Edible Food Find: Wildly Rooted Culinary Garden
Photos by Michael Piazza
Nestled behind two barns on bucolic farmland in Essex, Hannah Lawson’s Wildly Rooted Culinary Garden has been operating for about a year and a half. She’s been farming, however, for 12 years. One of her first jobs involved creating a mobile trailer garden towed by a car. Noticing a disconnect between people and their food, she decided to learn more about farming and quickly fell in love with it.
Lawson later worked for the nonprofit organic farm Gaining Ground in Concord. Her manager at the time, Doug Wolcik, introduced her to a growing method (more on that below) that she found eye-opening and inspiring and that she practices today at Wildly Rooted. The biggest takeaway from the experience, Lawson notes, is that you don’t need to have a lot of land to grow fresh food.
After about four years with Gaining Ground, the North Shore–raised farmer felt the pull of the ocean. She moved closer to her own roots and began working at the Ipswich-based nonprofit Three Sisters Garden Project. Lawson continued learning about farming, eventually running their wholesale operations. While working with local restaurants she observed that there was a demand for microgreens, edible flowers and pick-your-own type crops. After a few years, Lawson left Three Sisters, found available farmland in nearby Essex and started growing there.
“I’ve always had a question within myself,” Lawson says. “I wondered if I could do this on my own. I think fear stopped me, that it’s just a dream that I can’t necessarily make a reality. Then the pandemic happened and it made me realize that life is short. I knew that if I didn’t try it, I’d always wonder. So, I decided to just go ahead. One way or another, then I’d know if it’s something I can do on my own.”
Lawson emphasizes that she has a specific method of farming and treating the land. She leaves as little soil as possible exposed and practices no-till farming so that “all the life within the soil stays in the soil.” In addition to a greenhouse brimming with 15 varieties of colorful and tasty microgreens, she currently has two field plots, each containing multiple crops. Field one is filled with edible flowers (including pansies, violas, bachelor buttons, calendula, nasturtium, marigold and yarrow), tomatillos, heirloom cherry tomatoes and cut flowers. Field two holds sugar snap peas, dandelion greens, shelling peas, various beans, husk cherries, marigolds and more cut flowers. Future plans include extending both fields, adding a third field and another structure to grow the microgreens.
Wildly Rooted mainly sells wholesale to an expanding number of North Shore restaurants, bakeries and specialty stores including Talise, Mayflour Bakery, Sandpiper Bakery, Pastaio via Corta, Settler, Kitchen Table, Source Bakery, iPazzi Steakhouse and Utopia Farm. Lawson also sells at Gloucester’s Backyard Growers’ farmers market and sold microgreen CSA shares during the shoulder growing season. The farm and restaurant chef community on the North Shore is very tight and supportive of locally grown food, Lawson emphasizes.
“I’m trying my hardest to care for the soil,” she says, “which in turn creates amazing crops. I never intend to have more than one acre of land. I intend to grow efficiently and intensively. You can grow so much food on an acre. After being introduced to that type of farming, I knew that I needed to grow that way for myself and my soul.
My goal is to care for land the best way I know how and to work with chefs who share local, thoughtfully grown food with the community. Along the way I try to educate people about what they’re eating and how it was grown. For me there should be no disconnect between environmental health and our health.”
This story appeared in the Fall 2024 issue.
