By Matthew Enloe | Cerca Cultivation
Join us as Matthew Enloe, co-founder of Cerca Cultivation, kicks off the “Cultivator Connections” podcast with a special guest: his brother, Stephen Enloe. This inaugural conversation offers a unique, behind-the-scenes look at the passionate individuals driving Cerca Cultivation and provides a foundational understanding of their vision for cultivating success.
TL;DR – Quick Summary
Cerca Cultivation’s podcast, ‘Cultivator Connections,’ aims to demystify gardening, offering practical advice and fostering community around growing food closer to home.
Growing Strategy: Cerca Cultivation, a California benefit corporation, prioritizes collaboration over competition, finding success through mutually beneficial relationships with other urban farming organizations in Los Angeles.
Plant Selection: The company’s mission is to help people grow food closer to where they live, learn, work, and eat, with ‘Cerca’ (Spanish for close/near) embodying their commitment to local, sustainable food and community building.
Soil & Nutrition: Cerca offers live seedlings online, curating menus based on seasonal and regional growing conditions to meet growers where they are, with average orders of 18 plants often including diverse bundles.
Seasonal Planning: For beginner gardeners, buying seedlings offers a ‘bottled success’ head start, costing around $2.50-$3 per plant, comparable to a packet of seeds, and saves time and effort compared to germinating difficult seeds.
Cultivation Success: While gardening may not always be cheaper than store-bought produce due to setup costs (hundreds of dollars), the value lies in the experience, joy, and higher quality of homegrown food, often exceeding what’s available at typical grocery stores.
Pro tip: When starting your garden, try both seeds and seedlings; any plant you kill is a learning success, not a failure, and provides valuable experience for future attempts.
Matthew: Hey there everybody, welcome to the Cerca Cultivation Cultivator Connections podcast. I’m Matthew Enloe one of the co-founders and co-owners of Cerca Cultivation. And I’m really excited to be talking to everyone today. I’ve got a guest on. First guest is just happens to be my brother, Stephen Enloe Welcome to the podcast.
Stephen: Hey, how’s it going? I’m really excited to be here. I’ve been wanting to see you start doing this for a long time, so it’s really cool.
Matthew: So a quick note on what Cultivator Connections is. Cultivator Connections is a podcast that’s supposed to be sort of a way to share knowledge as growers, answer some common questions. Cerca is our mission statement is to help people grow food closer to where they live, learn, work and eat. And we have a lot of questions that come up from our customers online. from our in-person service customers and just from friends who want to get that green thumb a little bit greener. And so I’m gonna be answering a lot of questions. Hopefully in the upcoming episodes, we’ll have some guests on who are talking about interesting things that they’re growing, but it’s about building community, building knowledge, having resources and tools available to anyone who wants to grow their own food.
Stephen: And I think one of things that is really cool to me about this whole thing is that Cerca is so community based and you guys have so many awesome people that are truly a part of your actual community that will be on as guests but also just contributors of this whole thing.
Matthew: Yeah, one thing that we talk about is that we’re kind of trying to take an unconventional approach to a for-profit business. A lot of our friends and collaborators are non-profits in the urban farming world. We’re in Los Angeles here trying to grow food in the city. a lot of organizations get a lot of traction as a non-profit organization. But being a California benefit corporation, which just means that we’re a for-profit, but we’re for-profit and for good, it’s just how we file when we set up our company. so what we’re trying to do is take a different approach to the competitive sort of idea that if you’re not working together, then you’re a competitor to be defeated, we found that all of our successes come from collaboration. Someone may, we might be trying to get the same customers, but realized that we both serve slightly different niches. And yeah, so everything that’s worked for us so far has been flipping that upside down and saying like, what if we didn’t see people as competitors first, but collaborators first?
Stephen: Yeah, exactly and I feel like it from my understanding of what you guys have already done so much of there have been people who have been a quote-unquote competitors that you guys have ended up both benefiting more than you probably would have separately Just from realizing that you could work together and serve the people the same people but in in different ways.
Matthew: 100%, 100%. A little bit about myself. I studied environmental science and a lot of my focus was on marine biology, specifically marine ecology. And what you see is that the most resource efficient ecosystems have a lot of symbiosis where there’s mutually beneficial relationships. And that’s been a huge part of getting started. I want to take a second because this is the first podcast to just talk about Cerca and what we are, who we are. Like I said, where our mission statement is to help people grow food closer to where they live, learn, work and eat. Cerca about the name, Cerca Cultivation is, Cerca is Spanish for close or near. And when we were trying to figure out what to name this company, we were thinking local. You know, like getting people trying to be more familiar with their food. And our, co-founder, Kevin Dutton, his mom was from Peru and he grew up speaking Spanish in the home. And he was like, closer, closer, closer, cerca. And cerca is actually Spanish for close or near. And we were like, that’s it. That embodies our mission. So. What I like to say is we’re helping people grow food closer to where it’s going to get eaten. That’s a bit of the sustainability side of it. We’re trying to grow closer to our food, meaning that we have a better understanding of the types of effort that goes into it. So maybe we can, when we’re considering the type of labor that goes into our food or the farmers, can just carry that empathy for. the hard work that they’ve put in and a little bit of the gratitude.
And then we’re trying to grow communities closer by collaboratively and collectively growing food together, that practice of bringing communities together. that’s a little bit about our ethos and like who we are and just a second about like what we do. So, Cerca cultivation.
Stephen: is a place where you can go online and you can buy live seedlings. You can find healthy, strong, live plants available for sale. And me as the horticulture operations side of everything, I’m the one with Kevin as well. He’s my other horticulture right hand. I’m the one who’s doing a lot of the menu curating and making the final decision about what actually is available. So, you know, what time of year should you grow basil? And we’re serving the whole country. So we’re trying to make, you know, the healthiest basil plant available online to the consumer in Florida, where maybe that’s our only, the only people who would be served well with that basil plant. Whereas in like the Northeast they’re thinking this time of year, which it’s fall when we’re shooting this, just beginning, they’re thinking what’s gonna be able to tolerate the cold. So that’s plants like kohlrabi and like your our squash plants are gonna be in the summer. But we’re thinking broccoli’s, cabbages, things that are more used to that colder climate. So yeah, we’re trying to, we also often say we’re trying to meet growers where they’re at. That’s kind of the closer part. And that means like serving as many people as broadly as we can. selling plants online. And then we also have in-person services in the Los Angeles Orange County area, which is design. consultation, maintenance, education, and installation. So that’s who we are, what we do, what we’re thinking. and And I think one of the cool things about that too is from like an outside perspective that has seen this company grow along the way. First off, you guys do a great job at all of those things.
Like you guys really, you stick to your mission and you carry it out just one step after another, which is really cool. But also it’s interesting just to like even take a peek inside of like the authenticity of just like, I hate that word kind.
Matthew: Thank you.
Stephen: but like the the through line of everything being true to that same mission even in that you guys don’t refer to your uh… menu or your your products so to speak as your product lineup or you think you can you refer to it as a menu because at the end of the day you guys are thinking about the end user every step of it you’re thinking about this being food growth you’re not thinking about this being products to sell you’re thinking about this ads. what it actually means to the customer, which is I think a really important part of this whole community building and bringing this closer. It’s not just for the sake of like, we have this idea for the marketplace. It’s really truly, we see this need that we want to see in the world. We want to see it be met and it’s serving that.
Matthew: And that’s like, that was intentional from the beginning. So I’ve mentioned Kevin, Kevin Dutton, my business partner, my other plant dude. And David, while he doesn’t always identify as a plant dude, David Crowley is our other co-founder. He is the ethical business side of everything. So Kevin and I were just like, let’s start a nonprofit, give a bunch of plants away. But when it comes to that intentionality of taking things step by step by step, David, coming from a business background and being passionate about making a positive impact in the world. And from his starting point, it was he wanted to know where his food came from. So he started looking for people like Kevin and I, who had done a lot of growing our own food and helped other people in the past. And he was like, hey, you guys know what you’re doing here. Our missions, our personal missions, are totally aligned. Let’s refine this into something and make it something that can go so much further. And we went through that really refining process at the beginning. And it’s still being refined, but we try to stay true to that mission. We all believe it so wholeheartedly that we can make a really positive impact in the world by doing this type of work.
Stephen: No, it makes total sense. And I think that’s honestly that’s even kind of reflected with a lot of this now. I mean the fact that you guys are going through these questions that we’re going to be going through I think is just helpful. It’s a way for you to just again listen to the needs of people who are actually getting this food and growing this food with you guys and showing them how to do it a little bit better. Sometimes even some of them might just be fun questions. it seems like in this little list of ones, but yeah, I like that a lot.
Matthew: And the thing is there’s always room for improvement. I’m growing, I’m learning every day. We grow 15,000 plants per week, shipping all over the country. But I’m always working to refine to make the healthiest, strongest plants that can take the long journey through the mail and get to our customers as healthy as possible. And that’s a learning process. I come from, like I said, a science and plant background. But I’m learning that part of gardening is the planning and the, from us, a business side, and there’s so much planning that goes into it to be able to pull this off. So, yes, without further ado, let’s get into some questions. Stephen, do you want to throw me some of the questions that we were looking at earlier?
Stephen: Yeah, it’s really cool. Yeah, let’s get into some of them. And I really like this too, because I also, I’m not a plant dude. I’m not somebody who grows. I’m somebody who has done this alongside you for a long time and mostly kind of just watched on the sidelines. But a of these are honestly genuine questions that I’ve had in the past and that we’ve also, you guys have gotten from other people. So the first one that we have is what are the main advantages, maybe even just what are the main differences of buying seedlings versus starting them from seed especially if you’re a beginner gardener.
Matthew: So these some of just for some context, some of these questions are aggregated. You know, we assembled the main theme of several questions that we’ve gotten. So it’s like, when we think about the advantages, it’s more like it’s more like there’s a different place where every grower is on their journey of of their horticulture gardening skills. And it’s about finding the right fit for your garden. So Stephen, if you’re getting started, you’ve been seeing me do this for longer than I haven’t. But if I were to give you advice, so your question is, should I buy, how would you say it? Should I buy seeds or buy seedling tomorrow?
Stephen: Yeah, if I’m a beginner gardener, if I’m a beginner gardener, should I start my seeds from scratch or should I buy seedlings from someone like you guys at Cerca Online?
Matthew: Honestly, this is my honest opinion. I’d say both. It’s worth giving it a try yourself and stumbling through it. And then also having the success, almost like bottled success in a way, the tail, the head start, so that you can see, okay, this is an example of.
Stephen: That’s really cool, yeah.
Matthew: what it’s like for when I get my kale. You know, like I’ve got kale seeds, which is packet of kale seeds is maybe three bucks. And then our plants are, depending on if you get them bundled or whatever, it’s 250 to $3.
Stephen: So about the same price because most people aren’t buying a packet of seeds and growing an entire packet at once.
Matthew: Right, right, right. You would have to have a lot of space to do that. So your intention is to grow a couple of kale plants or maybe just one, one successfully. It’s your first time. So if you have the seeds that you’re starting by just throwing them on the ground, great way to start, putting them in a little bit of soil. And sometimes people will even use like toilet paper rolls or egg cartons. If you get it,
Stephen: Yeah, exactly.
Matthew: Right the first time, I’d say, bravo, you’re very lucky. But I didn’t get it right my first time. My first plant that I grew was a jalapeno that I got from a packet of seeds. And I like babied it, babied it, babied it. And I got a couple of jalapenos, but that was enough for me to get started. And then, yeah, I kept it under a little grow light in our kitchen.
Stephen: Yep. I remember that.
Matthew: then finally brought it out and put it in the soil. But at that same time, was a teenager and I was spending like, was cashing in bottles to go get plants and seeds. I would recommend if you’re getting started, try both and know that any plant that you kill is a success. It’s not that you’ve failed because you’ve learned. You’ve only failed if you don’t try again. And just because you haven’t tried again yet doesn’t mean that you won’t try again. So you haven’t even failed even still. You still can go and be successful if you do that second or third or fourth plant. So that’s a case where it would make a lot of sense to buy a seedling as a beginner. And sometimes it’s even like you just try the seeds and try that, stumble your way through until you see the success.
Stephen: That’s really cool.
Matthew: that’s a good way to go. Or you just do the seedling and see what it’s like. And then you’ve got you got the bug and you’re like, okay, cool. Now I want to upgrade my skills to get to the next level, which is I want to grow from seed. That’s one path that I’ve seen some folks go. Another reason why you would do seeds versus let’s let’s just say seeds instead of a seedling is. Sometimes there’s ways to get free seeds. can get free seeds from lots of libraries, have free seed banks. You can talk to friends and families who have been gardening. Most of us have a drawer full of seeds from a couple of years ago. And we don’t really want to do them. Maybe we’re bored with them. Maybe they’re older seeds and the germination is going to be low, but it’s enough. to mess around with. so you can get free seeds. can even, from a compost pile, squash will just pop up out of the compost pile. You’ll find a tomato plant that’s just growing off to the side. Yeah, we call, in the garden, we call those volunteers. That’s plants that, that’s plants where the seeds have.
Stephen: A rogue, a rogue gourd.
Matthew: sort of floated off wild and seeded themselves. So that’s one reason. Or if you’re trying to have like a lot of control at a little bit of higher level, you’re trying to have a lot of control about the specific varieties and hunting for that really special seed, this is for me personally, when I’m gardening, I’m looking for that. really, really special in my garden. I’m I’m asking people for this one seed because I knew they grew it out. I was like, let that one go to flower so I can get those seeds. Like, please, please, give me those seeds. I have a couple. just got given this, this corn, this beautiful corn from Jonathan Glandez. And this is a corn that they’ve been cross breeding for like the past seven years.
Stephen: Wow.
Matthew: And this is a masa corn. So it’s made, it’s a starchier and it’s more intended for like tortillas and rather than a sweet corn, which is what we’re used to buying in the store. But yeah, so friends at this point, friends will give all sorts of seeds. This is a pea. I think it’s similar to a. lima bean, but it’s indigenous to this area, to Southern California. It’s a crazy purple good though. You see that? It’s a crazy dark purple legume. It’s called Ayocote Morado, a purple runner pea. So I think it might be more like a broad Roma bean, actually. So yeah, at a certain point, you’re really hunting for that special stuff because you’re.
Stephen: Yeah, I see that.
Matthew: You know, your time and your effort is really valuable. Your time in the garden, you want to make the most of it. So that’s a case for seeds. Now on the seedling side, when you’re getting a live plant, like from the nursery or from an online seller, sometimes it’s because the seed is really hard to germinate. So that’s something like maybe an indigo plant. Like I bought some indigo plants online this year. They’re really hard to start from seed. And so I went and I found a small business in, I think it’s Georgia, that grows indigo. And that’s for making dye. So maybe the seed is really hard to start. Similarly to some of the peppers that we do, some of like the really hot peppers. the germination rate is so low and it takes so much care just to get that one seed to come up that sometimes it’s easier to just say, it’s not worth me like, you know, spending the next eight weeks trying to get this one like ghost pepper seed to come up. If there’s one that’s ready to go and I know it’s really hard to do, then maybe I’ll just go with a reputable supplier and. get that particular seedling because it’s hard to find or unique or rare and hard to start as well. So that’s a reason why. And then, yeah.
Stephen: Well, so also it seems like if you’re buying all these packs of seeds and each of these is the cost of a seedling or more sometimes, know, especially for the crazy varieties, it almost seems like you could save money by just getting a variety of seedlings from a place that allows you to buy a big variety of them even.
Matthew: Definitely, definitely. A packet of kale seeds probably has, if you’re lucky, maybe 250 seeds in it, a small packet from the store. You can get any amount of seeds. I buy my seed by, this is arugula from Everwild seed that I buy by the pound. So you can get any amount of seed. But you’re probably thinking, okay, I’ll get a packet of seeds for three bucks and I’ll get 250 kale plants. Yeah, but you only want a couple of kale plants at most. if you’re trying to get more options and maybe some stuff that you haven’t tried before, having a place like.
Stephen: Because most people are doing an order from you guys. They’re not just getting an entire order of 12 plants that are all kale. They’re getting a few kale, they’re getting a few of these, a few of that, right?
Matthew: Mm hmm. So we have our bundles are a collection that we’ve curated that so leafy green, a leafy green bundle, a veggie bundle, an herb bundle, and a lettuce bundle. And then we have specialty seasonal bundles as well, like roots and shoots is has like beets, carrots, peas, and, and beans in the roots and shoots. So we’ve curated bundles. And that’s about.
Stephen: Thanks.
Matthew: half of our customers, or half of our plants that go out actually go out as bundles.
Stephen: And then the other ones are usually also in variety though or they usually just one singular type.
Matthew: Yeah, yeah, it’s usually a variety and then people are putting like two or three, our average order size is 18 plants. And it’s usually someone will put two or three of their favorites. like, for instance, like borage is an edible flower that we sell and someone might put five borage and then the other 18, I guess that’d be the other 13 plants. are just picked from our menu, you know, to get a little bit of everything. On the rare occasion, we get someone who’s just like, I want all arugula. And I think that the purchasing sort of like the, the planning garden planning behind that is, a different perspective. I think that the common person who’s coming onto our website is looking for breadth for their garden.
Stephen: That makes a lot of sense for whatever people are looking for. mean, no one’s usually trying to just eat like five massive arugula salads every day for a week when they harvest.
Matthew: Except for our brother. We have an older brother named Chris. And he can eat five massive arugula salads every day for a week.
Stephen: Well, that’s true. That is very true.
Matthew: So there is that type of person and we have that often available for you. adding breadth without having to, know, the seed packets is more than you would need. And seeds have a finite life cycle. You can keep seeds longer in your refrigerator if you keep them really dry and pretty cool, but the dryness is the most important thing.
Stephen: which refrigerators are never dry places. They’re prone to moisture.
Matthew: Yeah, they are. are. But they’ll dry out your bread. But you can keep seeds longer if you keep them refrigerated. But eventually germination rate, which is every seed packet when you get it new has a guaranteed germination rate. And the idea there is just given common gardening, most gardeners would be able to get 75%, 80%, 85% germination of the seeds that they’re buying, but that drops off over time. So keeping seeds the same seeds year over year. Like I’ve got seeds from when I was a teenager and some of them are fine. Like the germination rate hasn’t dropped off, but some, especially like special peppers and certain squashes and like those ones the germination rate can drop off. And you just, reason why I’ve got thousands and thousands of old seed packets is because I only wanted a couple. Yeah, so adding breadth and then the last big category, we had a friend of ours who come by yesterday and he loves gardening. His name is Matt. He works at the last company that David and I used to work at and he gets his seedlings from us because he’s got a really, really busy job. He can’t… I was like, you know, like, do you want to take some seeds? Do you want to say I was asking him because he knows how to do it. He worked with us. Do you want to take some seeds and some of our trays to grow yourself? And he’s like, I don’t have time.
Stephen: That makes a lot of sense.
Matthew: Yeah. no, just not having the time. And then the last big one, which is the, the people who we serve in, in LA, like our bulk orders, because we do like, grown to order for more than three trays. those folks are usually coming to us because they’ve missed the, they’re, they’re feeling like they’re about to miss the window. on the season. So that seasonal timing is really important. If you start your tomatoes too late, then you won’t get that vegetative growth, all those leaves on during spring so that by the end of spring, they’re pushing flowers and fruiting. So like, for instance, for me, I started my favorite tomato, our ox heart beef steak. It’s a sort of like a heart-shaped tomato. It’s called cordobo. I started it a little bit late and I only got like maybe 10, 15 tomatoes off of it. Whereas if I would have started it earlier in the year, I would have probably gotten like 20, 30, at least off of that one plant. Yeah. Just seasonality is something that you can’t control because plants respond to only a few stimuli. They respond to. moisture at their roots, temperature at their roots, temperature swings and humidities in the air, daylight hours, and the fluctuation between daytime and nighttime temperatures. So those are the main stimuli that plants will respond to, and that will trigger different sort of hormonal responses for whether it’s going to be doing more vegetative growth of. of the leaves to just become a bigger plant or to put flowers on to reproduce because it’s getting towards later on in the season. Yeah, so timing.
Stephen: That makes sense. So I think that we kind of… Sorry, didn’t mean to cut you off at end of that. Anyway, we kind of went over this, but just to make it a concise answer, well, can somebody be looking at cost-wise doing seedlings versus starting from seed, if they’re a beginner specifically, and they’re wanting to just do like a home gardening?
Matthew: No, no, you’re good, you’re good. Yeah, so there’s a few different comparisons. There’s like, what if I were to just go to the grocery store, right? That’s always gonna be cheaper than, it feels like you should save money gardening, but because you don’t have the type of infrastructure of large farms and those efficiencies that come with the larger operations, you’re almost inevitably always going to, I would say that there’s probably a case to be made that you could save a little bit of money on certain things if you’re really, really, really, trying to. But for the most part, gardening is about the experience and the joy of being able to grow your own food and eat what you produce. So.
Stephen: But I think that because you grow so much of your own food at this point, I feel like you might be a little bit detached from this too, but there is a certain factor of to get that quality of food, depending on where you are, you A, might not even be able to get that high of a quality of produce, or even, I mean, we’re in Los Angeles, and to get the same quality that I would get from you, I’d be going and buying food.
Matthew: huh.
Stephen: from a farmer’s market or from like an Erewhon or from like a really high end grocery store on the best day where they just got their produce. But those are the only options for me to get as high of quality of produce as I do from you, from your farm or your seedlings.
Matthew: That’s true. That’s a good point. Where like, if you’re considering like a head of lettuce, the cheapest head of lettuce that you can get at like a Walmart, it’s like, yeah, it’s gonna be hard to beat that even in like the setup cost of a garden alone, whether it’s a hydroponic system or soil, you’re talking a few hundred dollars to get started, unless you’re going through a lot more like work and effort and time and expertise to… rehabilitate like damaged soil or unless you’re really lucky you’ve got beautiful soil and you just happen to be able to access it for free in which case lucky you. But when you set up the garden and like the cost of like when will it pay itself off it’s it’s it’s hard to compare the final produce apples to apples no pun intended. It’s possible, but that’s not really the point. I don’t think that’s really the way to think about it per se. At least that’s not the way I would think about it. Because the value isn’t in terms of pounds of arugula, you know, the value is in the process of growing the arugula. that’s like, I just, believe that so wholeheartedly that.
Stephen: Yeah, exactly.