At Cultural Roots Nursery, in Winters, California, Li Schmidt grows more than 100 Asian-heritage vegetables, herbs, fruit and trees on ¼ acre. She has figured out how to grow these mostly subtropical plants in the hot, dry climate of California’s Central Valley, and how to creatively source seeds for her crops. Schmidt is also a farmer member of the California Farmer Justice Collaborative and works with the Cal Ag Roots storytelling project with the California Institute for Rural Studies. Cultural Roots Nursery, in Winters, California, Li Schmidt grows more than 100 Asian-heritage vegetables, herbs, fruit and trees on
HOBBY FARMS:
Tell us about Cultural Roots Nursery.
SCHMIDT: I founded my nursery in 2020, and I don’t know if I would have started it had there not been a pandemic. I was finishing my master’s degree in community development at UC Davis, and there were no jobs to be found. At the same time, the local hardware store was running out of plant starts, people were panic-buying seeds, and a lot of people for the very first time started to think about where their food was coming from. With some farmer training I’d had for the 3 years prior to grad school, I decided it could be a good time to grow food, not only for local food security but also to experiment with some cultural foods.