When work life and Balance get thrown off the roof..

Anyone working for themselves, chasing their dreams, and refitting puzzle pieces together on a daily.. this one’s for you.

There really is nothing like it, the excitement of the first few months after starting your business with the person you love the most in the world. Don’t get me wrong, its A LOT! There are so many things you have to learn as you go and it seems like there is never a break in the learning curve. We are just shy of eight months into our leafy dream and we are still trying new methods, experimenting with seeds and tweaking our salad blends just a tiny bit to ensure they continue to to be the very best in the small markets we sell them in. We are currently doing all local business, we sell salad blends and herbs in a couple local markets and we have been working with a few amazing people within the Iowa food scene. We have met some amazing people and made a few wonderful partners and even a few new friends. It’s been a whirlwind of information overload, late nights, and so much love. We have both experienced so many new things and we have both grown so much both individually as well as together. Working with, living with, and just generally co-existing with another person has its challenges. No matter how much love is there for the other person. Two stubborn people, both of whom have a tendency to think they are right and one (the “who” depending on the day) refusing to believe that there is simply no other way to accomplish a task can, and does cause conflict. Hell, lets face it, life in general can cause some all out brawls.

If you don’t take the time to learn to communicate and fight correctly and if you refuse to realize that a partnership always depends on a little give and a little take, I have to believe (even with my little experience) that no partnership would ever succeed. In fact, in my experience, very little in life is ever actually 50/50. The scale is always tilted one way or the other for one reason or another. But the reality is none of us can be 100%, 100% is the time.

Maybe it stems from some version of pride. No one wants to admit that any aspect of their life isn’t exactly in perfect standing, let alone that almost every aspect is in fact, far from perfect standings and the person that you need to help you get the balance back in your life always seems to suddenly be on a different page, seemingly in an entirely different book.

Throw in a high enough potency of daily stressors, new responsibilities, to-do lists that never stop growing and little too much work without enough play, and things can start to feel larger than they appear. Challenges become harder than they should be and sometimes it becomes harder to remember that it should always be you and them against the world and never, ever against each other. Same goal, same dream, same team. We grow things, and we feed people. We sell salad blends and herbs in 2 local markets and we will be participating in a couple of local farmers markets in the upcoming spring and summer months. Our long term plan for Leafy Dreams In the upcoming years will make what we are doing right now seem like small potatoes! There is nothing negative in our life that should be big enough to get in between us, or our dreams. We are surrounded by beautiful things and amazing people, we have the very best support system in our family and friends, We literally have people cheering for us from all over, and I’m guessing a couple likely secretly hoping we fail. In between all of that, at the start and end of every day we have each other to quiet the outside noise. We have our partner to lean on and unwind with no matter how hard the rest of the day has been.

So why is it that a change of schedule or a few miscommunications can cause such a meaningless quiet between someone and their best friend. When we have everything going for us, just on the other side of our reach. When we really just have to keep hanging in there a little bit longer while we finish tying up loose ends until the balance finally falls back into place that seem to so easily make us momentarily forget all of the beautiful moments that led us to the place where we are today. The place where everything is just outside our reach, where we are so close it's infuriating… Somehow we forget everything that got us here, we give in, and take out the frustration we have on each other. People (myself very, very much included) are really rather frustrating, we see things outside of our own peripheral so clearly yet everything directly in front of us with blind eyes.

How did we get to this place anyway?

The short story is simple. Corporate burnout, desperation for a new path in life, and a single hydroponic tower that Nick for me for Christmas of ‘22. We both worked for a face paced semi-casual restaurant in Omaha, NE prior to moving back to Iowa. We worked insane hours, catered to people 24/7 and spent our days managing and pleasing people, a combination of the ultimate “ick”! It was a mind numbing rotation of of the same day over and over, one of the few benefits, when it was all said and done was that when we left, we left together. Something that the universe had everything to do with and in many ways could have just as easily never happened. Nick and I first met some eight to ten years ago while I was bartending and he was my bar manager. We were both on very different paths at that time, honestly it feels like another life ago. Life happened, fates played their courses and we met yet again, at the same restaurant where we met all those years ago except this time, he was the general manager and I was the number two.

What started as a hobby while I was on an extended medical leave due to continuous complications with a kidney transplant and a love of cooking with fresh produce and herbs turned into a mutual passion for tending to our plants and growing sustainable, chemical free produce. The more time we spent growing the more it turned into something we really wanted to do. Realistically this seems like a pretty reasonable path for me. I grew up around big gardens, and I come from a line of Farmers. Still, had you told either one of us four or five years ago that this is where life would take us, and take us here together, we both would have laughed at you.

I have had a personal struggle with sourcing fresh produce, especially in Iowa winters that were high quality and without so many of the chemicals and pesticides used today. My diet has relied on the need for fresh produce year round for over a decade. When I was in my early 20’s I learned that (for no reasonable reason) that my kidneys were failing. When I was diagnosed I was already at stage 4 and over 75% of my kidneys were already scar tissue, there was no coming back from the diagnosis without an inevitable transplant and/or dialysis. For me it was both. I maintained my native kidneys for 12 years before they finally gave out on me, unfortunately they went out fighting, leaving me with three heart conditions that would have to be addressed before I would even be considered for the transplant list. Barely into my 30s and staring down the barrel of four illnesses, all of which in their own special way are deadly. I had more than one doctor tell me they had no idea how I was still standing, let alone working the 50+ hours I was working managing a fast paced semi-casual restaurant. I still don’t think I really knew just how sick I was at some points of my journey, but looking back, seeing pictures and remembering the nights I would get home from work so tired I couldn’t even make it into the door of my building without sitting down to catch my breath, It’s certainly not a time I will ever forget, and it will always be what keeps me on track to never feel that way again.

Nick (thankfully) missed a large portion of when my illness was really bad. But he was at least a distant witness to the tole dialysis took on me and day to day struggles I dealt with in the days leading up to and several months after my transplant. We became close friends a little while after starting to work together but early on that truly is all that it was. We both needed a friend, we were both struggling a bit in general and we both needed someone to help us smile a little more. Nick and I’s relationship grew very slowly and to this day neither one of us really knows when we were officially “together” or how long we’ve actually been together for that matter. We were just friends, and then we were more than friends, and then we moved back to Iowa together, opened a business together, and are building our lives together. We never even talked about introducing one another to our families… we were ratted out, to both sides, by others. I was randomly invited to dinner and an interrogation at his parents house via text reading “you’ve been cordially invited to dinner” with an address attached to it…So to return the favor a couple weeks later I informed him we were taking the weekend and spending it at my parents farm in SE Warren county in Iowa. Only seemed fair. All kidding aside, we have an amazing family. We were both welcomed into the others family with open arms and life just wouldn’t be as good without them. We are very well loved. We have a very good love.

These are the things I try to remind myself of when the weeks are just a little too long and my patience is running just a little too thin. Sometimes the right answers ARE the most simple. It’s more than just luck that you find someone that just says what they mean, and does what they say, it isn’t coincidence that your “someone” accepts all parts of you and loves all of the parts of you in spite of what your or my thoughts are on the matter. Life should be spent with the people who make you smile more, believe in yourself more, and just enjoy moments a little bit more. So when all of that is sitting beside you, with a cute butt and a handsome face, are these fights even worth it?

Like I said, sometimes the answers are the most simple options.

I wish I knew why we fight when everything is so good. We have times when everything really is about as perfect as it could possibly be. Everything is in sync and every day is full of laughter and pur uninhibited joy and with the smallest thing, it can seem like you’ve run out of ways to stop the argument and they may go on forever. But here we are; human. With that, faulting in so many ways. Working every day, trying to remember that we truly are never actually at odds with one another but rather, just chasing the same dream from two different perspectives, both trying to do our very best for the other.

So cheers to another week of growing, chasing dreams and loving a little harder than the weeks before. May we all remember to just be NICE to one another.