Spade & Clover Gardens
Clover may cover the fields of John Warren’s farm on Johns Island, but that’s not the only reason he chose the name Spade & Clover Gardens. It’s a nod and wink to the suits in a deck of playing cards, because farming is one of the biggest gambles you can take. After 10 years, Warren’s gamble has paid off.
The Johns Island farm actually does grow clover as part of its strategy to help the fields regenerate between seasons, but it grows so much more. Food enthusiasts have come to rely on Spade & Clover for magazine-beautiful produce and specialty items like turmeric and ginger.
Warren started out as a sculptor in New York. Fed up with the vagaries of life as an artist, he decided to farm, starting at a cousin’s farm in Washington state and later moving to a Rhode Island farm, figuring, “How much worse can it get?”
He laughs now at his naivete and says he more or less learned by making mistakes at those farms and, later, at Joseph Fields’ farm and, in 2013, at a property provided by Limehouse produce as part of Lowcountry Local’s Dirt Works Incubator Program.
“I was their first applicant. I probably didn’t have enough experience to start a farm at that point, but I wasn’t going to do anything else, so I stuck it out through the first difficult years,” Warren says. “I was wasting a lot of energy doing things but not knowing how to do things. I was overworking to make up for my lack of knowledge, and just kind of trying to meet the expectations of the incubator farm and whatever restaurants I had engaged at the time. I was trying to make reliable money at something unreliable and my idealistic views of farming met up with reality.”
Even learning the hard way, Warren is a successful farmer, having expanded from the initial acre-and-a-half to about nine acres, with two to five producing crops while the others rest and regenerate. He provides produce to James Beard-nominated chefs at The Ordinary, FIG, The Grocery and Butcher & Bee, among others, and to healthy grocers such as Veggie Bin. Vegetable lovers can also get their fix at Spade & Clovers’ CSA or that of Lowcountry Street Grocery.
Warren says he would choose farming all over again, but he’d do it smarter this time because it is not an easy choice.
“It’s very hard on the body; I would encourage anyone who wants to go into it and going to do the labor, to really know what they are doing,” he says. “You just have to get through those (initial) mistakes. I think that’s why you don’t see a lot of new farmers, because that first period of time is so hard.”
