As the spring equinox approaches, the Peoa farm reflects on mistakes, growth, and what it means to become regenerative
“We’ve learned a lot,” co-founder Dr. Babbie Stern said. “We’ve made a lot of mistakes.”
It is not the kind of thing you expect to hear from someone describing a project she built from scratch. But at Healing Seeds, the Peoa-based farm where regenerative agriculture, botanical medicine, and community education converge, honesty about the path is part of the point.
As the spring equinox approaches, the team is preparing hoop houses, starting seeds, and planning for another year of produce, botanicals, and programming. But the season also carries something less visible — a chance to take stock of what the farm has been through and what it is becoming.
Healing Seeds took shape in the early years of the pandemic, when Stern and her husband and co-founder, Lessing Stern, left Park City in search of a more rooted way of living and working while staying connected to the mountains they have long called home. The vision was expansive from the start: a place where regenerative farming, botanical medicine, healing work, and education could exist under one roof.
But building something that large, that fast, during a period of national uncertainty came with real costs.
Because the farm launched during a time of supply-chain disruption, the early advice was to install as much infrastructure as possible and grow into it later. That gave Healing Seeds room to develop — but it also meant staff arrived at a large, demanding property with more work than any one person could realistically finish in a day.
“There have been a lot of times in the history of the farm already where it’s been a total mess,” Stern said, describing early questions about structure, staffing, and long-term sustainability. “We weren’t sure how to make it work.”
The farm went through difficult transitions. Team changes. Hires that were not the right fit. The kind of organizational turbulence that can quietly erode a mission if it goes on too long. At the same time, Stern said, many dedicated people helped shape what Healing Seeds was becoming, even when the road was rough.
More recently, she said, strong management and a clearer trajectory have helped stabilize the operation and foster greater cohesion in its work.
“We are trying to be regenerative in every sense of the word,” Stern said.
That line is more than philosophy. At Healing Seeds, regeneration has always meant something broader than soil health — it extends to the systems, relationships, and rhythms that sustain a project without exhausting the people inside it. And if the farm’s early years tested that idea, the arrival of another spring offers a kind of answer.
In Stern’s understanding, winter is a season of stillness, evaluation, and dormancy — a time to gather lessons, compost what didn’t work, and hold onto the seeds worth carrying forward.
“The spring is the wood element,” she said. “It’s when life emerges, literally and energetically, from the ground.”
At Healing Seeds, that emergence is concrete. As the equinox nears, the team begins planting in the hoop house, organizing crop plans, and starting seeds in the nursery that will later move into the field. On both the produce and botanical medicine sides of the operation, spring is when the season truly begins.
“It’s go time,” she said.
There is also a ritual built into the transition. Stern said the farm typically marks the equinox with a biodynamic preparation and a small seasonal gathering — a way to honor the return of light and the life rising back through the land.
“Even if it’s small,” she said, “it really is a celebration of life returning.”
That language of return feels earned at Healing Seeds — not as a metaphor, but as something the farm has lived. The past several years have made clear that building a place like this takes vision, adjustment, patience, and humility. The mistakes have been part of the process. So has the learning.
And as the equinox turns the season again, the farm offers its own quiet proof: that what rests can return, and that growth often begins below the surface long before anyone sees green.