Sex.

Kicks cheeks.

Yeah, I know it's morning and I have some goodies for you.

There you go.

If I had to put it any way at all, I would say my passion.

My gift is helping people connect to their food and it's through heritage.

So when I designed Urbana Farmstead, I wanted to incorporate all aspects from the planting to the harvesting to the distribution.

That's what you have here.

So urban Farm that has the farm and then the market and then also the kitchen.

It's all part of 1 farmstead which is really important because if you're at home and it's a homestead, that's what you would be doing.

When I plant something I have in mind, what am I going to do with it afterwards and I try to do 40 to 50% of everything I grow that I actually sell inside the market.

The whole property is 1 acre, but we're actually only farming on less than 1/4.

We have a pretty good high yield because we're using the space wisely.

We do everything vertical so vertical gardening is where you plant in the ground.

Or in our case we're using 5 gallon buckets and some of our.

Running and you remove the leaves going up the stem, which forces and causes that plant to grow up, and then you stabilize it with a string and so you have really less ground you're using, but also it keeps away the bugs.

It helps you for watering, so there's a lot of really good reasons why you wanna do vertical farming.

I think it's important for all of us to know you know again, more about our own self and how do we feed not just our bodies, but our souls.

So this is part of what I'm doing here.

I'm feeding my body, but I'm also feeding my soul and I try to share that there's so many people come to my market and they'll walk around my farm and they'll say, wow, I wish I could do this and I'm like you can.

You can have an entire herb garden in one little pot.

You can have a tomato.

You can have a cucumber.

You can grow things if you want to in your apartment on your balcony, you know on a patio that's very possible to do that.

Economically, is really important for people to grow their own food.

Second of all, there's just nothing from a taste perspective.

A tomato in a garden that you pick off that vine tastes like a tomato smells like a tomato, and of course, looks like a tomato.

Some of the things you buy in a grocery store, they've had to pick them so green that they don't smell or taste like whatever they were supposed to be.

So here on the property, you can buy it fresh.

You can buy it already canned, which I do.

For you, or you can come and learn how to can yourself in my canning club.

If you want you can come and learn how to cook it into a Parmesan or whatever because I have cooking classes as well.

In addition, I'm trying to teach people value ad which is the preservation piece of it.

So I take things in so the cucumbers an example and I take it in and I preserve it by making Pickles.

But I also make relish.

But I also use that so I can add that to other things and.

Get chutney so you can use those things by creating multiple things out of that one cucumber.

It all roots back to Italy.

Both my mom and my dad's family are from Italy, Sicily, and the Naples, and then they eventually moved to the South part of LA where I actually grew up.

We lived in an urban community with a very small house and they ripped out the the lawns and they planted in this urban house our garden.

So we lived like this.

We live sustainably, everybody did something.

You know you always learned how to plant and of course, harvest.

And you learn how to pluck a chicken so you could have the chicken.

We raise rabbits for food.

We absolutely did those things, and I learned a lot of it from that.

But then the real training came in when I went and lived abroad.

I went to Italy and the southern part of Spain for 18 months, and I lived with families, and I did this farm away program where I was working in the field for six hours.

And then I worked in the kitchen for six hours.

And that's where I really learned the technique because.

I learned some things as a child, but this is where it really came into practice.

I decided I wanted to go back to Italy and to discover more about my roots.

It was really great to be able to see myself and to, you know, look at things that were happening in my life and to say this makes sense.

Now I jump from the farming world of, you know, just trying to live as a poor family.

And then I went off and got my education and I went into high tech even when I was doing that job I was always looking for an opportunity to go and take cooking classes and learn other new cuisines.

During 911 there were a lot of major things that happened to the world and me personally as well.

I had a ticket in my possession where I was supposed to be on the plane that took themselves down and I decided at the very last minute that to not go on that trip I was saying what what would life look like now?

What should it look like?

What does it need to be to fill my soul?

One of my friends said, why don't you go check out Arkansas?

It's exactly what you're looking for, so I took a car and I actually went through the Boston Mountains and the Ozarks, and I spent a weekend and I fell in love.

I said this is exactly where I want to be.

I felt like, hey, I can do this because I've learned the techniques while I was in Italy and I lived the experience of doing urban farming as a child and that's what Urbana Farmstead is.

Urbana for urban and then farmstead.

Is a place where you can grow everything you need to live sustainably.

That's where I'm at in my life is to give back show people how to use this wonderful produce that they can grow in their yard or that I'm growing either one and, you know, just change their lives a little bit.