Jul 10, 2026 · 45 min · 13 segments
Shane and his wife started with two 8×12 plots as a hobby. Nine years later they own a 50-acre property in Sarnia, Ontario, market garden on 2.5 acres, and crossed $200,000 in revenue last year — up…
One thing that I found interesting about your story is you started really small scale and I'm in that Curtis stone type model.
That's a great question.
How did we go from so small to something so significant? I think what kind of started as a hobby just really continued to grow for us.
My wife and I, from the moment we were married, our hands were in the soil.
We were always growing things.
And that was just from two like eight by 12 foot plots to suddenly when we moved to the space that we could have it, we were right away into about a quarter acre of growing food.
And so I think that was the first time that we said to ourselves, could we actually see ourselves doing this? So when I made the decision to step away from that desk job, I really had no idea what I was doing.
I had tried all these different crops and largely had success with all of them.
But that was because when we were living at the Eagle Village, there would be three other farmers running their own farms out in the fields with us, these hobbyist gardeners who were going out and growing sweet corn, but only one row.
Is it fair to say it was just a hobby then? It was...
Yeah, it started most definitely as a hobby.
But I think as you catch the bug for growing food, you quickly discover that you can grow a lot of food without much space.
In fact, you often grow too much food and you end up giving it away, especially when you're in that hobby stage.
what evolved from there is as that family left, they said to us they had a market garden set up.
a small business and they said, Hey, we have a greenhouse.
We want to sell you our infrastructure.
We have a cooler, we have the bins, we have the knives, we have all this stuff to do a market garden.
And I, a quarter acre garden is the real thing to manage, but like at that point we had never done like a crop plan and we had never done a plan for growing enough food to then sell commercially.
And but given that unique opportunity to buy the infrastructure and basically set into fields and greenhouses and coolers that were set up was a I, we thought a really good opportunity.
And so we jumped both feet
When you bought that other farm, that was the transition into the business of market gardening.
One thing that I found interesting about your story is you started really small scale and I'm in that Curtis stone type model.
That's a great question.
How did we go from so small to something so significant? I think what kind of started as a hobby just really continued to grow for us.
My wife and I, from the moment we were married, our hands were in the soil.
We were always growing things.
And that was just from two like eight by 12 foot plots to suddenly when we moved to the space that we could have it, we were right away into about a quarter acre of growing food.
And so I think that was the first time that we said to ourselves, could we actually see ourselves doing this? So when I made the decision to step away from that desk job, I really had no idea what I was doing.
I had tried all these different crops and largely had success with all of them.
But that was because when we were living at the Eagle Village, there would be three other farmers running their own farms out in the fields with us, these hobbyist gardeners who were going out and growing sweet corn, but only one row.
Is it fair to say it was just a hobby then? It was...
Yeah, it started most definitely as a hobby.
But I think as you catch the bug for growing food, you quickly discover that you can grow a lot of food without much space.
In fact, you often grow too much food and you end up giving it away, especially when you're in that hobby stage.
what evolved from there is as that family left, they said to us they had a market garden set up.
a small business and they said, Hey, we have a greenhouse.
We want to sell you our infrastructure.
We have a cooler, we have the bins, we have the knives, we have all this stuff to do a market garden.
And I, a quarter acre garden is the real thing to manage, but like at that point we had never done like a crop plan and we had never done a plan for growing enough food to then sell commercially.
And but given that unique opportunity to buy the infrastructure and basically set into fields and greenhouses and coolers that were set up was a I, we thought a really good opportunity.
And so we jumped both feet
When you bought that other farm, that was the transition into the business of market gardening.
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