Radical Gardens is a unique farm, restaurant, online market, and catering service that has been running out of Timmins for the last couple of years.
TimminsToday sat down with owner/operator Brianna Humphries to ask her about what drove her to get into farming, about starting a business, and about what makes Radical Gardens so unique.
How are things with the business now?
It’s going pretty good. Last year in 2015 I decided to buy a restaurant out of necessity. There’s not a huge food scene as far as farm-to-table or fresh food in town. Especially when I first started, there was no restaurant in town where you could show up with a fresh bushel of stuff and say ‘Hey I got this you should buy it’. That doesn’t exist in Timmins. As a farmer that is watching her harvest go to waste because people are so far removed from their food that they don’t understand how markets work. They don’t understand what a farmers’ market is, why they can’t get an apple here, or why they can’t get an asparagus in September. There’s nothing here for the small farming community that is here. I was doing a lot of work in my parents’ kitchen because my farm is on their property. I was doing all my canning in my mom’s kitchen, it was really sucking for everyone involved. My parents ate a lot of pizza for a couple years there.
What do you mean they ate pizza?
Once you’re canning, that kitchen’s a write-off until your done. If I’m on a 16-hour canning marathon, no one’s getting in there to eat food. So I was forever ordering my parents pizza. It was the saddest thing ever, you can only eat so much pizza! So, I was looking at prep kitchens around town and nothing was working out the way I wanted it to and I happened upon the building that I’m currently in. I bought it randomly on a Friday and I owned it on Monday. It was just on a whim. Most of my staff was on vacation that weekend and they came back to discover I owned a restaurant.
So the restaurant’s concept is ‘farm to table’? What is that? Can you describe it and talk about why it’s unique.
‘Farm to table’ is not necessarily unique. People have been eating like that since the dawn of time and its just that society has gotten really far removed from the concept. It’s probably why we have a multitude of health problems like diabetes. Farm to table is literally just how you should eat food. My whole thing is if you live in Northern Ontario and you’re eating avocados every day you need to stop. Bringing in food from South America to Northern Ontario so you can feel the gratification of eating an avocado whenever you want is an absurd way of thinking that’s not good for the global economy, for food sustainability, or for that avocado farmer that worked and then put that avocado on a vehicle so it could travel all the way up here and still be cost effective for you. What did you pay that farmer at the beginning of that line so that it is so cheap? That’s brutal. Our restaurant hasn’t done anything new except we wanted to cook real food and to get people back in touch with their food. Food is not perfect. It’s weird looking. Sometimes tomatoes have stripes and sometimes squash grows a little butt - just eat it.
What does Radical Gardens offer that other businesses don’t?
We definitely offer a unique experience in that there is no other restaurant that you can walk into in town that looks anything like ours. The outside looks nothing like anything else, we don’t make food like anybody else. We purposely go out of way to make some crazy stuff. Our bakers don’t even make things like anyone else. We love creating new stuff all the time. Our whole thing is to never be the same.
What is some of the food you make?
We make hundreds and hundreds of different things. We have an insane collection of cupcakes. We have cakes that are out of this world. We have an artisanal baker who is putting out artisanal sourdoughs. There is no one in town making super crazy Instagram food like we do. We love that stuff. Our whole thing is we grow this food so maybe we have a bit more of connection with it. We want the food that we grow to be so beautiful and so moving. You should be so into your food that of course you want to take a picture of it. I think that we offer a pretty unique experience in that , we create some really crazy food art. We’re a bunch of eccentric crazy people all under one roof and as far as I’m concerned there’s really nothing we can’t do at this point.
You are supported by a CSA, what is that?
Community Supported Agriculture. A CSA is basically like a family. People pay a share into a farm. For example, our CSA is $500 and they pay us in April. It helps pay our farm staff for the first chunk of time while there is no income coming in because we’re planting, preparing, or waiting for stuff to grow. What happens is once a week, as soon as stuff is available for harvest, they get a share of the crop. They get a percentage of the crop every week for 12 weeks and it gets delivered or picked up.
When you first got into organic farming it was because you found out you were celiac while working as a pastry chef, right?
Kind of, I later discovered I was a celiac. I was working as a pastry chef and I started getting sick and it turned out I contracted the antibiotic resistant strain of C. difficile (Clostridium difficile) - a really crappy infection that gets rid of all the healthy flora in your intestines and stomach. It made it really hard to break down and digest food. I was really ill for a year and a half, not getting better or worse, just kind of existing. They had me on such an absurdly high dosage of antibiotics for almost six months that my antibiotics were averaging something like $7,000 a month. It was insane.
That was all related to you taking in all that gluten as a pastry chef?
We figure. I think it was exacerbated by a couple of things you know? I was working a lot, I wasn’t eating well, and I had an overall unhealthy lifestyle. My immune system dropped because I was inhaling wheat all day, every day. After being treated I finally got diagnosed clean of C. difficle but I never felt any better. I went and got the blood and the biopsy work done and that’s when it turned out I was a celiac. Except that my intestines were a mess from taking that high of an amount of antibiotics for so long. I couldn’t eat anything, it hurt to drink water, and I went through a lot of turmoil and heartache while dying and wasting away.
How did this lead to you starting a farm in 2013?
It was hard to deal with the fact that now I had to eat all this specialty food that I couldn’t afford because I hadn’t been at work for a year and a half. I had to grow it. I’ve landscaped and been a gardener my whole life but vegetables are much different. I started this tiny garden. Well, tiny to a farmer. To a normal person it was huge, like 50 square feet. I have this problem, I really like to 'go big or go home'. I grew like 535 tomato plants and I sucked at it. I went around to the farms here in town and a lot of them let me work for food which was sweet because I didn’t have any and I was poor and I was really rather hungry by then. They taught me how to farm and how to switch to growing vegetables. That winter I worked at reading and educating myself on farming and sustainable practice and biodynamic farming. In the spring I increased my garden to 100 square feet from the 50 feet, hired someone, and just saw what would happen. I couldn’t do it by myself. In theory, I thought, it should make enough money that I can pay this person. And it did. It made enough money to pay her for the entire summer. A light bulb went off in my brain. I called my neighbor, who’s also a farmer, and he showed up with a disking plow and he disked an acre for me and I expanded to the 1.3 acres that I’m currently sitting at.
I know there is more to you guys then what we’ve touched on, can you talk about some of the other things you do?
We threw the first ever food festival this summer. We’re one of the greenest restaurants in the country. We are 'Feast ON' certified because we serve a large percentage and mostly only local food. We received the best business under one year award. We throw super secret supper clubs that happen in really random places. The whole concept is to have dinner in a place that you normally wouldn’t have dinner in. They’re for 20 people, you don’t know who the people are, you don’t know where you’re eating, and you don’t know what you’re eating, and you receive an invitation in your inbox the day of. We do a dinner in white on our farm every year. 70 people come, they dress in white, and they eat crazy food from chefs from all over Northern Ontario. Each chef does their own course. We helped sponsor the first ever Punk Festival in Timmins. Pretty much every festival in town we serve.
Any future plans?
Oh, I always have something cooking up my sleeve.
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Interview edited for brevity and clarity.
