Stephanie Storer grew up in western Pennsylvania and has fond memories of picking blackberries with her father, then baking fruit pies with her mother. The family always had a garden, she says. “Everything tastes better when you just picked it.”
Those memories “literally planted the seed,” she says, of her interest in gardening and ecology.
Shawn and Stephanie Storer met and married while they were teaching theology, music, science and mathematics at Red Cloud Indian School on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota,
When they moved to South Bend, IN, the Storers started with a small yard and a container garden.
In 2012, they bought a larger property, a double lot (just under a quarter acre of land) at the corner of Miami and Victoria streets in South Bend.
“We decided to stay in town and have an urban farm,” she says. “We can walk to the library, walk to our church or bike downtown. We treat the property as an urban homestead, producing food for a family of seven.”
Stephanie, a Villanova graduate, holds two master’s degrees from the University of Notre Dame—an MS in environmental engineering and a master’s in nonprofit administration. “My focus was on ground water safety,” Stephanie says. “Many of the things I studied are very transferable: water and soil chemistry.”
Shawn is ecumenical and interreligious officer for the Catholic Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend and teaches theology at Holy Cross College; together the Storers teach a course in integral ecology, an integrated approach to environmental and social justice that is a key concept in Pope Francis’ encyclical on the environment, Laudato Si’. (For a more in-depth look, see their “Growing Ecological Eaters” series of YouTube videos.)
The family tries to live by the words of French Catholic social activist and theologian Peter Maurin: “The future will be different if we make the present different.”
In a double city lot, the Storers have fit in 40 fruit and nut trees, including 21 apple trees of nine varieties (UltraMac, Red Rome Beauty, Golden Delicious, CrimsonCrisp, Cortland, Blushing Delight and others). Six trees are espaliered (trained to grow flat against a wall). “We’ve also sown wine cap mushroom spores so after a big rain we search for mushrooms around the yard,” Stephanie says.
The garden includes all the familiar backyard crops: cucumbers, greens, lettuces, chard, kale, spinach, peas, onions and carrots. And tomatillos. “We make a lot of green salsa,” Stephanie says. “You should grow what you like to eat.”
The Storers took out the yard’s traditional landscaping and put in native plants like honeyberry, which is hardy to -40°, as well as gooseberries, elderberries and jostaberries—a thornless cross between the black currant, black gooseberry and European gooseberry.
Stephanie’s “garden babies,” she says, are the many varieties of tomatoes. “We grow about 35 plants each year—all heirloom plants from organic seed.”
Preserving the food they produce is a big part of the equation. “We eat everything fresh, then preserve to have enough for the year.” Food is preserved in multiple ways—canning, freezing, fermenting, pickling, dehydrating. Onions, pumpkins and hard squash are cured and stored in the basement for use over the winter.
The Storers homeschool their five children: Abram, 11; Jonah, 8; Moses, 6; Hannah, 4; and Adah, 2.
Each of the older children is responsible for a garden plot of their own. “They choose a specific crop during the winter, choose which varieties of seeds to plant, start the seeds and take care of the garden plot through the growing season, including harvesting and preserving,” Stephanie says.
The farm also includes six chickens and two beehives, and the Storers have begun tapping their mature maple trees for syrup. “The last two years the trees have yielded over three gallons of syrup. So we have our sugar sources right in our own yard. Cane sugar has a pretty high carbon footprint. And we only use hand tools in the garden, including a reel mower. We want to tread lightly on the planet.”
The Storers adhere to the ancient Greek notion of oikos, which includes three concepts: the family, the family’s property and the home. “The economics of the family means that everything is a means of production rather than consumption. We produce our food, we homeschool our children. I cut everyone’s hair. It’s trying to regain the beauty of a simple life—joy is found in the fruitfulness of the household. That’s a better measure than our conventional ideas of success.”
Three years ago, Stephanie and Shawn took over organizing the Common Goods Co-operative Grocery (“Working together to make it easier to be good.”) People bring their own containers to the market to fill with bulk goods rather than use plastic bags or containers.
“Everything we sell is healthy and local—grown with no pesticides. We work with local farmers who are regenerative, who try and build up the land they’re farming,” she says. “It would be great if everyone knew the farmers, and knew where their food was coming from.”
The co-op is open once a month from 6 to 7:30 p.m.; dates are announced on their Facebook page.
New members are welcome. There is a sliding scale membership fee based on income (no fee for those who are unemployed), and members contribute 10 work hours per year.
“We really want people to have access,” Stephanie notes. “We don’t think organic should mean expensive.”
744 S. Main St.
South Bend, IN
commongoodscoopgrocery@gmail.com
facebook.com/CommonGoodsCoopGrocery
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