Courtney Guerra is a culinary farmer who loves the intimacy of planting seeds, watching them sprout, and harvesting rich, colorful produce. She's grown food for some of America's top restaurants.
Courtney Guerra is a culinary farmer who loves the intimacy of planting seeds, watching them sprout, and harvesting rich, colorful produce. She's grown food for some of America's top restaurants. Now Courtney focuses on bringing the positive impact of gardening and interacting with nature to her community in Southern California.
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Shelby Stanger:
We often talk about outdoor adventures that lean toward athletic endeavors, like hiking, running, and swimming. But there are ways to enjoy nature that are gentler, slower, and a little dirtier like gardening. If you ask me, the best food is the stuff that comes straight from the earth. Not only can gardening be therapeutic, but it's also rewarding to grow your own food from seed. Courtney Guerra is a culinary farmer who loves the intimacy of planting seeds, watching them sprout, and harvesting rich, colorful produce. She's grown food for some of America's top restaurants. Now Courtney focuses on the positive impact of gardening in her own community. I'm Shelby Stanger, and this is Wild Ideas Worth Living an REI Co-op Studios production. Connecting with the earth and the outdoors have always been a big part of Courtney's life. She spent a lot of her twenties outside playing beach volleyball professionally. After retiring from the sport, Courtney took some time to find her footing and eventually decided to try culinary school. Courtney Guerra, welcome to Wild Ideas Worth Living.
Courtney Guerra:
Shelby, thank you so much for having me today.
Shelby Stanger:
You've had a wild, wild career, not just one wild idea, but a few. I'd love to just start with how you went from being, you know, this amazing beach volleyball player to having a lifestyle around gardening and culinary arts.
Courtney Guerra:
That's a big question
Shelby Stanger:
How did you, okay, so there was this time where you started to listen to yourself. How did you do that?
Courtney Guerra:
Nature was helpful in this process. I had an office job, but I also was living on a beautiful spot on the Rincon in Santa Barbara, in Carpenteria actually. And having the office job that felt kind of uninspired and um, and really that I was using my gifts in ways that I felt like weren't paying respect to the source that gave them to me, right? I was being really friendly on the phone and trying to sell telecom equipment and very personable and all of these things that I very much lean on now for my work. But it wasn't something that inspired me or gave me passion at the end of the day. And so I'd come home and go on these long walks on the Rincon and contemplate life and, and really ask deep questions, right? And I could feel sitting in a chair all day, my body start to slowly melt
Shelby Stanger:
I'm gonna ask you one more question about this, because when we are one thing, for so long - for many years I was Shelby, the soccer player, people don't even know I played soccer, but like that's all people knew me as, like this competitive Olympic development soccer player. And when I gave that up, I had like a full existential crisis. I mean, you did it to an even bigger degree. I mean, you played professional beach volleyball, you were Courtney Guerra the professional beach volleyball player. Was that hard? Like how did you navigate shifting that identity?
Courtney Guerra:
It was, it was extremely hard. Not to mention I was in a relationship for many years with another volleyball player. So my whole life was volleyball, my friends, my community, the source of just even physical activity and, and, and it was all volleyball. But when I was done, I was done. Who was I, what did I have, you know, where was I going if I wasn't Courtney, the volleyball player? And yeah, existential crisis is a great way to put it, but that friction, right, that tension, that questioning - that is what pulled me towards finding that next step and listening to that friction, and that angst, you know, like, I got to do something amazing. I wanna do that again. I wanna have impact with this life, with the gifts that I have. And it's not happening sitting at this desk job. And so I think it's a really powerful tool to really sit with the discomfort of what am I doing here? What is my purpose? Whhat is it that I want to do next? Because I'm 28 years old, 29 years old, I've got a full runway and I wanna do some awesome stuff. So what is it?
Shelby Stanger:
Courtney's daily walks were instrumental in the process of changing her career. Getting outside in the fresh air and moving her body, gave her space to think about what she wanted to do next. Courtney has always loved food. She came from a family of bakers and her grandmother bought her a subscription to Bon Appétit Magazine when she was young. But it wasn't until she retired from volleyball that she thought about returning to her culinary roots.
Courtney Guerra:
Deciding to go to culinary school was a big leap for me, but I knew I was ready in that if I woke up every morning and I was making food for people and they were happy, that was gonna be a good day. At the very least, I knew that much. And actually I wanted to go into baking and pastry first. And the first week or so, I was in the baking and pastry side at the Culinary Institute of America, Napa Valley. They separate the hot side, they call it the hot side from baking and pastry. And so on the other far side of the kitchen was the hot side, and it was loud and there was fire and sizzling and crackling and popping and tattoos and I mean, it was a whole vibe over there. And I was very interested, but there was a little bit of a knot in my stomach like, "Oh, it kind of scares me over there too, like that's a little intimidating."
The baking and pastry side is much more
Shelby Stanger:
Soon Courtney was excelling on the hot side of culinary school. She got a job at Meadowood, one of the best restaurants in the Napa Valley. Meadowood had a garden and Courtney loved working in the dirt and growing ingredients for the kitchen. During school she also did an internship at a fine dining restaurant in LA where she accompanied the chefs on their daily trips to the farmer's market. Between her internship and her job at Meadowood, Courtney got an insider view of how restaurants were sourcing their ingredients. A few weeks before graduating from culinary school, she realized that she wasn't going to become a chef. Instead she'd be leaving school a farmer. It was a scary decision, but one that also felt exciting and peaceful at the same time. So most people go to culinary school and they become chefs. You decided to do something totally different. You became a culinary farmer. First of all, what is a culinary farmer?
Courtney Guerra:
And, and you can't find carrot blossoms anywhere unless you let a carrot bolt, which means go through their whole cycle and go to blossom. Every plant will produce a seed eventually and blossom. And so I really feel like you don't understand the true essence of a vegetable unless you've been able to explore its full arc of life. And that even includes the death, the dying process. So much death goes into farming, it's, you know, a whole other spiritual topic, but allowing a plant to start to go through that process and then bringing it into the kitchen and seeing what can happen. And I think that, you know, working with the right chefs is, is a dream come true because then they take it and they do something amazing with it that you never even thought of. And the creative process continues and you are one part of the note of the song that ends up being played in a symphony for a diner.
Shelby Stanger:
You are so cool, Courtney. I don't think anybody has made me more excited about carrot blossoms. I eat a lot of carrots. I've never even thought about the carrot blossoms. That's amazing. So, okay, you could have been a chef, you chose this other route and your next adventure was, was that finding a piece of land?
Courtney Guerra:
My next adventure was finding a piece of land in Venice Beach. I had a friend who owned a house down there just off of Lincoln and Rose and he didn't necessarily take care of the place. It was Venice before what we know Venice today as this was a decade ago and -
Shelby Stanger:
Pre-hipster Venice Beach.
Courtney Guerra:
Yeah. It was still a little rough around the edges and there was a back studio and I, so I moved in there and I said, Hey, do you mind if I do a little bit of like farming in the yard and, and put up a little pop-up greenhouse in the back? And the owner was totally on board with it. And so I just took every square inch of that place, and I turned it into an urban farm - greenhouse in the backyard. I grew in milk crates, vertically hydroponic towers. And it was a real moment of trust in the universe. And I worked in culinary school and so I had some money saved up and I was just all in to this dream, but I was coming from Napa where you've got some of the most amazing growers in the country. And so I was bringing that knowledge of what I had gained in Napa working with and for very talented growers down to LA where there was no one, no one was doing these things.
Everyone was kind of working with the same ingredients, with the same vendors and purveyors. And I thought, well I know that there's gotta be some chefs in LA here that will be into what I'm doing and I just, I trust that there's a place for me here in LA. And so I, I graduated culinary school right at the end of 2012. In January, 2013, I broke ground on my little project in Venice and by mid-February I had partnered exclusively with a, a new restaurant and was featured in Bon Appetit, you know, six weeks, eight weeks after starting my idea. And it just was kind of like a rocket ship from there. By that fall or end of summer, the restaurant that I had partnered with was named Best New Restaurant in America.
Shelby Stanger:
When we come back, Courtney talks about her work with the LA-based nonprofit Upward Bound House and tells us what it takes to start a backyard garden.
Former professional volleyball player Courtney Guerra came up with a wild idea to become a culinary farmer over 10 years ago. She started out growing produce for a restaurant in LA called Alma. But in a couple of months, Bon Appetit Magazine ran articles about both the restaurant and about Courtney's culinary garden. In addition to the great press that came from the partnership, working at Alma opened up opportunities for Courtney to get more involved with her own community. How did you get into nonprofit work?
Courtney Guerra:
So my journey with working in the non-profit world started when the restaurant that I partnered with, Alma, their vision was to have Alma Community Outreach. So they had formed a nonprofit right as they opened their doors and they were already working in a couple of schools. And so we installed school gardens and every week we would go and we would share a recipe, we'd do some work in the garden, we would eat together. I mean you've got third graders eating arugula salads with persimmon. They participated in the process, right? They harvested the arugula, they cut up the persimmons, they dressed the salad, they put it in bowls for each other. They kind of poked each other if someone wasn't trying it like, "Hey, come on, try it, what are you scared?" You know, so there's some healthy peer pressure there too. I couldn't bury myself in fine dining and say My gifts are only for the elite who can afford this kind of food.
I knew that gardening farm-to-table style food was for everyone. Is for everyone. And so I spent the next four years with Alma Community Outreach and then also started working with Upward Bound House and Upward Bound House's Mission is to eradicate homelessness among families with children. And I just fell in love with the organization, with the work, with the clients, with the kids. Also around that time there was a landowner in Santa Monica who had a vacant parcel and they said, "Hey, we've got this land here, do you wanna do something with it?" I didn't want to start a whole new endeavor of just growing food and selling it to chefs. This to me was something that could be amazing for the community, but I needed the support of infrastructure of other people helping. And so I gave this opportunity to Upward Bound House. And so Upward Bound House took their big leap of faith to say, okay, let's do it. So for the last six years that farm has been growing and supporting workshops and family day events and fundraising events and all of the food harvested goes to the food pantry at Upward Bound House. And it's a beautiful thing. And it was the beginnings of what is now a formalized wellness program for Upward Bound House.
Shelby Stanger:
Do you have any stories of how gardening in this community has, has benefited them?
Courtney Guerra:
When I get to teach gardening, especially in inner cities in Los Angeles, I really do feel my most pure connection with source. And that tugging that I had so long ago of like, no, what are you doing though? Like, what are you really doing with your life that it feels like that pressure valve just gets to be released a little bit Like, okay, because you get to see joy, you get to see curiosity sparked, you get to see inhibition soften. You get to see somebody who kind of walks into the farm and seems all tough and like, I ain't eating that. No way. And then you spend an hour and you walk around and you play with the bunnies and you feed the chickens and you start to pick things off - "oh, here, come try this pea." And I mean, to get to participate and be in the presence of a human reconnecting, I say reconnecting because there is a deep knowing about the relationship that we have as humans with our food. And so when I get to help make those connections, it lights me up, especially with the kids. The kids are just, it's such an easy thing, to put a kid in a garden and say, "Okay, you're gonna have a good time. I promise."
Shelby Stanger:
In her nonprofit work, Courtney has learned a lot about gardening with children. She's also making sure to teach her own kids the lessons she's learned from growing food. Courtney's family lives north of LA in Ojai where she has six acres of land, much of which she's turning into, you guessed it, a huge garden. What does it take to start a backyard garden? I think a lot of people listening wanna start one? Where should we start?
Courtney Guerra:
Well start with the beginner mindset, right? And I adopt that so much in life. There's the growth mindset and the fixed mindset. The growth mindset allows for failure in service of learning and getting better. The fixed mindset says if I fail, I'm done. And so having a beginner's mindset, starting your garden, being an observer, finding the space that has the best sunlight that's accessible from your house. And also I would encourage people to not farm out the work of starting their own backyard garden. I did not have a familiarity with power tools or you know, anything like that, but I learned there's never been a better time to learn and to go access information on the internet, on how to build a basic raised bed and what you need for that, right? Now, if that isn't for you, that's okay. If it's just, I just want the veggies growing, that's fine too, cuz you're gonna get a lot of benefit from that.
But try and participate in the birthing of your backyard garden. And then from there, be a student, you know, there's amazing people and resources to help you on your journey. Knowing your growing zone is helpful cuz that will dictate when you start to plant stuff. But also just get messy, like throw stuff in the dirt. Water it regularly. Domesticated plants like our vegetables, they love consistency. That's the biggest part. It's the consistent watering versus wild plants where they have to go months without water, right? And they're more hearty and their flavors are a lot stronger. With domesticated plants, they need to be a little more babied. Same goes with fruit trees, for example, pruning and feeding. The biggest thing I can emphasize to have a successful garden is to feed the soil first. You're, you're a soil farmer, and then the rest is just a bonus, right?
So if you've got a live healthy soil that you are constantly feeding, you will have beautiful plants that are able to stand up to things like pests and bugs and whatnot. And how do we feed the soil? Through death! Let things die in your soil. So when you harvest something, cut it off right below the surface of the soil, let those roots die in. No dig, no till. This is what I practice. Don't disrupt all of the good stuff that's happening in your soil. Compost. That's another huge component here. Compost is like nature's cure-all for anything that's going wrong in your garden bed. It's very available food, nutrients, because it's already digested. It aids the digestion process so that when those plants get in contact with the nutrients, it's a really easy uptake for them. And then just have fun experiment. This is where the, the culinary farming part comes in where it's like, it's your garden.
You can harvest that thing at any point. You can eat any part of that plant. Let it get bigger than you normally you'd find in a grocery store. Or what does it taste like when it's a little bit smaller and more tender or the blossom? Who wants to try a carrot blossom? Okay, just let your carrots go. It's a creative endeavor for sure. And it doesn't have to be overwhelming. It doesn't have to be expensive, it doesn't have to be a big time suck. You can just have two or three little raised beds and it can be your own fun little relationship.
Shelby Stanger:
Gardening at home is a great way to connect with nature no matter where you live. Even if you don't have a backyard, you can grow herbs in your kitchen, plant a small window box full of edible flowers, or even sign up for a plot at a community garden. I love Courtney's gardening tips because she focuses on finding joy in the process rather than the outcome.
Courtney, thanks so much for coming on Wild Ideas Worth Living. You Open my eyes to the different ways we can approach gardening and growing our own food. If you wanna learn more about Courtney Guerra, check out her Instagram @CourtneyEGuerra. That's C-O-U-R-T-N-E-Y-E-G-U-E-R-R-A. You'll definitely want to keep an eye out for some of her upcoming projects, like an ebook for beginner backyard gardeners, and a children's book on soil and composting.
Wild Ideas Worth Living is part of the REI Podcast Network. It's hosted by me, Shelby Stinger, written and edited by Annie Fassler, Sylvia Thomas, and Sam Peers Nitzberg of Puddle Creative. Our senior producer is Jenny Barber and our executive producers are Paolo Mottola and Joe Crosby. As always, we love it when you follow the show, rate it and write a review wherever you listen. And remember, some of the best adventures happen when you follow your wildest ideas.