Living Greens
Living Greens was created in 1980 when 3 sprout loving women got together in a joint venture. Each contributing $25.00, and free labor, we chose to use my backyard & screened porch as the growing area. I was living in a small duplex at the time, 4 blocks from the ocean. We purchased seed, laundry tubs for harvesting, lumber for the shelves
from the article in Mother Earth News, and window screen to cover the wide mouth opening of the jars. The gallon glass jars came for free from the local sub shops. Within 6 months, we split up over a heated argument about women’s rights. Elaine, who had the car, took Melbourne and also the Sunseed Food Co-op. Laura & I shared the Cocoa Beach accounts. Laura soon told me that I could have all of our accounts if I would supply her with sprouts. That was easy! I kept the name, Living Greens, since I had thought it up. Several months later, Elaine quit growing. I went to all of the accounts and got them to agree to buy from me. Then I got a car, and delivered twice a week all over Brevard County. I loved being the sprout lady of Cocoa Beach.
A six foot privacy fence kept the little paradise growing 2 crops of sprouts and greens weekly. I enclosed the back porch and hung laundry tubs over the side to maximize the space. I eventually had a funky greenhouse with built in draining racks and 4 laundry tubs. The north and south sides of the fence alternated growing the sunflower, buckwheat & wheatgrass, depending on the time of year. Large garbage cans with 
triple sprayer heads installed in the lids grew 20+ pounds of mungbean sprouts each. I kept very busy every day growing my sprouts, harvesting, packaging & delivering. I often said it was like raising perpetual babies, always daily care to be given. I could never skip a watering. With over 150 gallon glass jars full of growing sprouts, the life of the sprouts depended on a consistent schedule. An entire day would be spent harvesting. This entailed repeatedly filling the laundry tubs with water, then emptying 6 jars into each tub.
Swishing the sprouts around, gently shaking loose the hulls, skimming the hulls off the top, then removing the floating sprouts and placing them into a tray to drain. It was meditation-like for me. I would lose myself as I did the same thing over and over and over… first the alfalfa, then the clover, then the spicy mix with radish, then the mungbeans. And then I would cut the trays of sunflower greens & buckwheat lettuce… and then I would be finished, only to start the harvest again 3 days later. There was something to do every day.
I sold my first Living Greens in 1985 and after immerging myself in a 30 day drug & alcohol recovery program, I moved to Tallahassee, attending the Community College there for an Associates Degree and then went to massage school. Graduation from both came by 1987 and I moved my family to Atlanta where I worked full time as a massage therapist and did not grow another sprout or green for 7 years. It was moving to Lakemont, GA to be an innkeeper at a Bed and Breakfast that got my sprouting passions re-ignited. The decision to garnish the plates of the weekend guests with sunflower greens and clover sprouts with sliced tomatoes reminded me of how I enjoyed having live, sprouted foods in my diet.
Within a year of taking on that roll, the inn was sold and I relocated my younger daughter, Julia, and myself back to the Cocoa Beach area in 1995.
The second Living Greens, sprout garden, market and eatery opened in November, 1998 after a year of remodeling a small house in a residential/commerical area of Merritt Island, FL. Two of my dear friends, Karen Etheridge, who I had met when I had Living Greens 10 years earlier, and Laurel Woods, who worked with me the entire time Living Greens was open for business in Merritt Island, helped from the beginning to create the menu. We loved learning together by reading recipe books and trying them out, deciding if we wanted to offer the creation on the menu. Laurel loved making the desserts and cookies and her creations were delicious. We enjoyed offering a colorful menu of pestos, pates, dehydrated pizza or burgers, fresh smoothies & juices along with all the fresh 
grown sprouts and greens. The organic produce which we sold kept us making beautiful salads & wraps Mondays through Saturdays. We started to offer a ”dining in” by reservation for a gourmet RAW meal. Featuring a new raw recipe book, we would create the dinner with recipes from that book. With the limited seating of 24 people, it was always an intimate evening. We had guest speakers, such as long time raw foodist, Doug Graham, of the 80/10/10 fame or Brenda Cobb, Director of Living Foods Institute in Atlanta, GA.
I offered classes which would spread out over a month of Saturdays, each week learning a new addition to living and raw foods. They would take this information home and return the following week with what they had grown, then learn to harvest. By the end of the series of classes, they had implemented into their daily & weekly routine the growing of sprouts in jars, greens in trays, soaking seeds & nuts for pestos & pates, making fresh smoothies & juices, knew how to make rejuvelac, raw pizza crust from the spent, sprouted wheat berries, fresh dressings and cookies & crackers in the dehydrator.
It was a very busy, time tedious business. Everything was perishable. And I was growing the business with no concrete plans. In hindsight, locating it beach-side would have been to our advantage. Then the tourists would have found us also. Owning the property would have increased the value of the business, but, it was not for sale. Figuring it out was a lot of fun, developing the menu, greeting the customers, etc. But, it was very work intensive. And then the Department of Agriculture told me that we needed to test the sprouts for e-coli contamination before we sold them. The cost was not something we could afford to do, and I stubbornly only wanted to use my own sprouts, rather that purchase some from another grower. Also, I had just become a grandmother, and wanted to spend more time with my grandson. So, I closed the business in November of 2002, sold off some of the equipment, and moved my daughter, grandson and myself back to my hometown for the next chapter of my life.
