Our Story

We are Taya Schulte and Seamus Fitzgerald, two plant nerds that had started our work in agriculture long before we met each other in 2015. Both of us had been running our own market farms on rented land, living a little too “rustically” or commuting too far each day to take care of our crops. Minneapolis was home base for both of us and after juggling so much with trying to pull our farming careers together moving our farm to vacant lots in the city wasn’t a bad idea! We wanted to farm near our family and community so badly that we set to work turning two formerly vacant parking lots into Growing Lots Urban Farm. For seven summers we poured our hearts into building up a foot of soil by trucking in municipal compost as well as making our own compost out of any organic material we could find around the city. We hauled in materials like beer mash from local breweries, wood chips from arborists, coffee chaff from java roasters, fruits and vegetables that went bad in organic food warehouses, anything that we could get by the heaping truck load! Surprisingly our makeshift 1/3 acre of a parking lot was enough to get our farming business off the ground! We grew to serve a 75 member CSA, sold at multiple farmers markets, and even wholesaled to some local restaurants.

However in the fall of 2022 the leases on our lots ran up and could not be renewed as they were being developed. When we put away our farming tools that fall we had no idea whether or not we would continue our farming careers the following season. Through the wide network of our farming community we heard about a farm being sold out in Wheeler, WI. An hour and half from the city, but close to some other small scale farmers who we have looked up to for many years. So we finally took the leap and bought our own (hopefully forever) farm. 2023 was our inaugural season here on the farm in Wisconsin, it was all the chaos of moving and breaking into new land that you could imagine! Farming has always been a special blend of exhausting and exhilarating, so we are up for the challenge of making this new farm our home! Which brings us to 2024, still pondering a new name for our farm…we have ironically out grown the name “Growing Lots,” but our new name has yet to reveal itself. All that aside, we are eager to continue growing delicious produce for our ever expanding community.