Talk about a change of venue.
In just a few years, Traci Nally went from being a well-known and active member of the bar in Champaign County to being a gentlewoman farmer with muddy boots, insect bites on her arms, dirt under her fingernails and some gorgeous vegetables and flowers. Particularly her zinnias.
For decades, Nally worked at her own law firm with a group of other formidable women including Champaign Mayor Deb Feinen, was vice president of human resources and occasional libel-preventer at The News-Gazette, and was a senior manager at Attorneys’ Title Guaranty Fund.
But a series of fortunate circ*mstances, including a decision by Nally and husband Bruce Kelso to buy a home with a 2-acre plot on South Prospect Avenue in Savoy, changed almost everything. The land not only had trees and open space, but also its own well and a greenhouse that the previous owners used to grow hybrid orchids.
Thus was born The Urban Gardens Company, a strictly family affair where Kelso mows the property and drives the company tractor and hauls compost, wood chips and other items; brother-in-law Ric Weibl maintains the irrigation system; and sister Terri Nally helps grow veggies. Traci Nally is president of the company and its primary grower, fertilizer-applier, aphid-killer, caretaker, sales manager and display coordinator.
“I’ll never have a payroll. Never. I’ll never hire anybody,” Nally said. “I know how payrolls go. I’ve had too much of that.”
She said she still does a little bit of legal work out of her home, but her full-time job — 40 hours a week at this time of the year — is managing the farm. She grows garlic, asparagus, tomatoes, cucumbers and okra. But her real love is flowers: tulips for sale in March and April, peonies in May, and all sorts of colorful flowers, fine and full, the rest of the summer and fall.
There are sunflowers, snapdragon, celosia, dara, bachelor button, sweet William, strawflower, iris, daylilies, honeywort, statia, lambs quarter — all sorts of colors and textures and sizes and shapes — plus that spectacular rainbow of zinnias.
That, Nally said, is where the money is.
“We found out that you can’t make any money on vegetables,” she said. “People want perfect vegetables, like at Schnucks or County Market. You can have an ugly-looking tomato that is the most delicious thing in the world but it doesn’t look like that beautiful-looking red tomato that tastes like cardboard from Schnucks.
“So you find when you put out vegetables that the imperfect ones don’t get bought. So there is a whole lot of waste,” she added. “When you think about it, your lost inventory in the vegetable market is huge. I don’t know how grocery stores make it. Plus it’s a lot more work getting vegetables together for sale. Fortunately, you can charge more for flowers than for vegetables.”
At The Urban Gardens Company, you assemble your own bouquets from the flowers provided on the little table under the little tent. Twenty dollars a bouquet. Strictly cash (or checks or Venmo) and carry. There is no customer-service desk (unless you’re lucky to run into Nally when she’s harvesting her crops) and no one to make change. Hours are 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., Wednesday through Sunday.
Tomatoes are 50 cents apiece, no matter the size.
“I don’t want people to have to weigh anything,” Nally said. “It’s strictly the honor system here, so you have to make it easy to calculate and easy to pay. Customers don’t pay any taxes. I pay the sales tax.
“People will say, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t have the right change,’ or whatever. I just say ‘This is the honor system, man. You can come back later with the right change. Or the next time you come by for a bouquet, you just pay double.’ I wouldn’t know anyway. I’m busy in the garden.”
If that’s not enough whimsy, there’s the shed on the property behind a skyline of sunflowers. On it, Nally has already painted a large copy of Andy Warhol’s 1964 piece “Brillo Box (3 cents off)” and a replica of the Banksy graffiti artwork “Love is in the Air,” in which a masked man who appears to be a terrorist is seen throwing a bouquet of flowers, not a Molotov co*cktail.
But wait, there’s going to be more. Next up are two pieces by the Japanese artist Yosh*tomo Nara, who specializes in drawing cartoonish little-girl figures, some mean, some humorous. Nally saw a Nara exhibit last year in Austria and was perplexed.
“After I went through the exhibit with my friend, I said, ‘That’s art? Why does this guy deserve to be exhibited in Vienna?’” she said. “But since then, it grew on me, in my head. I like this guy. This guy is good. It’s funny, it’s interesting. So I’m going to do a couple of his.”
That likely will be in October, once the growing season ends and before the tulip- and garlic- planting season begins.
“This is busy. And it’s complicated. Farming is complicated,” she said. “You have to think about the plants and the weather and the irrigation system. You have to plan. And since I have a small retail operation, you also have to think about the retail.”
She said with a laugh that she isn’t in it for the money.
“The retail operation isn’t the reason I’m out here except that I want to be in the black,” Nally said. “I have been in the black, just barely, for the last two years. But that’s only because I don’t count my labor or anyone else’s labor.”
She said she enjoys watching the birds and insects and animals who also live off her bounty, and appreciates watching the property transform from bare ground in February to a lush wall of green with splotches of yellow and brown and red and other hues mixed in. She turns a youthful 70 later this year and plans to keep farming.
“I think I will, as long as I’m healthy,” she said. “And this keeps me healthy. It’s so important to not sit behind a desk all day long. And just getting outside is good for you. So that’s a good reason to keep doing it, even though it’s a lot of work.”
And the zinnias. Don’t forget those zinnias.
Tom Kacich's column appears weekends in The News-Gazette. He can be reached at kacich@news-gazette.com.
