Mail-Order Abundance
Many of us want to grow a garden, one that will provide many fruitful harvests, but do not know where to start or how to keep it going. The inevitable setbacks are too much to endure for some and others cannot get past the task of germinating seeds. Gardening stores often sell varieties that are not ready to plant when you find them there, and costs can be high, especially when your garden fails to grow.
Leaf’d Box, a new home-gardening education and subscription service, offers plant starts as low as $3 each, along with information and support that can help home gardeners produce up to $700 a year worth of produce.
Leaf’d Box was designed to take the guesswork out of gardening at home. With a subscription and less than an hour per week of maintenance, gardeners from beginner to expert can have fresh, homegrown food all year. The family-owned company provides online lessons that walk you through preparing your garden area, and deliver plants to your doorstep at the moment they should be planted.
“Our subscriptions break up the gardening process into seasons that overlap harvests with new plantings,” says Robert Campana, who started Leaf’d Box with his wife, Kayanna, in 2020. “We also email our customers reminders when it’s time to harvest, scannable codes to learning lessons, and recipes so they can enjoy eating their homegrown vegetables and herbs.”
Robert is also a customer, and since starting the company and subscribing himself, has been able to turn the empty planter boxes he built, filled and then ignored for over two years, into a garden that produces year-round vegetables for his young family. He grew up in Ojai, where his father worked full time at Seminis, Inc. (a seed company), while caring for 100 orange trees and two vegetable gardens in their one-and-a-half-acre yard.
“My magical garden moments as a kid were enjoying the gardens and fresh food from them each season, then selling the extra produce at the farm stand at the end of our driveway,” says Robert.
Now he is a successful gardener at his home in Ventura. He also grows many plant varieties in the test garden in Santa Paula for Leaf’d and PanDia, the seed company he started with his dad in 2010. His kids, ages 6 and 3, are having the same kind of experiences that he remembers as a kid, enjoying fresh foods that they helped grow and selling the surplus from both gardens at a corner near their home. Additional excess produce is donated to nonprofits like Food Forward and Food Share.
Robert says with Leaf’d Box he aims to re-create these magical garden memories for other aspiring gardeners and their families. The plugs are grown in peat moss with an organic binder and shipped at the ideal size for planting, either in a garden, raised beds, pots or even hydroponic systems. “We aim to make gardening easy, by giving aspiring gardeners the right plants at the right times to help them start and maintain their #EasiestGardenEver,” says Robert. “We are setting them up for progress, not perfection.”
The Leaf’d Box team groups vegetables or herb varieties that they have tested for predictable harvests. A spreadsheet they developed based on customers’ hardiness zones tells them when to send the plants out to growing areas across the U.S. to make the most out of each season. Depending on the plants, they may be ready to harvest from five weeks to three months after they are planted, timed perfectly with the shipment of a new box of plants. “As you are harvesting one area of the garden, you are planting another area for future harvest,” says Robert. There are a few exceptions such as artichoke, which takes six months from plant to harvest, but special instructions are provided to plant it in the corner so the next shipment of plants can go in around it.
“One of our customers in California bought a subscription for herself and for her father on the East Coast, and they are now able to grow the same things at the same times, allowing them to deepen their connections through a shared experience even though they are far apart,” says Robert. “Another in Maine receives his plants on a different schedule than Southern California, but still enjoys harvests much of the year as well.” Leaf’d Box customizations allow customers in colder climates to choose to receive the boxes earlier if they will be starting them in a greenhouse or after the weather warms up to plant directly in the garden.
It seems simple to grow a garden, but even being surrounded by seeds and growing plants, Robert realized that life commitments can get in the way, and he needed to have something mapped out and easy to follow to keep his garden going. He thought maybe others were having the same trouble and wanted to offer a solution.
With the fortuitous timing of the pandemic-induced gardening revolution, a month after launching Leaf’d Box, mostly advertising on social media, the company already had 400 subscribers. Two years later, the company continues to grow and has expanded to gardening education seed kits for home and charter schools that are sold on the website and through Walmart and Target.
The Herb Garden Boxes include plants such as basil, dill, lemongrass, chamomile and nasturtium, and the Veggie Garden Boxes include plants such as cherry tomato, round tomato, green lettuce, red lettuce, kale, cucumber, scallop squash and sweet bell pepper. The subscriptions come in small, medium and large sizes, in a vegetable or herb option, with 10 plants in the small, 30 in the medium and 60 in the large. The small subscription is billed quarterly at $44.99 per shipment plus shipping or annually for $199 for four seasonal shipments. There are also one-time seasonal vegetable or herb garden boxes available.
Through a partnership with World Vision International, every subscription to Leaf’d Box provides clean water to someone in need. PanDia, Robert’s other company, researches and develops seeds for growers around the world, and he has personally visited places such as Haiti and Honduras, where many struggle for access to clean water and healthy food.
For more information visit LeafdBox.com.
