Lisa Sherman is 26 years old, and has been working for Tega Hills Farm for three years. Her duties at the farm include product weighing, packaging, and lettuce harvesting. She learned to love farming from spending time at her grandmother’s house in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania in her youth, and plans to pursue a degree in horticulture from Clemson at a later date. Topics in this interview include her experiences with both conventional and hydroponic farming, learning experiences taken from her work at Tega Hills Farm, and her long term goal of opening up her own nursery.
Tape Log
| Time | Description |
| 0:00:10 | Introduction, Interviewer |
| 0:00:38 | Introduction, Lisa Sherman |
| 0:01:22 | Learning of her love of farming at Granny’s house in Pittsburg, PA |
| 0:03:04 | Lisa’s personal garden and personal experience gardening |
| 0:08:19 | Coming to Fort Mill, SC as a broke college student and looking for work |
| 0:11:31 | Finding Tega Hills Farm |
| 0:14:47 | Lisa’s work at the farm with lettuce harvesting, transferring, and packing |
| 0:19:37 | Learning farming techniques from experience; likes and dislikes |
| 0:24:40 | Wanting to run her own nursery |
| 0:28:07 | Final thoughts on hard work and loving her job and the people she interacts with |
Transcript
[00:00:10]
>> MG: This is Mike Gregory, graduate student, UNC Charlotte, public history. I am here talking today with Lisa.
>> LS: Yes.
>> MG: Lisa, okay, with Tega Hills Farm.
>> MG: Honestly, I know very little about you, so I’m gonna just open this up to let you introduce yourself. And then we’ll get down the road to talking about your employment here at Tega Hills Farm.
[00:00:35]
So tell me about you, tell me your name and where you’re from.
>> LS: My name is Lisa, I am originally from Jacksonville, Florida. We moved up to Pittsburgh in my junior year of high school, and that’s where I got into gardening. My growing up in Florida, gardening was not something that I, farming’s not something that I ever considered as a career.
[00:01:01]
Working outside back then meant going around and cleaning up the debris that dad had left after trimming stuff around the yard. And it just wasn’t fun pulling up weeds that, its impossible to get out without burning the whole thing and starting fresh. But in Pittsburgh we were at my granny’s house one year, one summer.
[00:01:27]
And she has this beautiful garden, she’s always kept a huge garden. And on the drive home, back up to Pittsburgh, I sort of remember talking to my mom and asking her if we could start a garden.
>> LS: Were we able to start a garden? Cuz we weren’t vegetable garden people, we had flowers and things, but not actual food crops.
[00:01:51]
So we talked about what we liked to eat. And then I just researched on my phone what kind of light do they need, what kind of soil do they need? Can I actually grow this or not? And I started my first little garden up there. And then a couple years later we moved down here to South Carolina, and I’ve been slowly building my garden ever since.
[00:02:14]
>> MG: So how old were you when you had this revelation at your granny’s house?
>> LS: About 20 years old, so I’m 26 now. And I went from just enjoying growing flowers to having a little hobby garden, to now I have this 30 by 60 foot space. And I want to have either a farm or a nursery or something of my own one day.
[00:02:37]
Slowly working towards that now.
>> MG: So you’re working toward it yourself now?
>> LS: Yes, yes.
>> MG: What type of plants and vegetables or fruit did you start growing in your garden?
>> LS: The first garden I had, I had corn, peppers, some sunflowers, and some lettuce. And I think I tried broccoli, but I started it too late in the season, and the heat killed them.
[00:03:08]
Because it was fun, we did not get much out of that garden. Did not have a fence around it, and there were plentiful deer where we were in Pittsburgh. So they pretty much mowed down the pepper plants, and we did not get any corn either. The night before we went out to harvest the corn, this groundhog came through.
[00:03:26]
In the morning it looked like a tornado had hit the corn patch. And it had just pulled down every ear of corn off of the stalks. And taken about three bites out of every ear, and then moved on to the next one.
>> MG: And this was in Pittsburgh?
[00:03:37]
>> LS: It was, yes.
>> MG: So you didn’t get much out of the garden, but the groundhogs and the deer had a buffet.
>> LS: Yes, yeah.
>> MG: I’m sure they enjoyed it. [LAUGH] So when you started your garden, was it a big learning experience for you, or did you find it came quite natural to you?
[00:03:57]
>> LS: I really love to research, so I researched the heck out of that, and we,
>> LS: Actually, it did come pretty naturally to me.
>> LS: Maybe?
>> MG: How did you research that?
>> LS: I’ve actually-
>> MG: Yeah.
>> LS: I always research very thoroughly, I guess gardening has come naturally to me, yeah.
[00:04:25]
I didn’t always have a green thumb, but I never had a black thumb.
>> MG: [LAUGH]
>> LS: I started out with a simple little petunia plant. And all I had to really do is deadhead that, water it, keep it in some sun. And I bought a half-dead petunia from a garden center.
[00:04:43]
And it was very dry, and it was very sad looking, I stuck it in a big pot, I watered it, I fertilized it just a little bit, cut it back. And then that thing flourished. And we had this great corner window in our house that faced east and south on the sides.
[00:05:01]
So it just got sun all winter long, and that thing was inside flowering in February. It’s a gorgeous plant. So I said okay, well, I started with the easiest thing possible, what else can I do? I just went from there.
>> MG: What type of crops did you grandma grow?
[00:05:23]
>> LS: Lots of tomatoes, lots of cucumbers. She never pruned back any of her stuff, so it just went everywhere. She had onions, she had garlic, she had a lot of eggplant. Did I say peppers already? She had those, too. Just the main, that kinda stuff that everyone has in the summer.
[00:05:46]
She didn’t have any any special, rare kinda crops in there. Just a very Southern gardner kind of lady, I think. In my garden, I like having the herbs, and I like mixing the flowers in. And I tried the potatoes, and I’ve tried a little bit of everything to see what I can do.
[00:06:09]
And I’ve narrowed it down the things that I love. I try to stay away from the cucumbers and squash and the peppers that everyone always has so much of in the summer.
>> MG: Yeah.
>> LS: Cuz I can find those anywhere.
>> MG: Yeah, my maternal grandmother and grandfather, they had a garden as well.
[00:06:26]
Huge, it was about an acre. Always had your standard Southern fare, which was collards, lettuce, tomatoes.
>> LS: We had collards too, yes.
>> MG: I think they had cucumbers occasionally, potatoes were another big one, so we’d have green beans.
>> LS: I never had any luck with potatoes.
>> LS: They look fine above the soil, and you pull them up, and they have the black rot all through them, and I don’t know how to stop that.
[00:06:55]
>> MG: I don’t either, my father had the same problem. He tried it with smaller garden, never could get it. Corn was never a problem, potatoes, terrible.
>> LS: My dad tries to make me grow corn for him every year. And it always gets the corn ear worms, so I’m devoting again about a quarter of the garden to corn this year.
[00:07:16]
And I’m not gonna get anything off those plants. But I do the fertilizing and I do the side dressing throughout the season. It’s a small little plot, so I’m out there hand-pollinating those ears, but every year. And I’m not one to spray stuff with pesticides, so this year I’m trying to go all natural to see if that can work for me.
[00:07:44]
>> MG: Well, I hope it does. Seems like a lot of farming, what I was trying to get away from was heavy pesticides, it’s probably [INAUDIBLE]. So you have had quite the journey, you went from Jacksonville, Florida to Pittsburgh, is that right?
>> LS: Yes.
>> MG: And now you’re here in Fort Mill, South Carolina, that’s quite the slingshot.
[00:08:04]
So Tell me a little bit about what brought you here to, you had family in Pittsburgh [INAUDIBLE].
>> LS: Yeah.
>> MG: And so that must have brought you there, but what brought you from Pittsburgh to Fort Mill, South Carolina?
>> LS: I was a broke college kid.
>> MG: Okay.
>> LS: I had absolutely no money, still living at home, and my grandparents’ house was declining slowly.
[00:08:29]
So mom and dad wanted me to be closer. My dad’s family is in Florida, my mom’s family is down in Georgia, so it’s about a seven hour drive from here to other side of grandparents.
>> LS: So I lived with my mom and dad for a while here, and I [INAUDIBLE] moved out, but my garden is still in their backyard.
[00:08:49]
>> MG: You said you were a broke college kid, what were you studying?
>> LS: I could not make up my mind for a long time [LAUGH]. I knew that I liked to garden then, but I didn’t know that I wanted to do it for a career, for a living.
[00:09:12]
So at first I thought that I wanted to do, at first I was going towards animal science, and I wanted to do stuff with horses. So I did some chiropractic stuff early on and I really loved that. So I started off going to school for that. And I was not the best student growing up.
[00:09:38]
Did not have the best grades. I was enrolled at a community college trying to get my basic math, science, English stuff out of the way and my grades got up, and I was going to transfer to Princeton ideally, as my mom and dad went to Princeton, that’s a part of it.
[00:09:56]
Things of family. And I still-
>> MG: Still bleed a little orange?
>> LS: Yes.
>> MG: [LAUGH]
>> LS: It’s a little late in my life, but I still wanna go to Clemson for horticulture, now that I’m finally settled on something, it took me long enough.
>> MG: It’s never too late.
[00:10:15]
>> LS: It’s ten years to decide.
>> MG: Never too late, I’m 38 years older and still over humans in. So there’s a lot to be said for having a little bit of experience and then going in as what they call a non-traditional student.
>> LS: Yeah, travel a bit, explore the world, find out who you are as a person.
[00:10:35]
>> MG: And then come back.
>> LS: What you like, and then come back.
>> MG: Exactly, so-
>> LS: You need to have your mind made up straight out of high school, you don’t really know who you are yet at that point.
>> MG: I sure do.
>> LS: You think you do, but you really don’t.
[00:10:47]
>> MG: Nope, you sure don’t.
>> MG: So tell me about how you went from the broke college kid, back here, you’re here Fort Mill, South Carolina to meeting up with Mark and Mindy Robinson and working at Tega Hills Farm. So this is definitely, it’s a non-traditional farm. We’re getting into a farm that has some history here.
[00:11:15]
You went from a smaller farm to suddenly work into this big hydroponic network here on two acres. So tell me a little bit about that. How did you run into them?
>> MG: Tell me a bit about your history.
>> LS: I was
>> LS: The time I was working at Pet Smart, doing a little bit of everything there, pet care, customer service, cashiering, early morning stocking.
[00:11:43]
And I was just sick and tired of being stuck Inside. I wanted to be out in the sunshine. I wanted to be in the rain. I wanted [LAUGH] to be in the snow when it’s freezing out there. And I didn’t like having to be stuck inside a building for eight hours a day.
[00:12:01]
Just not for me. So I looked online. I just typed in seasonal farm jobs. I live in Rock Hill, so I typed in seasonal farm jobs near Rock Hill, South Carolina. And this popped up. And I was thrilled. They work year-round here. So I’d sent them a resume, well, I actually walked it up here.
[00:12:22]
And my dad helped me type up this really nice cover letter telling them why I was interested and that I’ve been gardening for a while.
>> LS: I wanted to see where else
>> LS: I wanted to see if I would be interested in farming for a living. And whether I wanted to do it on my own, my own small farm or I wanted to work for a bigger farm.
[00:13:04]
>> LS: And yeah, so they interviewed me and about a month later they hired me and another girl, and I love it here. I love everything that I do. I love watching the lettuce grow, I like talking to the little baby plants.
>> MG: What year did you start, what year?
[00:13:32]
>> LS: I’ve been here three years now, so that was 2016?
>> MG: 2016.
>> LS: Think it was 2016, I might have lost a year in there somewhere. [LAUGH]
>> MG: It’s okay, I find the older that I’m getting, I’m starting to lose years. [LAUGH] So you talk to the plants.
[00:13:53]
>> LS: I do, [LAUGH].
>> MG: That’s fantastic.
>> LS: Not just for the science specific reason of, you bring out carbon dioxide, and that’s what the plants need to take in for photosynthesis. Just because, they’re adorable. How can you not talk to them, and tell them how adorable they are?
[00:14:12]
>> MG: Okay, I don’t judge. I think it’s fantastic. So what do you do here at Tega Hills?
>> LS: I work mainly with the lettuce in those greenhouses. I help with the harvesting and the transferring plants lettuce. We have another lady, Carrie, who plants the lettuce seeds every Wednesday, and I’m the one who waters those in Wednesdays, and then I also water the rest of the seedlings Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays.
[00:14:47]
So I’m with the lettuce every step of the way through the process. And I also work in house three, where we have the kale, arugula, fennel, watercress, that kind of stuff.
>> LS: Harvesting outside during the summer. I need a there. I had a few months where I was working in-house too with micro greens, so I’ve done a little bit of everything here.
[00:15:14]
>> MG: So you’re, what you do tends to change depending on, is it by season, or just necessity?
>> LS: We have the lettuce year round. Every morning we harvest lettuce. What I do changes with the seasons, depending on what day it is. Some days, in summer we have peppers and tomatoes, cucumbers and squash.
[00:15:44]
So in the summer, we have a couple days a week. We go in and pick out all the stuff. And the next day or so after that, we go in and we do the cultural work, pruning and the things back up.
>> MG: So walk me through a typical day that you do, whatever you do here.
[00:16:10]
>> LS: What day of the week do you want?
>> MG: I’ll leave it open To you, maybe if something, and you don’t have to get too specific.
>> LS: My day, yeah.
>> MG: So as things change throughout the week, just a kind of a typical day or two.
>> LS: In the morning, we harvest lettuce.
[00:16:29]
We always harvest two passes in house one, and then two passes in house four.
>> LS: That’s a few hundred heads of lettuce a day that we’re pulling out, and then,
>> LS: Barely describe this without actually showing you, but we.
>> LS: Harvest a day, two houses, each house a day, and then we.
[00:17:03]
>> LS: Plant back where we harvested out our big seedlings. And then we, we clean up, we try to get all that stuff done before lunch. Then after lunch is usually planting.
>> MG: Sorry guys.
>> LS: Distracting. After lunch is usually harvesting in house three and we’ll plant back in there.
[00:17:37]
Any clean up from the morning tasks if it’s summer, yes we’ll go through and pick cucumbers sometimes after lunch.
>> LS: If it’s a delivery day, Mindy usually has me help pack in the greens orders. For picking flowers, I love picking flowers, beautiful flowers, it’s great.
>> MG: It just kept adding up there.
[00:18:19]
>> LS: Can you- Jenny?
>> Speaker 3: Yeah.
>> LS: Can you find me another green lid?
>> Speaker 3: Yeah
>> LS: That means somebody will try.
>> [INAUDIBLE]
>> LS: Here’s one box, it just does not have a lid. It might be the green.
>> Speaker 3: This color green?
>> LS: Yeah, that color.
>> LS: Gets me distracted.
[00:18:47]
>> MG: It’s okay but business has to keep going.
>> LS: Yes.
>> MG: What would you say you have taken away from your time working here at Farm for your own business. What have you learned here that, and I’m sure you’ve probably learned a lot. You’ve been here for a couple of years, but that’s something else there.
[00:19:17]
>> MG: But what have you learned that maybe has surprised you or something that you are going to take away for your own use for when you finally start your own market.
>> LS: I learned that I really, I enjoy waiting. [LAUGH] It’s a really simple, basic answer, but I love pulling weeds.
[00:19:47]
And I didn’t realize how much I enjoyed doing that. And I like pruning back the cucumbers. And I like separating the tomatoes. And I didn’t realize that was something that you had to do to prune them. And to prevent your little tomato plant from turning into this giant tomato jungle monster.
[00:20:07]
You have to cut them back. And they actually produce more if you do that properly. And if you pinch off the leaves as you go, the bottom leaves, it opens up the face of the plant and allows more air flow into the middle so you prevent disease. And I learned that you shouldn’t do work like that ehen the humidity is high.
[00:20:30]
Because that, those break a leaf off and that little open section of the plant is open to infection and disease and bacteria getting in there. And I just, not that I don’t like harvesting lettuce but since I do it every single morning, I’ve decided that I do not want to farm lettuce.
[00:20:55]
I’m so tired of lettuce. I enjoy that part of my job but, for myself and my own life, no. No more lettuce.
>> MG: I can understand that. When I first spoke to Mark and Mindy. Mark told me how many thousands of heads of lettuce are harvested. And this is a small space.
[00:21:16]
It’s a two acre farm, but not all two acres are full of greenhouses. There’s only five, only five greenhouses.
>> LS: Yes.
>> MG: So for one, how fast they grow is staggering.
>> LS: It is, it’s amazing, yes..
>> MG: And to have that many thousands of heads of lettuce pulled over such a short amount of time, and there are only five full-time workers at TV Hills or thereabouts?
[00:21:55]
>> MG: Somewhere in there.
>> LS: Yeah, somewhere in there. We have about seven employees right now. Some are full time, some are part time.
>> MG: That’s so much time that’s occupied by just lettuce.
>> LS: That’s our summer staff. Sorry, our winter staff I mean. In summer we have about ten.
[00:22:18]
>> MG: Has working in these greenhouses with these hydroponics made you want to consider doing something like that yourself? Or are you leaning towards? You’re shaking your head, that’s telling me something.
>> LS: I love to play in the dirt. [LAUGH] I don’t know anything about pumps, I don’t know anything about water or how to add the right nutrients to the water, and I’m not really interested in learning about that.
[00:22:44]
My own garden, I have raised beds, I have the concrete block beds, I have some wooden beds. I have stuff growing on large trellises, stuff on vertical trellises, things in the ground, things growing out of straw bales. I have a little bit of verything in there. And, yeah, hydroponic growing, it just isn’t.
[00:23:05]
I take more of a creative approach. For myself I don’t like just, I get bored with just long rows of little, long parallel rows of plants for miles. I like to have the kind of garden where you can bring in the kids or people who don’t even like plants, and they go wow, this is amazing.
[00:23:28]
Or, what are these little round yellow things, and I say that’s a lemon cucumber, and they go what, that’s a cucumber? And I see that happiness and that wonder on their faces, and I love when kids leave and they’re like mom, dad, can we grow some watermelons? Can we grow some whatever.
[00:23:43]
I love that.
>> LS: I thought of an answer to your earlier question.
>> MG: Sure.
>> LS: About what I’ve gotten out of the farm and what I’ve learned about myself. And what I possibly want for me in the future.
>> MG: Yeah, please do.
>> LS: I recently decided, last week recently, that I don’t necessarily We want an actual farm [LAUGH] where I produce food for people.
[00:24:18]
I like watering the lettuce seeds and I like taking care of the seedlings. And I like nurturing them up to the point of taking them out to the greenhouse. And I work in house too with the microgreens, it’s the same thing. I love looking at the seeds, I love petting them every day and making sure every one was growing the way that they should be.
[00:24:43]
And wherever I’ve been now is I just want a nursery and I want to start plants and I don’t want to have a whole lot of everything. I don’t want to spread myself too thin over that, but I want to grow the things that I love to grow.
[00:24:58]
The pretty little flowers and herbs that you can companion plant with all of your vegetables or certain insects or throw in the beneficial. Things like that I’m still working on that idea. It’s been a week since I bought that but that’s where I am now. Just a love for baby plants that I didn’t realize I had before.
[00:25:21]
And I’m actually able to grow these seeds. This is the first year that I’m successfully growing flowers and okra from seed. They’ve not sprouted at all for me in the past. So I’m thrilled with all that.
>> MG: I bet.
>> MG: So when you go back to study horticulture,
[00:25:44]
>> MG: Is perhaps opening up your own nursery your goal? Or do you have something else further in mind or what are your kind of projected ideas for your future?
>> LS: I still feel like that 20 year old that had no idea [LAUGH]. I like, at the moment, yeah, I’m going to return to my own nursery.
[00:26:09]
But I never went through a period where I really got away from the house and traveled and saw the world, so I still want to do that a bit. So right now I’m bouncing back and forth between, well, I still want to do all of these things but I had this business idea.
[00:26:25]
And I’m growing extra seeds this year so that I can sell them as small plants. And if I start that up, then I can’t do the other thing. But I can’t do the other thing without money. So it’s a lot of back of forth at the moment. I still am only 26.
[00:26:43]
I keep telling myself I have time, it’s disappearing gradually but I like to think I have time.
>> MG: You have plenty of time. So, really I think I, would like to turn it just for a moment over to you if there’s anything that you’d like to say finally about your time here at Tega Hills Farm.
[00:27:09]
Or you could tell us anything you want. Because this interview is going to be made available to students. But as well as to other people who are interested in kind of our food culture in Charlotte which is wide reaching, it’s coming all the way to South Carolina. There’s a massive region where Charlotte seems to be kinda at the center here.
[00:27:35]
And that reach was what led me to Tega Hills Farm and to Mark and Mindy and to talking to you. So when we put this into our project online with Library Special Collections, it will reach a lot more people, people who are interested and students. Is there anything that you would like to say maybe to them, even if it’s just about gardening?
[00:28:00]
Or is there something you’d like to tell them about.
>> LS: I love what I do, but people don’t realize how much work goes into this. And it’s long hours, it’s really cold in the winter, it’s really hot in the summer. And the greenhouses are, to a point they’re heated in the winter and we have big fans in the summer.
[00:28:33]
We have the evaporative cooler at one end, that doesn’t mean that it’s temperate and cool in there. It just means that instead of it being 140, 50 degrees in there, it’s only 108. So it’s [LAUGH] it’s a hard job, but it’s very rewarding If you want to get into it.
[00:28:51]
I love bagging up produce for people. I love when someone comes in and says, well just give me your favorite lettuce, or what would you recommend? What do you like to eat? I love customers like that. I love telling people about the farm. I love sharing this joy that it gives me with people.
[00:29:14]
>> LS: No matter if we have any bug problems, nutrient problems, it’s super hot, it’s super cold. You have a rough day here, a rough day there, it’s all worth it to me in the end. Just because of the great product that we roll out and just the amazing people I work with, too.
[00:29:38]
They’re awesome and everything that I’ve learned has made it so worth it to me. And it,
>> LS: What am I saying? [LAUGH] Yeah, I wouldn’t change it for anything. I would go back and I would do the whole thing again.
>> MG: I think that’s a very touching and powerful note to end on.
[00:29:59]
Lisa, thank you so much for talking with me, I really appreciate it.
>> LS: Yes, thank you, a pleasure.