresh vegetables as we protect our land for future use.

Taste the Difference: Farm-Fresh Vegetables

If you were to ask us if this cover crop process was time-consuming, we’d say yes. If you were to ask us if it’s worth it, the answer is a resounding YES—and we invite you to taste the difference with our farm-fresh seasonal vegetables, herbs, and microgreens.

If you live in or are visiting Northeast Ohio, stop by our farmer’s market to say hello and choose your own vegetables. You can also have deliciously fresh produce delivered directly to your front door anywhere in the United States.

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Today, though, we’ll look at soil from a different angle. We’ll explore the different soil types—including the lake bottom sandy loam soil that we benefit from at The Chef’s Garden. This is a great soil for crops because it’s fertile and drains well—and because it encourages growth as water and air are easily accessible by plant roots.

Now, here’s more information about the different types of soil.

“All soil,” Bob Jones, Jr. says, “consists of sand, silt, loam, and clay. Sandy soils are the most common, and they contain the majority of sand, while others are sandy loams that have little silt and very little clay. Clay soils, just as you would think, are predominantly clay.”

As farmers, we need to consider the makeup of our soil and make agricultural decisions based on that. “Sandy soils like ours,” Bob shares, “tend to dry earlier in the spring—and warm up earlier, too. They also dry out more quickly. We then base our cover crop program on those characteristics, one that’s specifically designed to add more humic substances to our sandy loam soil.”

Humic substances are compounds of decaying organic matter that enhance soil fertility. Adding these substances increases the soil’s moisture-holding capacity and cation exchange capacity (CEC).

“What that means,” Bob says, “is simply that we can now hold and exchange more minerals in the soil and support more biological life in those same soils.”

The Perspective of Farmer Lee Jones

“We’re blessed with the richest lake bottom loamy soil possible,” Farmer Lee says, “which gives us the ability to grow just about anything.”

What, though, is meant by “lake bottom” soil? Well, during the last Ice Age, glaciers covered much of the land, including where The Chef’s Garden exists today. The glaciers scraped the land, creating large depressions in the ground. When the ice melted, these basins filled with water, forming lakes—including Lake Erie, which is in the same region as our farm.

The glaciers also left behind plenty of sediment, including the sand and silt that’s in our incredibly rich soil. Then, as Lake Erie receded about 13,000 years ago, this sediment remained in the soil that was once part of the lake and created loamy land with great drainage ability.

“European settlers,” Farmer Lee says, “recognized the value of this land. In fact, at one time, it’s said that about three hundred and thirty vegetable growers had small plots of land in our area, which would have been the largest concentration of veggie farmers, people who were true artisan growers, in the world.”

Farmer Lee likes to compare farming to maintaining a relationship. In this analogy, The Chef’s Garden is extremely fortunate to have such rich land. “Having said that,” he adds, “we must continually maintain and improve this relationship through sustainable and regenerative farming.”

By relying on organic, not synthetic, fertilizing methods, we’re not only caring for the land. Because of fertilizer run-off, we’re also caring for the water by not adding harmful substances to our rivers and lakes—which brings us full circle since glaciers and Lake Erie played such a crucial role in creating the soil we’re so blessed to farm.

“In short,” Farmer Lee says, “making decisions that are good for our water and land is what we mean by working in harmony with Mother Nature rather than trying to outsmart her. At The Chef’s Garden, we focus on slowly and gently farming in full accord with nature.”

Farm-Fresh Vegetables

The fresh vegetables, herbs, microgreens, and edible flowers we regeneratively farm in our sandy loam soil are delicious and nutritious and shipped directly to you. We invite you to browse our site to find what’s in season and available.

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