Sweet Grown Alabama Blogs

Picture this: it's a random Tuesday. You’re walking through the hayfield with your husband and children. It’s a beautiful October day and you throw around the idea of planting strawberries. Except strawberries must be ordered over the summer and it's the middle of October and you have never even grown a strawberry so you sigh a sigh of relief and decide maybe next year. But you and husband don’t let bumps in the road slow you down. So you find strawberry plants the next day and you spend the next two weeks turning a hayfield into a strawberry farm and you never look back. 

We laugh about this a lot. The late nights of research, the long days of work. The only breaks we took were for church and to watch our kids play sports. The family and friends who stood beside us to paint, to clean, to plant, to pray for us and cheer us on when we felt defeated. 

But this friends, is how Pleasant Pastures U-Pick Farm (Andalusia) went from being a dream to a reality. 

In 2019 we started beekeeping and absolutely fell in love with it. It wasn’t love at first idea, Sidney had to talk me into it. I just wasn’t so sure about getting stung and truth be told I didn’t even like honey, which is unfair to think about now since the only honey I had ever had was the little honeybear from the store and that’s not even honey. But beekeeping changed the trajectory of our lives. It was then we realized we in fact could get into agriculture with beekeeping. Our four hives quickly grew to 20 hives that quickly grew to 200 hives. Our kids enjoyed it as much as we did and didn’t know anything other than beekeeping since they grew up in it. 

We were selling honey wholesale and retail, selling nucs (small honey bee colonies), and participating in almond pollination, and we realized we needed help if we wanted to grow any bigger. So instead of growing bigger we decided to diversify, and Pleasant Pastures went from being just honey to an agritourism farm.

Our dreams were becoming reality, one day at the time, with much encouragement from friends and family. After our fateful October day in 2024 , we worked nearly seven days a week, for the next five months to prepare for strawberry season. With plants in the ground, we prayed and prayed and prayed some more. And the first strawberry picked was the most beautiful thing we had ever seen.  

I’ll never forget our first basket picked, the first time a family came to the farm, the first time a field trip was booked. Our community believed in us and supported us and that is something that I will forever be grateful for. What started out as an idea for U-Pick strawberries, quickly turned into summer produce and a pumpkin patch. Welcoming more field trips than we can count- schools taking a chance on a new place and families deciding to make memories on our farm. 

We have grown so much since last year... from big things like how to simply grow strawberries to managing a commercial kitchen to supply and demand for strawberries and how to handle watching the public climb over your strawberry rows (if you know you know). We’ve learned how to manage scheduling of field trips and scheduling help for events. We more than doubled the plants in the ground, and the community just continues to bless us and trust us with bringing fresh, Sweet Grown Alabama, strawberries to their tables. 

While the days are long, seeing families enjoy the farm as much as I do and working beside my husband and spending that time with my children will absolutely never get old. 

If you would have asked me 10 years ago what my life would look like, I never thought it would be this, but my goodness I couldn’t imagine a day without strawberries in it now. 

And seeing my husband fulfill his dream of being a farmer will always bring a smile to my face. 

The fruit and vegetable community is so close knit thanks to organizations like The Alabama Fruit and Vegetables Growers Association and outlets like Sweet Grown Alabama who work so hard to help bring locals to farms just like ours. 

So if you find yourself walking through a hayfield daydreaming, run after that dream and don’t slow down. 

Learn more about Pleasant Pastures here.

The views and opinions expressed in this blog are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of Sweet Grown Alabama.