Family Owned with Attention to Detail …
Our story
As a family run farm, Mike and Janice have been fine tuning their vegetable gardens since purchasing their first family home and garden in 1998.
Mike grew up on a dairy farm in Spearfish, South Dakota where he learned how to grow, harvest, and sell vegetables with his parents starting at the age of 6. After 30 years working at IBM in Rochester, MN, he decided to go back to his roots and spend much of his day tending to his garden. Soon he realized he wanted to be able to share his passion with customers who would enjoy the bounty.
Janice's passion for garlic came much later in life and grew from her love of garlic and realization that home-grown garlic delivers a profoundly different taste experience while also containing healthy benefits. After a few years of cultivating her crops, she's now up to almost 2000 garlic plants. The crops have also extended to shallot bulbs since they have the same growing and harvesting conditions.
In 2017, Mike and Janice decided to purchase dedicated land and Four Cats Farm was established. Four Cats Farm is located in NE Rochester in a prime location near 48th Street NE and Broadway. The grounds have been previously home to horses and are free from pesticides for as many years as we are aware: the soil is pristine! We know it's good soil because it is home to many worms and weeds grow as well as the vegetables.
Thank you for joining us on this adventure.
What matters
Healthy Pesticide free vegetables without preservatives and whatever else gets added by big commercial companies.
Earth Friendly Vegetables shouldn't need to travel more than 10 miles from ground to your kitchen.
Fresh We want vegetables to go from the plant to your hands within hours. We don't have a facility to store a lot of vegetables for long periods of time and we're good with that!
Community We love visiting and getting to know our customers and neighbors. We also love working with volunteers and occasionally helping younger gardens learn the importance of growing your own produce.
Little Things that Matter As a general rule, we present clean, nice looking vegetables. But Mother Nature isn't perfect and we believe taste and health is what matters. When you visit our farm, you'll see weeds. But you'll also see bees and worms and rabbits and deer and sometimes, unfortunately, raccoons and woodchucks who partake in the vegetables. When you get our produce, you might see imperfections, but you won't think twice when you taste it! We believe in being up front and honest and selling at a fair price to encourage everyone to eat healthy and eat local.
Four cats?
We are often asked about our farm name. When we started the farm, we had four cats: Missy, Tigger, Whitty, and Garage Kitty. Missy and Tigger went over the rainbow bridge shortly after but Whitty and Tigger still oversee the seedlings at our home. Who knows? Maybe we will end up with many more cats in the future.