I’m so glad I get to share the beauty of the farm with you. I have always been fascinated by being outdoors and growing beautiful and delicious things. I grew up in Dacula, Georgia, surrounded by cows and goats, eating straight from my Dad’s big vegetable garden. As farmers' kids grew up and moved into other fields of work,  farms were sold and Dacula changed from a sea of hay fields and livestock to a land of subdivisions. The old timers out there think of it as before the highway came and afterward. I feel so lucky that my parents have stayed on their three and a half acres out there, complete with horses, goats, chickens and the big garden. 

I love that my kids can go out and experience country life. I love that I don’t have to try to board horses in Atlanta! As you probably can guess just from the farm’s name, I don’t still live in Dacula myself. I moved to Atlanta in 2001 to go to college at Georgia Tech. After graduating in 2005, I began working in the field of behavioral science, conducting research for treatments of symptoms of Autism Spectrum Disorder. Although I loved this work and was good at it, I just couldn’t envision a career path that aligned with the life goals I had. I felt drift less at work and in other areas like hobbies and community. I needed a big change. My anchors at that time were my family and my church. Other than those two things, I felt like I could leave everything else behind to pursue any opportunity that would lead to feelings of challenge and fulfillment. I wanted a new path. 

I knew I needed to shake things up, so I took a sabbatical and hiked the Appalachian Trail. I started at Springer Mountain in Georgia on April 8, 2010 and finished at Mt. Katahdin, Maine on September 12, 2010. It wasn’t 157 days completely in the wilderness, or just over five months of complete solitude. I saw people every single day and sometimes didn’t have any solitude at all. It was 2,178 miles of hard work and perseverance in which I proved to myself that I could do hard things and make sacrifices to achieve a goal.

Hi, I’m Danielle Durgin.

After I returned to Atlanta I went back to work at CHOA, got serious about rehabbing my fixer upper house, got more involved in helping out at church and started dating my friend Greg, from church. The next year we were married and soon I transitioned into full time motherhood. The decade of the 2010’s included 2 moves, 5 kids and diving head first back into my childhood passion of gardening. I grew mostly vegetables on our half acre lot in Lavista Park. Every year I took a little more of the lawn to grow in raised beds. Then I learned a lot by actually growing market garden style in the ground. That’s when it really felt like growing food had the potential of going from a hobby to a career. We began to look for land that I could commute to and farm while we stayed put in our home. Then COVID.  That’s part of everyone’s story in some way, right? 

We had seen our current home and farm a few years before, both in person and as an online real estate listing, but the timing wasn’t right. It was right across from our children’s school. One day, while everyone was learning from home, I needed to go and collect the next packets and library books at the otherwise empty school. I parked in front of the farm. It wasn’t a farm then. It was an older house, one and a half times the size of our current house. With a garage. And a one acre field. I opened the app. I just wanted to see if the pictures from the old MLS were still up. I needed to fantasize before returning to my too full house. I clicked the arrow so the app could find me. One red dot. FOR SALE. The farm. I was nervous to bring it up to Greg, how could mid pandemic be any better timing than it was in 2018? But, with my mother’s encouragement, I brought it up and Greg thought the idea had merit. (Greg’s an engineer, so that’s the regular person’s version of getting excited.) 

So we bought the farm. I never thought the environment could have been as supportive as it was. I love our community, our school, our neighbors. I feel like I’m home and I doubt that will ever change. 

In all the time we were looking for where the farm would grow, I always thought it would be a market vegetable farm growing a diversity of organic food.  There are lots of little reasons that growing flowers works better on our current space. Drainage isn’t perfect, the established oaks are on the south side of the field, and one acre is a really modest size for an organic veggie operation. But the space is perfect for a small flower farm. More than enough, really. And over time my passion for cut flowers has grown too. I like a challenge and I like to learn and refine my process until I have a honed skill. Flowers keep teaching me, and the community of flower growers and lovers in Georgia and in the world is so collaborative and open to sharing that I know I have found my community. I love sharing flowers with others too. Come find our flowers at a farmers market, at the roadside farm stand or ask your florist to include some for your next event. I’m so excited for you to join our local flower community.