Sylvia Ganier

00:00Hi, it's Brandon Styll, host of Nashville Restaurant Radio, and I want to relay a message from What Chefs Want. They know this has been the craziest past two months any of us have ever experienced, and they are excited to work together to get our industry back on its feet. They've been working hard this whole time to make improvements and feel like their service model is even more helpful than ever to help you manage your food cost and difficult to protect inventory needs. Now, they'll still be breaking every single case. No minimums on orders, 24-7 customer service to help you, and deliveries when you need them the most. In addition to that, they've expanded their to-go selection as well as partnering with local farms who desperately need help right now. Finally, if you have any questions or any news, please feel free to contact them. They are here to help. 502-587-9012. We look forward to getting moving again and continuing to be What Chefs Want. Welcome to Nashville Restaurant Radio, a podcast for and about the people of the Nashville restaurant scene.

01:05Now, here's your host, the CEO of New Light Hospitality Solutions, Brandon Styll. Hello Music City, and welcome to Nashville Restaurant Radio. My name is Brandon Styll. I am your host. Happy Monday to you and yours. Hopefully, this nasty weather we're anticipating today. Rain and glum is not keeping you down. We are excited. We've got new sponsors. What Chefs Want, thanks for coming on board and supporting us. And I'd also like to talk to you a little bit today about Springer Mountain Farms. They're a family-owned business nestled in the hills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. They have over 50 years experience raising chickens. They are non-GMO, no antibiotics ever. They're fed a hundred percent vegetarian diet of US grown grains. Find them at your favorite restaurant or at a grocery store near you. They are doing it right. And I appreciate them supporting what we're doing. So let's talk about another farmer.

02:16Sylvia Ganyer is going to be our guest today. And I'm so excited to share this interview with everybody because she's such a hard worker and she's one of those people that genuinely cares. I think that she's the definition of what hospitality is. We discussed in our interview that hospitality is a love language and that's her love language. And hopefully you get to enjoy listening to her talk about it, her whole story. And I appreciate you guys listening today. So without further ado, let's jump right in. I'd like to welcome in Sylvia Ganyer. Sylvia, welcome to Nashville Restaurant Radio. Sylvia is the president and CFO, the chief farm operator at Green Door Gourmet. How are things going? And for a farmer that is saying a lot because we have been in the middle of a lot of different challenges from a lot of different directions.

03:24So I'm gonna say stable at the moment. It can change any second. So let's just jump right into that. This is kind of a fun interview for me because I've interviewed a lot of people on this show and I've known most of them for many years. So I have a direction I like to go. I kind of have some history with them. I want to talk about different things, but you, I met you today for the first time. So I don't have a lot of history with you. So I'm excited to learn about you and I want to learn about Green Door Gourmet. What you're doing, how it started, and just get into all of that good stuff. I know from every, I've done some research and I, so a little about me, I am a produce guy. I don't know if you know that, but I used to work for Creation Gardens in 2005. And then I was there for almost four years and I was with Freshpoint for seven years. So I have sold produce for 11 years in Nashville to pretty much every restaurant in the city.

04:28I am a produce nerd. So I, I don't know why we haven't met and why I haven't been to your farm and spent time at your farm, but it is beautiful. It is, there's a feeling when you come on the property that it's just, it's so quaint and it just, it just makes you feel warm inside. Is that a way to describe it? That is certainly what we're going for. Even though we're located in Nashville, Metro Nashville proper, we want you to feel like you're a hundred miles away from the city when you come onto the farm. And where we have the opportunity, we always try to keep things as a down home feeling as we can. I like to call it country-politan. So country with a little bit of that cosmopolitan edge that people feel comfortable that you are still in the city, but you feel real at home. So you live on the farm, like on the property, right? So yes, we do live, we live here.

05:28And you, we is you and your husband? Yes, and my, my four-legged children. How many four-legged children do you have? Five. Wow. That's, that's a lot of four-legged children. Well, we each have, you know, 60 acres to work every day. So it's good to have a lot of four-legged children. And you have 350 total acres there, right? 350, yes. Wow. So tell me, let's, let's take it back to the beginning of Green Door Gourmet. When did this thing start? Did you guys live on the property and you just said, hey, let's, let's do this. Are you a farmer? Tell me kind of when we started. Well, it really probably started long before ever being in Nashville because I did grow up a dairy farmer's daughter in North Carolina. I moved to Nashville many, many, many years ago and had been involved in the hospitality industry as well as keeping an eye on farming, what was going on.

06:32And of course, the music industry, everybody moves here for music, right? Right. So when I closed my European style cafe in 2006, that was the moment of saying, OK, this is, you know, a new world for Sylvia. What am I going to do? And the answer to that was I'm going to retire. And so unfortunately, now I can never retire because we're farming every day. So the farm was my husband's family's farm and it was purchased out of their estate when they passed in the early 2000s. So growing up on a dairy farm, you were a kid, you probably had lots of different things that you had to do. Just being in a dairy farm, I'm sure there was many other things as well, right? And of course, that involves gardening. We in the rural south, if you grow up on a farm, that means you're raising everything you're going to eat. So we had acres of gardens and all of that.

07:35But at that point in time, in a small community, in a small town, usually you have cousins or neighbors and you kind of divide up who has the best land for what or who has the best knack for growing things or who has saved seeds for, you know, forever. That were their great grandpa seeds and you go and see Dave Anthony for this particular thing or so carpenter for cantaloupe or sunny bean for a particular type of tomato. So that was part of the social moment of being in a small town or a small community would be to go and visit those cousins or neighbors to get produce. But it was really to check on them and to maybe take corn if you're growing sweet corn or a gallon of milk to turn for butter or that sort of thing. So that's kind of community that I grew up in. You know, that just sounds like so amazing. And I don't want to I don't want to say simple, but like less complicated in so many ways that it's just I don't know.

08:42It just sounds picturesque what you're describing and what you're doing at Green Door Gourmet. You have a lot of so this thing has evolved and I want to get into that. But this is a point you do weddings, you do special events, you have school literal field trips that come in all the time. But right now you can't you're not doing those things. So on the farm, does it feel a little bit more like those days because you don't have all this hustle and bustle? It's kind of running a farm in a simple form. Yes, and I love it. I think people have different ideas of what being on a farm or farming is. And modern farming is very different. Modern farming, basically there are two paths to modern farming. One is go big or go home, you know, the Earl Butz model from the Nixon era, go big, go home.

09:45And that is your big corn, wheat, soy, your CAFOs for animals, all of that sort of stuff. And then you have the other folks that are the small folks growing what is known as specialty crops. Now, to me, that always makes me chuckle because a specialty crop is yellow squash or the common vegetables that you would think of. But they're all looped together in this thing called specialty crops. And if you're not growing a commodity crop, then you're kind of on the outskirts of being the cool kid on the block with all the big guys, if you will. And it's very difficult to sell specialty crops at a high enough value as a small farm to be sustainable. And that to me is the one thing, if I could get people to understand a little bit more, that the time and the care and the tomato seed does not go in. And then tomorrow you pick a tomato. And being a produce guy, you probably really understand that when everybody wants something way early in the season and it's just not time for it yet from this particular area.

10:55So you have to develop your your network and get your greenhouse going and all those things. So farming is may look simple and may feel pastoral if you're driving into a beautiful farm and things look great. But it is constant juggling 20 plates at one time to to make things happen if you're a specialty crop grower. I'm really glad that you brought that up, because I don't know what the perception is. And I think that there is that perception, that pastoral kind of, oh, this is simple. And I know that it is a lot of hard work and it's a lot of timing and there's a lot of factors at play as far as weather and bugs and all kinds of things that Mother Nature can throw some evil stuff at you. By the way, I'm eating some of the strawberries I got today that were picked like an hour and a half ago. And I know those are another thing that you only get for a couple of weeks out of the year. And those were the best strawberries I think I've ever had, by the way.

11:58Thank you. So when you talk about farmers markets, you see these farmers markets all over town, like how vital it is to go and support your local farmers, because you're not selling bulk products. Because you're not selling bulk products to like Kroger, right? Correct. So where do you distribute your product to? We are here on the farm. That's it. We want people to come to us. We want them to enjoy the glimpse of, as you said, coming in and it's lush and green and you feel like you can slow down and leave the city at the gate and come on in and have the experience to look through and pick out your CSA when you're here. To ask the farmer a question, to figure out, oh, what goes with what, to learn the old adage that growing up, we were always taught if it goes together in the field, it goes together on the plate.

12:59And, you know, companion planting is the same thing as companion flavors on a plate. So when you can teach people some of those things or the art of hydro cooling, when they get home and their lettuce is a little wilty, they're like, oh, so that's the added value that we have by coming here to our farm. And we work with some wonderful restaurant partners that have been very supportive for a long time in buying our produce as well. So we're blessed to have that. And we certainly hope that everybody gets up and going as soon as they're able to. But we also understand that it's a different market out there right now. Do you see any tourists come by there? Yes, we actually have seen a lot of people who think that we are a state park and not a working farm during, especially this time of COVID. And it's a delicate thing to have to be able to go out and say, I'm so sorry, you can't just go walk wherever you want all over the farm. They feel a little sense of entitlement that it was just a farm.

14:03I can go walk wherever I want to. And I'm like, but please, not on my my Jimmy Red corn that I'm trying to grow over there. Yeah, well, I just know it's interesting because you get so many people that come to town and they end up sitting on Broadway. And I think one of the most amazing things about Nashville and one of the reasons I love living here is that we have this metropolitan area that has a professional hockey team and football and all the big city stuff, all the big concerts on stuff. But 15 minutes outside of downtown, you can walk into the green door gourmet. And it's it's just amazing. It's none of that. It's the polar opposite of what it is downtown. And people that come to town are looking for stuff like that to do when we're not in this COVID-19 time. Is this a big destination for people to come visit and walk around and. Farm tours, of course, we could not do the you pick strawberries this year, so people do like to bring their families and come out for that. We planted sunflower mazes so you can be outside and enjoying something that you wouldn't get at a downtown hockey talk.

15:08And people do love to come and find us. And we'd love to show them around the farm and show them what we're doing to have our chef do a farm to table, local farm box dinner, guest chefs, cooking classes, using our ingredients. So all kinds of stuff that people can come and do once we're out of C-19. Wow. So if you're listening to this out there, if you come to Nashville, this is a must see thing to do. You've got to come out here once this COVID-19 is passed and you get back to Nashville. You got a bachelorette party or somebody get down to the farm and go check it out. It is really, really cool. Go stock all if you're going to be there for a week and you're cooking food, go buy your food there and then bring it bring it back to you. And you support you in your market there. You have a shop like a market inside your market. You have products from a bunch of other farms, right? We wanted to be a central aggregator. And you were talking about the importance of going to farmers markets.

16:09Yes, farmers markets are amazing for the consumer. And this is this is a different way to look at this. Farmers markets came about because farmers needed a place to, quote, sell their items in a simpler time. Now, every street wants their own farmers market. Every business wants a farmer to come and set up and create a farmers market. If all we did was spend our time going to a farmers market, we'd never have time to farm. So more farmers markets is not necessarily, in my opinion, the modern way to promote agriculture. The best way to promote modern agriculture is to allow the farmers to farm. I know very few farmers, except for me, because I'm crazy, that would want to sit there and talk about how to cook a rutabaga and how do you grow it and why it's important to know that this is the area where the farmers are going to grow.

17:14So if you think about the early strain of rutabaga that we grow, most of the farmers are like, I need you to buy your stuff and move on. I got somebody else I need to take care of because they're just there to sell their wares and then be able to get back to their farm and farm. It takes approximately 24 hours to get ready and to do a farmers market. So if you think about the farmer gets up the day before the market, he has all of his regular chores to do. And then he has to go out and harvest for the market. He's going to harvest differently for that farmers market. It has to be packaged differently, look differently. The size may have to be different than he would if it was a wholesale or a CSA. That sort of thing has to get that prepared, ready to go. The next morning he has to get up usually five, five thirty to load out the truck, make sure everything is iced down, get everything. You can't forget one thing if you forget the bags, you're in trouble. If you forget the iPad to ring people up, you're in trouble.

18:17And then you drive however long it takes you to get to that farmers market. You take out the tents, you take out the tables, you set everything up, you take out the produce, you see what's been destroyed in transportation. You put it all out, you stand out in freezing cold or extreme heat most of the time. You're going to lose product from doing that. You're going to have people who come by and they're going to go and say, oh, could I get this? But could I also get that with it? And I need a bag and it comes up to 98 cents. And by the time you run the credit card and you've paid a 10 cent transaction fee and given them a 7 cent bag and lost three things from people rifling through the barrel, you've lost money on the transaction. So farmers markets are a very difficult thing for the farmers. But they're great for consumers because you get the best of the farm coming to you. Does that make sense? I don't think anything's made more sense. That was incredible because I mean, you go to a bunch of farmers markets.

19:18I think the perception is you want to go there to support the farmer. But going to that farmers farm and purchasing from them there makes a lot more sense to really support the farmer. What you're doing or having centralized aggregators. And that's what we try to do with the people who have been our friends for forever. Dustin Noble from Noble Springs Goat Cheese, which is so delicious with our strawberries and our baby greens that we grow. Those partners make sense to us. I don't need Dustin to come out here and see if he can sell $50 worth of cheese. I need him to be on the farm milking his goats, feeding those goats, taking care of the new kids that were just born. And that's where I think our system has to go. I think our downtown farmers market has made great strides in trying to make things truly more local. And I commend them for doing that. Tasha's doing a really nice job down there on that. But I think having aggregators that you can come to a farm setting makes a lot more sense than a tent village on every street all across town to me.

20:28I think we need to make sure that we have some centralized places that's convenient for people to get to, but we don't need one on every street. CSA Community Supported Agriculture. That's the way to go. Not doing farmers market. I mean, how do people get involved? I know CSAs are very popular and everybody knows about CSAs. Can I just sign up to do a CSA with you? So CSA, that model started in the 1970s. And just like we talked about the original intent of farmers market being phenomenal and then it got a little askewed, if you will, I think CSA has kind of done the same sort of thing. If you are committing to do a CSA, you need to understand what that commitment is. So CSA in the traditional way means that you are saying to that farmer, I believe in your farm, which is entirely different than I want vegetables exactly like I want them when I want them. Have a nice day.

21:31Because vegetables don't grow that way. They don't grow that way. And that's important for people to know that. And the farmer could have crop failure. We could have a freeze like we had a couple of weeks ago that we've had no sunshine. We've had five days of sunshine since January. Think about that full sunshine days, five days. Every other day has been either partly sunny, overcast or raining. It's very hard to grow vegetables with that. My grass has never looked better, by the way. Yeah, it's just it's been very frustrating in that realm. If you're signing up for a CSA, you have to understand that you are doing it to support that farm and farmer and you have to have a little give and take. You have to not expect everything to be a supermodel vegetable. That is not how a CSA works. So that being said, we know that the modern consumer is not always going to be able to wrap their mind around that.

22:31You're going to have a percentage of consumers who do that. So we offer a traditional CSA and those are our season subscribers and we hope that they get it and they're they're with us hardcore through whatever Mother Nature is going to throw at us. Then we offer what we call our local farm box, our flexible box. And that is however many extra shares we've got an extra 20 bunches of something that can be put together in a box and sold as individual shares. You can opt in week to week for one of our extra shares. There's no commitment. It's a one time box. You never want to get another one. You don't have to. If you travel a lot, if you can't eat nightshades and it's potatoes and eggplant and tomatoes, you're probably not going to want to get a box that week. So we try to make a version of a flexible type of farm box or CSA for those people who want to customize it a little bit more for their lifestyle.

23:39OK, so I think that's important for people to hear. There's a hey, we want to support our farmers and we're going to do a CSA. Then they get this box and they go, hey, how come my squat? This isn't a crook neck or how come it's too big or it's too small or this has a dimple on it. There's a zipper on this one. I don't understand why it's like that's what it looks like when it comes out of the field and the people that are really supporting the farm. That's the product you mentioned when you do the farmers markets that the farmers have to go through and pick through all their products. Because if you put out the normal stuff that grows, people go, oh, that one isn't the one that I want. They only want perfect food. And that's not what it looks like. So in a CSA, you get what comes out of the ground. I would love that people would understand, just like all of us, we're perfectly imperfect. And once we understand that about food, then we actually will be on the right path to sustainability. Otherwise, we're just, you know, spinning our wheels.

24:39We're not going to get anywhere until everyone knows that things are not uniform coming out of the field. There's so much that just gets left in the field that we could be feeding people with because it doesn't meet the right specifications. That zucchini isn't exactly, you know, five inches long and two inches across. So it doesn't make super select or extra fancy leaving the field because they can't get quote value out of it. So we have to learn to value the perfectly imperfect things. And man, imagine if we did that, how we could feed people. Absolutely. That'd be amazing. So I just I just I've enjoyed talking about this with you. And I think it's really good for the the people out there. If I'm a restaurant, I have a lot of people that own restaurants and chefs and they let's just say that they want to buy your product. Would they just contact you and say, hey, look, I want to support your farm. I want to start buying your product. How does that work? We partner with Nashville Grown, which is a wonderful aggregator and service.

25:47And that's the easiest way to get our products because we're listing what we have available there on Nashville Grown. But we have some long term relationships with folks. And we always love to know if there's something different and unique that someone would like to see if it's available. And we welcome that call to the farm, whether it's a chef or a caterer or a food developer, stylist, all of that. We can't always put everything we have because if it's not enough volume, it's not going to it's not going to sell. But it could be the one thing that one person needs. So I always feel like calling the farm. But I would say if you are a chef and you're interested in buying products from whether it's us or any other farm, if you say, hey, I really use a lot of cucumbers. And I want you to grow cucumbers for me. Know when cucumber season is. Don't expect them in November to go on your menu. Don't say I'm creating a seasonal menu with things that are not seasonal.

26:49But when it is seasonal and we have those things available, honor your commitment and buy from us like you ask us to grow it. We're going to grow it, but we're going to need you to buy it. So that's kind of the give and take that I think sometimes farmers get a little, you know, rung into the stick on things because people will ask and oh, well, I changed my idea. I don't need that there. Well, I'm growing an acre of days into having plants in the ground. Oh, well, so now I have to find a different market for those things. So farmers are adepts. Don't get me wrong. We usually figure out something to do. Those cucumbers might become pickles in a manufacturing kitchen, but my plan was to grow them for you. So we really love it if you would take them because you ask us to grow them. So sounds like that's happened. Oh, maybe once or twice or a hundred times. I mean, I can't imagine menus changing and ideas changing overnight after somebody's asked you to grow stuff.

27:51But that's just that's weird, like common sense. That's like do the right thing. You know, I mean, that's something that I think that one of the reasons why I want to do this podcast is to really get like stuff like that out there to gain perspective that hey, don't be that guy. Before C-19, I think, you know, Nashville is a little bit of a revolving door. You know, your sous chef who would be putting together your order menu would be working for Joe one day and then he's working for Bill the next day and then he's working for Sue on the fourth day. And so when that kind of happens, you kind of get lost in the shuffle of who's supposed to be buying and how the menu might be changing and who's going where. So that makes it complicated for the farmers. And that's another reason we decided to go mostly through Nashville Grown is it kind of has a broader net so that no matter where someone might have moved to or is writing a menu for, they can find our product versus just locked into one place.

28:52So to get back, I'm going to pivot a little bit. You mentioned I'm all over the place here. You mentioned that you grow products that go products that grow together, grow, go better on the plate. Yes, right. Give me an example of that. Like, what do you mean? Cucumbers and dill. You plant cucumbers and dill close together. The dill actually serves as a deterrent for cucumber beetle works great in the field. You're not going to get the pest. They're going to come in and make the marks, the pock marks on your cucumbers and destroy them. Then what's better than a beautiful, refreshing cucumber and dill salad in the summertime? Right? Yeah. Tomatoes and basil, the same thing. The basil stops tomato hornworms from coming through. They don't like it. They don't like the oils, essential oils that are coming off the basil. So oregano has some of those as well. So those are some ideas of things that work well together. It's funny because I had a bunch of tomatoes growing and I had basil growing in the same thing.

29:56I didn't have any worms and I never knew. I was wondering, like, I guess the worms aren't out this year. I guess that makes sense. No, they're out, but they're just leaving yours alone because it's a little less attractive for them to have to get through that basil to get to yours and to go to your neighbors who didn't plant the companion basil to go along with them. Well, mine was completely by accident. So if you just take credit and a good one that we love to do garlic alongside of strawberries. Now, I know that sounds really crazy, but if you've ever had a deep balsamic reduction that has a little bit of garlic that you just put a perfectly ripe strawberry in, it's phenomenal. And garlic deters deer. You plant strawberries in the fall and then they grow during the winter and they're ready to go and they really get large and full plants by early spring.

30:58There's not much else growing that is that attractive to deer. So if you don't have something that deer really don't like, they're going to eat all your strawberries. Deer do not like alliums, aka garlic. And so we always plant garlic, big rows of garlic around our strawberries to help the deer stay away. Huh, there you go. So if you're growing strawberries, grow garlic around your strawberries. Now, do they go well together? Can you eat strawberries and garlic? Yeah, so if you treat them in a savory application, instead of just a sweet application, like I was saying with the balsamic reduction that has just a little bit of fresh mixed garlic in there, you dip the strawberry in that, it's delicious. I'm in, I have those ingredients right now. You know you're going to eat all those strawberries, you're going to have none left. Well, I have a five and a six year old and a wife who are downstairs right now actively going through there. They're my deer in the house right now eating my strawberries while I'm up here talking to you.

32:05So if I'm a so one of the things right now, a bunch of people are quarantined. We're at home and I see all over social media, everybody's planting their own gardens. We have a bunch of people posting pictures that, hey, look, I've started a garden. Do you have any tips for the home gardener of anything that people might be listening or doing a home garden you could help them out with? Oh, where to even start? You can always come and see me and ask me questions about vegetables. I'm not your pansies and azalea girl. I'm your tomato and cucumber girl. But I would say the biggest thing that people will do is they will get one something, one squash, let's call it. You get your first squash and you think I'm going to leave this squash until it is bigger and perfect and I'm going to pick it and it's going to be magnificent. And I'm going to tell you, you should have already picked it at that point in time because something will happen to it overnight.

33:08A squirrel will come and eat it. The deer will come and step on it. Bugs will get to it. It'll grow like a zucchini, another 18 inches over the course of the evening, and it'll be too big and seedy. So don't let things go too long. Know when to harvest them. The other thing that picking something small does, it sends this subliminal signal to the plant. If you leave something on, the plant goes, oh, my work's done. I've made the baby over here. If you take it, the plant goes, oh, my gosh. I got to make more. Something might be going wrong. Something might be eating me. And so I better make more babies. So it will actually help you get a better production if you pick something when it's a little bit on the smaller size, at least at the beginning, and activate the plant into saying I need to produce more. Like okra. Okra. Do not wait too long to pick your okra. Yeah, so big okra. Make sure you have gloves. Most people are very, very irritated by picking okra.

34:10It has an enzyme that can make you itch. So you want to make sure that you wear your long sleeves and your gloves and all of that sort of stuff. But I adore okra. It's my favorite vegetable. If you had to ask me what my favorite one would be, I would say okra. So speaking of favorites, what brings you joy throughout your day? What's the thing that for you personally, Sylvia, what makes you happiest? Seeing someone that comes to the farm and they taste something like a strawberry and they go, this is the best thing I've ever had in my life. That brings me joy. Where does that come from? That spirit of wanting to see somebody else experience something like that for the first time. So I interviewed Chef Andy Little from Josephine and he said one time on a blog, he said if you went out and you dug a hole and you planted a seed and you had a potato and you watered it every day for three, four weeks, five weeks, wherever the time frame is, and you went back and checked on it and you finally dug it out and you pulled it out and you washed it, you would cook it the right way because you respected it.

35:27Do you kind of feel a sense of that? Like when you spend that time and energy cultivating something and then seeing somebody enjoying it? Is that where some of that happens? I do see that that is one aspect of it, but I truly believe that there are people who are put on this planet because they love the art of hospitality. And hospitality is not only serving great food, but I believe it is growing great food. And I think it has to start with wanting to have a wonderful ingredient that you can then share with someone because that's what hospitality is, the art of sharing something in a setting between two people. Hospitality can be holding the door for someone, that's simple interaction, but it can also be, look, I have grown this beautiful, flavorful, wonderful thing and I want it to be for you to discover, to learn a new source of preparation for it, to just enjoy it as it is.

36:31So I think it's truly that hospitality aspect, and that's what makes our farm a little different, that we like people coming to our farm because we want to give them that food hospitality that they wouldn't get anywhere else. It's your love language. Yes. You know, some people like to give gifts and some people like touch and some people like words of affirmation. I think hospitality for people like us, because that's me. I love doing things for other people and seeing other people enjoy stuff. It brings me joy. That's what brings me joy. I think that's a unique thing that we share in the hospitality industry is that I think that's one of the things that most people are missing right now is not being able to do that as much. Is that where you get children when the children come on field trips? And I've seen so many videos of you talking with children. And is that kind of all in the same vein? It's the best thing when you can take a child out to the field or a garden and you pull up a carrot and they say, and I'm talking about a child of any age, we had some 19 year olds that went, carrots grow like that.

37:44That carrot comes out of the ground. The child immediately says, I want to taste that. I can't believe that's where a carrot came from. It builds this fascination and then they will taste it and it will taste different because of their level of fascination. We eat with our eyes and our experience just as much as our taste buds. And when you can make something different and alluring, here's a little fun thing to think about. If you tell children those are tomatoes and they're vegetables, they immediately form an opinion. Oh, I don't like vegetables because I've heard over and over. I don't like vegetables, right? But all kids like candy. If you tell the children that this is tomato candy, they will come back in and they will ask for cherry tomatoes. I cannot go get my tomato candy over and over and over again. It's pretty cool. And it is. That's amazing. So you what do you spend most of your day doing on the farm being the head honcho?

38:49Well, unfortunately, as much as I love being out in it and planting and doing all of those things, when you're running an operation, you are pulled in 15 different directions. So I might be running the CSA. I could be planting something. I could be working on financials. I could be talking to a new grower that would like to bring stuff to Green Door to set up being part of our ag partnership. I could be doing a class. I could be doing a farm tour, a lecture. I could be working with Chef to create a recipe for something we're growing. So you name it. Chief Cook and Bottle Washer. That's what you do. That's it. Sounds like you're very, very busy all the time. I like it that way. Supposedly, it's supposed to make me stay out of trouble, but I don't know that that is the case. What trouble could you get into? Oh, I could buy more seeds, have to plant more things.

39:50That's trouble. That's trouble. That's the kind of trouble you're talking about. So what do you, if you're out working in the fields, which is probably one of your favorite things to do, I'm guessing, because it's relatively, I mean, you're just out there in the fields by yourself. If you're picking, if you're pruning, if you're doing whatever, does that you do that, I assume? I do. I love to be out. That's why I like to pick okra. Nobody else on our crew likes to pick okra. And so they know if I'm in the okra patch, that's Sylvia alone time. Leave me alone. Let me pick the okra. And it's the early morning, kind of just before everybody else has to be in and asking 28 million questions, and what are we going to put in the farm box, and did you order these boxes from this so we can pack this, and do we have enough of this? So that's my quiet time. It's very therapeutic to have your hands in the dirt and playing with the plants. I feel the exact same way. I am a yard guy, I have a garden, and I love, I love being in the dirt.

40:53It's one of my favorite things. But that's also the time when I'm able to think, and I just, I have, I'm able to spend that time alone. What do you think about when you're out there by yourself? Uh, what's going to need my attention when I'm finished doing this? Who's going to be waiting for me at the end of the row? Um, that has been a lot of that lately. Um, I guess I would say, I let my mind wander to the place. And that might sound a little weird, but I think this farm is so special. And there's just something about being in nature, it makes you feel really small. And you feel like you're just one little dot that happens to be out here gathering something to feed other dots that are evolving, you know, around your little sphere.

41:57And it, it's good to go out there and feel small in a really big place. Yeah, it's grounding. No pun intended. Well, I mean, I know, listen, I think us people in hospitality business, we wake up and we, part of the joy is that we have no idea what's going to happen that day. Is there going to be a tornado? Is there going to, is a guest going to choke on something? Is this person going to call out? Is there going to be a fire? No idea. Every day you're coming into chaos and it's just kind of, you can have a plan, but everything pivots every moment. And I think it's very similar. And I think that sometimes having a moment to yourself where you can just kind of breathe and prepare for that, that's how you do it. And I think that's just curious where your mind goes. Your mind goes and I think that feeling small sometimes enables you to take on all of those challenges and balance some of that.

43:05Yeah. All right. What, do you have anything you would like to say to the people of Nashville? Because I've kept you here long enough and anything you want to say, just let her go. Nashville, Green Door roommate loves you. We cannot wait to get through the C-19 crisis and hug all of you when you come to see us. We want to check in with all of you. We want to know your kids. We want to know what you made with our vegetables. And we just appreciate your love of good food and the farming community here in Nashville. Thank you. You are an absolute treasure to this city. And I am honored to have you on this episode today in Nashville Restaurant Radio. You are just a saint and I cannot wait to see you at the farm. And I hope that everybody here goes to the Green Door Gourmet when they can go now.

44:07They're open. They've stayed open to this entire time. They've got to, if you want to buy your local produce and they have those strawberries right now, go get them. Sylvia, thank you so much for spending this much time with me today. My pleasure. Anytime. So I want to extend another thank you out to Sylvia Gagne for coming on the show today. She just, you know, I love when people shoot things straight. And I think with everybody, you know, guests come into our restaurants and they leave a scathing Yelp review or, you know, they just, there's just some etiquette involved with what you do. And I love the fact that she wasn't afraid to say farmers markets are tough. That's a tough place for farmers to go get the right product. Just the story she told is so fascinating. And when working with restaurants and asking her to grow something and not fulfilling that commitment, knowing your growing season, some of that stuff is bold.

45:07And I really appreciate her honesty and candor today. Hopefully you were able to take something out of that and hopefully you're able to grow pun intended this time. So thank you guys for listening. If you do love this podcast, please subscribe. We'd love to have you getting this podcast every single day that we put one out. I'd like to say thank you again to What Chefs Want and Springer Mountain Farms. And I hope that you guys are staying safe. Love you guys. Bye.