Veggies by Vonne

Vonne Whittleton designs backyard vegetable gardens for a living. But what she really hopes to do is lead her clients down a path toward a different way of life. 

Whittleton, who once worked in mortgage-backed securities at Bear Stearns, was an at-home mom two years ago when she went to a symposium in town about the farm bill and government subsidies. At the same time, she was reading Michael Pollan and Barbara Kingsolver's book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.  All of this thinking about food and where it comes from led to some soul-searching and she decided her future lay in dirt, seeds, and home-grown, organic produce. Later that year, she hung out a shingle and began a small business designing gardens for families and restaurants in Fairfield county.

The career change wasn't quite as out of the blue as it seems. A native of Fort Worth, Texas, her family has been in the rice farming business in Arkansas for 100 years. Whittleton had spend her childhood riding tractors and learning about gardening alongside her grandmother.

Now she's working on a  slightly smaller scale.

"Backyard gardening is a little bit trendy right now," said Whittleton. "It might be the cool thing to do for some people. Others are really concerned about where their food comes from." Overall, she's found people around town to be open to the idea and willing to get their hands dirty -- although she admits that one client went through the trouble of establishing a garden but lost interest. "This one woman has great soil and great plants. Vegetables are growing, but she doesn't pick them!"

Whittleton's services are so full-spectrum and flexible, she's even willing to make house calls to weed and prune – or pick those ripening tomatoes for her more, well,  indoorsy clients.

More frequently, though, Whittleton works with a homeowner to select a site for a new garden. She'll put up a fenced perimeter and construct several raised beds inside. Often, she'll put down gravel paths for easy navigation. Prime mulch and topsoil are delivered to fill the new beds, and then Whittleton plants all the organic fruits and vegetables herself according to custom plan. The process takes just two days and can be done almost any time of the year – except January and February.

And she does more than just plants. Whittleton is an advocate of the "homesteading" philosophy. The idea is all about self-sufficiency: Grow your own food to feed your family and your animals. The animals (like chickens) then provide fertilizer for the plants, aerate the lawn and eat pests like ticks. Composting makes use of scraps to nourish the next season of crops. It's a closed loop system where people don't have to rely on a supermarket. "People have lost the ability to sustain themselves," she said. "And we might really need it. Our grocery stores only have enough food to feed a community for three days."

Whittleton walks the homesteading walk herself, composting all of her family's scraps and raising hens, which provide them with four eggs daily. Her gardening isn't contained to a single patch, either. She's planted herbs, fruits and vegetables everywhere she can -- yanking out flower beds and lining her front walkway with strawberries instead of petunias. Every available patch of dirt is planted with arugula, carrots, tomatoes, figs, spinach, peas, lettuce, kale and potatoes. In her front yard, she also keeps a bee-hive. Bees are essential, she says, for fertilizing many fruit and vegetable plants. Having lots of bees on her ½ acre property insures she'll harvest much bigger crops.

Plus, there's the added bonus of the honey.

Whittleton is honored that one of her gardens will be featured in the Westport Historical Garden Tour on Sunday, June 13. It's one of six on the tour touted as a "green garden." It's exactly what she had in mind back when she first came up with the idea for her business. But she might be more proud of an even more modest achievement: her six-year-old son has since learned to love the kale she grows for him.