May 30, 2024
By Michele Miller
What’s What New Port Richey
Jim Kovalseki was in his element, standing in the shade of a Florida oak and holding court the way people do when they are ready to move on. He was a goner. Not in the worst sense, but rather how people come to accept when living in a state where transience is part of the landscape and the heart’s home is often somewhere else.
Over the waning winter planting season and Jim’s tenure as a resident of New Port Richey, regulars at the Tasty Tuesdays and Wright’s Farmers’ Markets where Jim was a seasonal vendor had been making it a point to stop by to say “so long.” Some were part of the co-op that unexpectedly took off with the pandemic, growing to about 70 members. Some were home gardeners who had picked Jim’s brain or sought him out after seeing YouTube videos featuring his farming practices.
“I Googled, ‘Florida Food Forest’ and I found him,” said Anne Barca of Holiday, a northern transplant who came by Wright’s on a Sunday morning with her dog, Ziggy to say one last goodbye and pick up a few things even though she was growing her own vegetables these days. “I’ve always been a gardener even in an apartment. I just had a good rookie season here.”
The last Saturday in April was also a time to offer well-wishes along with some tearful goodbyes at a celebratory send-off hosted at the Green Dreams Nursery in Spring Hill. It would be the last of many since Jim announced he was packing it in and moving to Maine to farm there and live with his family full-time.
He was going home.
But not before passing the torch first.
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To those who have wrestled with Florida’s sandy soil and tropical climate, Jim Kovaleski, 62, is a legend. A former landscaper from Minnesota who followed his brother’s business to Florida in 1982, came to work as an estate caretaker in Odessa and ended up embracing, studying, and fostering organic methods of growing food as a way to carve out a modest living and help feed his community.
“I had been doing the landscape wildlife gardens and people appreciated that, but when I started growing food out of that garden space it changed how I felt about it,” Jim said. “It became kind of a mission to produce my own food and sell it.”
He started with a plot in his front yard on the street where his mother lived. There on Virginia Ave he soon was sowing the yards of his neighbors as well as his own, developing what people came to call “The Garden District.”
The trend with his neighbors tapered off, but Jim continued to grow what became a showcase operation called Freedom House Farm on his and his mother’s adjacent property.
He was an early proponent of developing the city’s compost program. Each growing season he piled inches upon inches of the nutrient-rich material that had been broken down from yard waste collected in New Port Richey neighborhoods and encouraged others to do the same, always reminding them to drench it with water so the nutrients would seep down. He promoted the NPR Library’s seed lending program and was an anchor vendor at the library’s Tasty Tuesday’s Community Market from the start.
He was frequently tapped to be a guest speaker at local food fests, sharing his thoughts and expertise on organic urban gardening, following a philosophy to feed “his people” with food that hadn’t traveled far to get to their table and the knowledge of how to do that themselves.
“Most of my produce is sold within two blocks and I’m proud of that,” said Jim, whose vegetables have long held a spot in the produce section of Wright’s Natural Market and Cafe on Main Street and can be found complimenting restaurant menus at Estuary in New Port Richey, The Little Lamb Gastropub in Clearwater and the Crown and Bull in Dunedin.
People found their way to him. They came out to volunteer to pull sweet potato vines in the fall. Local newspapers published stories about New Port Richey’s “urban garden guru.”
PHOTO | MICHELE MILLER
Others discovered him on YouTube videos filmed at Freedom House Farm and in Maine where Jim farmed and tamed the lawn with a scythe in summer months. Those educational episodes were filmed and produced by a food forest landscaper named Pete Kanaris who expanded the direction of his Green Dreams business model after taking an impromptu tour of Freedom House Farm while working in the neighborhood.
“Those videos really blasted it out there,” Jim said. “I’ve had people drive up to my house visiting from California and Canada and tell me they just wanted to see the place.”
Those closer to home came to proudly claim him as their own.
“Few would doubt the importance of Jim’s work and his presence in supplying enormous quantities of seasonal vegetables to the community,” said Dell deChant, who serves as chair of the city’s Environmental Committee, oversees five local food fests as a member of the New Port Richey FarmNet Steering Committee and is a fierce advocate of a local Agragarean movement. “It is taken for granted now, but what is much less known and must be recognized and celebrated is that every aspect of this system would not have occurred without Jim’s pioneering work.”
“Jim has been a fixture in New Port Richey for as long as I can remember and he will be sorely missed,” said Lia Gallegos, of People Places, who worked with Jim during EcoFests of old. “He’s leaving behind a legacy that’s all about knowledge, self-reliance, and putting healthy food on our tables.”
- Jim Kovalski Returns from Maine with Mixed Emotions, YouTube video, January 2024
While others might rave about his white globe turnips, winter greens or golden beets – what he calls “the gateway beet,” Jim is loathe to eat what he grows unless someone else cooks it up for him.
“I’m an omnivore. I like to hunt and fish,” he says proudly.
But he’s eating more of his own vegetables these days.
Some years ago, during a summer farming stint, Jim had the good fortune to fall in love with a woman named Alexandra who he met while working an annual seedling sale in Maine.
“This young woman, with tattoos all over showed up with two boys. The next year she was looking for a scythe and a friend said, “Jim will teach you how to mow,” he said. “Slowly a romance started. Then we decided to have a baby. On the first try, she called me at Christmas and she said, “We’re having a baby.”
Yemaya Kovaleski came into this world in September 2018 outside of a teepee in the woods.
“She was born right there on the land,” Jim said.
The trips north became more frequent and the longing to be there more urgent. Aside from his extended stay over the summer months, Jim traveled back for holidays, to tap the Maples during sap season and to set up the greenhouse in anticipation of spring sowing. But it wasn’t enough.
“The kid’s growing up and I want to be there,” he said of his daughter who is now 5 years old. “I’m missing my girls.”
All the while he was working out a way to continue the New Port Richey operation – to put it in someone else’s worthy hands so it would be there for the local community – “his people” – even as he began letting go.
After his mother’s death, when her home was to be sold, he started a crowdfunding push that over time grew to $25,000 with the thought he might raise enough to buy the house himself and kickstart a community buy-in or draw the next owner who would promise to follow a similar farming practice on the land on the corner of Virginia Ave.
Remarkably he pulled it off.
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One after another fans and friends at the Green Dreams nursery strode up to extend a hand or share a hug, share a story, a gardening tip or ask for advice.
Many had benefited from Jim’s wisdom whether he knew them or not.
Jay Morton and Cameron Hill who made the drive from Zephyrhills in east Pasco County, first heard about Jim while listening to him give an interview on sustainable farming on Public Radio 88.5 – WMNF’s Morning Show.
“Thanks for all the information. It’s helped a lot,” said Cameron, who owns Remedy Alpaca Farm in San Antonio.
It was a humbling testament to the reach of an urban farmer’s wisdom that sprouted from composted earth at his New Port Richey urban farm to the 35 acres he was headed to work in down east Maine.
The following day Jim would board a plane, leaving the southernmost state to fly to his family and celebrate his wife’s birthday in northeastern Maine. It was a trip he has been making since shortly after he started urban farming in 2007, driving his “Big Red” pick-up on the long highway haul and sleeping at rest stops along the way.
“It’s definitely weird to be flying this time,” he said. “It’s my usual kind of going but different because I’m leaving everything behind.”
This time he would not be back like clockwork come fall to sell the northern crops and blueberry preserves he typically returned with as the selling season at Tasty Tuesdays started to ramp up again.
Now he was looking forward to a May Pole birthday celebration that was his wife’s and now his tradition and a promised fishing excursion with his daughter.
“I told her I’d take her fishing for land-locked salmon on Monday and you know kids once they get something in their head so that’s all she’s been talking about,” he said. “I’m more than ready to get there.”
A few possessions, like the old bike he rode from Crystal Beach to Alaska via Baja California, Mexico when he was a younger man and got him around town in later days, would be ferried up over the summer.
But everything else – the two houses on Virginia Ave that had been home for him and his mom, the land surrounding them that is now called Theo’s Harvest, and the signature truck that let people know he was set up at the market- would be in the hands of 29-year-old Tanner Kauffman, an apprentice of sorts and farmer in his own right with a young family and a kindred philosophy who happenstanced his way into taking the reins.
“He’s pretty much buying my life here,” Jim said with a wry grin. “The fact is I’m leaving, but we’re both starting a path we haven’t gone down before. But this place in Maine is very similar to where I grew up. It feels like I’m coming back to my roots.”
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Tanner Kauffman was looking to get serious about life. He grew up in Boca Raton, a self-described “urbanite” – a city kid with a penchant for music, skateboarding and graffiti tagging who moved to New York City for a time and who for most of his adult working life, got by as a gig worker.
He had moved back to Florida and was working a stint at Zenn Naturals a farm his brother started in 2017 in Groveland, Florida when he decided to strike out on his own.
“I thought that farming seemed like the most wholesome way to serve the world and be good to the ground,” said Tanner who returned to Boca in 2020 to work a portion of a friend’s land.
He had been networking with small farmers across Florida when he took an online class featuring Jim called, The Grass-Fed Market Garden. He started with Jim’s signature cool season crops – snow apple turnips, salad mix, cauliflower and green garlic.
“It was a huge learning curve,” Tanner said. “I wish I had just started working on a farm that was already thriving. It went well, though and I learned a lot.”
During that time, just before the growing season, he met and ended up falling in love with a woman named Ana with a child of her own who was soon calling him, “Papa.”
“I knew she was special and I was living in a van at the farm site and searching for more permanence. I needed a place to put down roots and that is how this thing with Jim started,” said Tanner who made multiple trips to see Jim in New Port Richey and Maine.
The two urban farmers realized a commonality despite their age difference. They had read many of the same books such as Living the Good Life, by Scott and Helen Neary and Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered, by British economist E. F. Schumacher. Studied the the work of Elliot Coleman an American farmer from Maine and early proponent of organic gardening and author of The New Organic Grower. Like Jim in his youth, Tanner had embarked on an extensive bicycle trip – trekking from Boca Raton to New York City and writing a book on his travels titled, Goin’ Nowhere Fast. At one time they both sought out times of solitude. Tanner spent time reflecting and working alongside a monk who gardened in a Buddhist monastery in the Cat Skills in New York. Jim spent two harsh winters in his youth living in a teepee in Wisconsin and reading Thoreau.
So when Tanner called Jim to tell him he was considering putting the money he had saved up on five acres of land in Okeechobee, he felt comfortable enough to advise his young friend to take a minute.
“Jim suggested I take a break – a refresh – before making any decisions – and come up to Maine with the family,” Tanner said.
They were there a couple of days when Jim’s wife, Alexandra, came up with a proposal that was simple and brilliant all at once.
“You want to sell your farm and he wants to buy a farm,” she told her husband. “This might be the guy.”
“Alexandra planted the seed and we picked up our lives and moved into Jim’s house,” Tanner said. “We didn’t sign anything. Jim said, “Let’s do a trial season and see how it works out.”
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“We’re both busy. I don’t know how I was doing this myself,” Jim said one morning on the farm in April as he was stringing Early Girl tomatoes and Tanner was planting okra starts. “It’s been good. We’ve had three $3,000 weeks so far.”
“I’ve had other people work for me and it’s really hard for me to delegate, but for some reason, Tanner and I hit off,” he said. “It’s been a really simple transition.”
Especially since Jim was able to spend more time in Maine with Tanner working the New Port Richey farm.
The transfer of property was more complicated and has been taken in steps. They started working out the terms of the sale in February of 2023. Tanner first purchased Jim’s home by securing a bank mortgage and Jim owner-financed Tanner’s purchase – less the $25,000 crowdfunding – of his late mother’s home in late April of 2024.
Tanner has transitioned into his role, making his imprint while settling in with his wife, Ana and their family – which now includes their 8-month-old daughter, Salome in addition to Soleya, 4, and a black and white tuxedo cat named Junebug.
Photo | Michele Miller
To lengthen and make the winter/spring growing season more profitable, Tanner nixed Jim’s practice of razing it all come spring and planting sweet potato starts that would grow on their own over the summer while he was in Maine.
“Jim’s CSA season was only about 17 weeks. I’ll be operating for 36 weeks,” Tanner explained. “Doubling the season doesn’t give me the time to do a full sweet potato cover crop and now we’re doing tomatoes which there’s still a learning curve to.”
Tanner also extended the farm plot beyond the front wall of the property and expanded the backyard food forest, which now features a sandbox, toys and a brightly painted bench and is flush with Mulberries, bananas, papaya, pomegranate, sugarcane and loquat.
Water was also on tap. Jim had been perfectly content to water by hand. Tanner not so much.
“I can’t wait to have irrigation,” Tanner said, hosing the okra seedlings down that April morning as Jim quipped back that he, on the other hand, “loved growing with the hand watering.”
And while Jim was a cash-only business with a “Just take what you need and catch me next time,” easy response for those who pulled out their plastic, Tanner began accepting credit cards. Tanner is also getting a little stricter with the terms for co-op members who Jim always offered an opt-out. Members must now commit to a 6 or 12-month buy which is a standard CSA business practice when you are guaranteeing people a limited slot. (For more on the CSA subscription link to Theo’s Harvest)
“I have a family and two mortgages to pay now,” Tanner said, “These are things I have to do – changes I have to make to support my family.”
Tanner has also secured additional rental income from the house next door which is now the site of the Ahava Microschool a nature school where the garden will be part of the curriculum and where his daughters will go to school.
“He’s doing things I never thought of doing,” said Jim, adding that in years to come, “People will be saying, “I knew Tanner when…..”
It’s a fair prediction.
“It’s been really easy to come into this place that Jim started,” Tanner said. “I’ve been embraced by the community who really wanted to keep this farm going. We really love it here. We love the small-town feel.”
The fact that the farm continues under Tanner’s stead is good news to James Renew, who happened upon Tanner and Jim at the market and began using their produce at his restaurants, Estuary and The Little Lamb.
“I love the product and I think it’s super important to source locally. We’re sourcing from about 1/4 a mile away with Estuary which is just incredible,” he said. “I’m paying them and that money is staying in the community. It’s a win-win all around. And at the end of the day, the produce is better than I can get from any of my other vendors. I get produce that’s picked that day.”
CSA customer Rachel Newell who was delighted to discover that Jim the “farmer dude” she had seen on YouTube lived down the street on Virginia Ave after she moved in, said she is also grateful that the neighborhood farming operation continues.
“You get to literally know where your produce comes from. It’s more flavorful when it’s just been picked that day,” she said while stopping by Theo’s Harvest on a recent afternoon to retrieve her share of Swiss chard, eggplant, carrots, tomatoes and microgreens. “Besides that, I love the conversations I get to have when I come here. The people I see out and about and the connections I’m making and the produce I’m getting that I’ve never had before.”
Those connections will likely grow as Theo’s Harvest edges the door open a little more to the community.
After Jim’s departure, Tanner closed out the season with a Deep Mulch Workshop attended by 22 people who were treated to an impromptu Farm to Table meal.
“There were so many courses,” Ana said. “The food was so good.”
Chris Falzon, executive chef and owner of the Crown and Bull Restaurant said he plans to be a part of those Farm to Table dinners in the future and to continue working his menu around produce he purchases at Theo’s Harvest.
“I try to manipulate the product as little as possible and the quality of his produce is superior to any other local grower I’ve worked with,” he said. “The best part is that I can shake Tanner’s hand, and meet his wife and his kids. It’s community-based. I tell him how much I need. He harvests it that day and gets it to me. The customers see the produce getting dropped off by Tanner, not delivered in boxes on a big Cisco truck. They love it.”
So it seems there is more to come since the torch has been passed. More planting space, too, as the last bit of grass on the property gives way to piles of composted mulch.
In the meantime, as summer heats up and harvesting wanes in these parts, there’s perhaps a little time for rest, regeneration and reflection on the two paths that merged for a time to veer off in new directions.
“Jim gave me this extremely good opportunity that is so great,” Tanner said as he surveyed the property around him. “The dude changed my life completely. My life is chock-full but very good. I’ve never been so busy in my life but things are so good.”
“This is how life should be.”
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Local News Articles
- Urban Farming Takes Root in New Port Richey Front Yards, Tampa Bay Times, March 2017
- Every Tuesday is organic market day at New Port Richey Public Library, Tampa Bay Times, June 2015.
- Living Off the Lawn, Tampa Bay Times, December, 2009
