Meet Kate & Sam Stevens | Owners of Garden of Oz

We had the good fortune of connecting with Kate & Sam Stevens and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Kate & Sam, can you walk us through the thought-process of starting your business?
Garden of Oz has been a dream of ours for at least a decade. Our garden taught us to slow down, enjoy nature, but most importantly it has taught us the value of our impact & how to live more sustainably as caretakers of our environment.

As a wife and wife team, our thought process behind starting Garden of Oz is to teach gardeners sustainable, joyful ways to expand their home garden, whether that’s growing food (our personal favorite), pollinator habitat, or more native plants. For gardeners at any level, we hope to create a positive impact by transforming food waste into garden resources through bokashi composting. At the heart of our business is our Bokashi Buddy and Bokashi composting. Using anaerobic fermentation and effective microorganisms, bokashi composting breaks all organic waste, expediting traditional composting. We know composting is a challenge for so many people, and in our own experience bokashi composting has been an enormous solution to reducing our organic waste, creating home compost in weeks instead of months, and living more sustainably.

We also hand make and create upcycled products with resources in the community, like our Gardener’s Exfoliating Hand Soap, made with spent coffee grounds, and sustainable gardening products like native and regionally adapted seeds, plants, and compost activators. Garden of Oz is quickly becoming a place where people can turn to in order to keep usable resources out of the landfill, like a community member who approached us with locally harvest, organically fed pig lard that had been sitting in a freezer a little longer than the owner had hoped for. We were able to upcycle it into a beautiful cuticle cream and have future batches of soap in mind for the remaining 20 pounds. We pride ourselves on making the most of overlooked (or even thrown away) resources and teaching others to do the same.

The namesake of our business was our beloved orange tabby cat who lived to be 21. We love sharing our passion for productive, beautiful home gardens with our community and envision Garden of Oz as a force for good: connecting people with nature, the power of sustainability, and the delight that home grown food can bring.

Can you give our readers an introduction to your business? Maybe you can share a bit about what you do and what sets you apart from others?
Garden of Oz is here to help get you growing sustainably, from a windowsill or to a homestead. We serve any gardener or grower in developing sustainable gardening practices, compost coaching, and food waste diversion through bokashi composting.

We keep resources in the community with regenerative practices, like diverting brewer’s spent grain (like Beerkashi and dog biscuits) and spent coffee grounds into upcycled products or living compost. What sets us apart as a gardening company is our teaching & learning mindset. We want every individual we encounter to leave learning something that will help their own practices grow.

Whenever we are working on a new product, project, or partnership, we look to how it will leave the community better than we found it. This mindset has helped us create partnerships we’re proud of, like the garden to table project with Mugs Coffee, where we collaborated with the Mugs team to plan, plant, and support the management of more than 220 produce plants that will eventually produce fresh food for the local small business.

We’re a relatively new member of the small business scene, opening our business in late January 2023. We want everyone to know how passionate we are about regenerative growing practices, diverting food waste into resources, and that we are committed to helping the growing community reach their goals.

Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
We LOVE our hometown and can think of so many wonderful places to shoutout. For either morning coffee or afternoon pick me up, we’d definitely stop by one of the two amazing Mugs Coffee locations. If we’re not staying to eat a delicious breakfast on the Mugs patio, we’re grabbing our coffee to go and walking around The Oval or City Park to enjoy some greenery and hang out while walking our dogs. On a Friday night you could find us at the Well Fed Farmstead Friday Night Market picking up incredible local produce and shopping at other local vendors, and of course Saturday morning we’re hitting up the Larimer County Farmer’s Market to score some more local produce from our favorite farms, like Folks Farm & Native Hill, fresh KREAM Kimchi, and small batch Autumn’s Harvest Granola. If it’s beer o’clock (and when isn’t it?) you might find us grabbing a pint at Stodgy Brewing (in between brewer’s spent grain pick ups) or Maxline Brewing, and a slice of Project Pizza (cannot miss Project Pizza if their school bus housed pizza oven is nearby — incredible flavor!). We’re plant people after all, so we definitely are stopping by the CSU Annual Flower Trial Gardens (our alma mater) to watch the sunset and flower-gaze.

Who else deserves some credit and recognition?
The people who immediately come to mind are Sam’s unconditionally supportive parents, Bob and Patti, who inspired her love of gardening and have been Garden of Oz’s biggest fans from day one.

Patti has been a home gardener for more than 50 years and set out on her very first compost adventure with the Bokashi Buddy. We couldn’t be more grateful for their love, support, and cheerleading.

We’re also unbelievably grateful to the Northern Colorado growing community! Thank you to everyone who has welcomed us into their backyards, balconies, fields and compost piles. We love growing with you!

Website: www.gardenofozco.com

Instagram: @garden.of.oz.noco

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100090420518945

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@gardenofozco

Image Credits
Photos by Kate Stevens of Garden of Oz