At Les Verts Living, we’re on a mission to empower anyone anywhere to grow fresh, quality food for their family, friends and local communities.
We strive to be the most trusted resource for grassroots growers everywhere by providing simplified indoor farming technologies and expertise that enable them to grow with success, nourish the people around them and thrive in life.
Our founders
“Les Verts” translates to “the greens” in French. For us, this phrase carries multiple meanings: vibrant and nutritious gourmet leafy greens and a commitment to sustainable, green living. It’s also a tribute to two of our founders, Rachel Green and her father Kerry, who live in Winnipeg, Manitoba.
Both Rachel and Kerry have dedicated their lives to agriculture, cultivating leafy greens not only as food but also as a livelihood. Starting at Wolf Trax, an innovative plant nutrition company, they conducted plant growth trials in a growth chamber located at the company’s R+D headquarters in Winnipeg. After the sale of Wolf Trax, there was a lot of market interest in evaluating new agricultural technologies, so together with former colleague and co-founder Jennifer Bailes, they set up a growth chamber in a container as a testing facility.
Our journey
During this process, they discovered the container could be used for much more than testing purposes and began exploring the possibilities of indoor growing at a larger scale. Jennifer and Rachel, who stood out as young, innovative females in a typically male dominated industry, were determined to make a difference and started researching all the systems available on the market and reviewing the latest innovative technologies being developed. All the options were expensive, overly technical to operate, not suited to a northern climate like Manitoba and required significant capital to operate. And none of them included all the tools, equipment and ingredients they would need to start growing easily.
Our vision
Because their focus was on the growing aspects and how technology could positively impact that, versus technology for its own sake, they found the larger-scale solutions weren’t in line with their values. Large scale, store-bought produce typically gets handled 4-5 times and spends much of its time sitting in trucks.
Moving to a smaller scale model allowed for the freshest produce to get into the local community, significantly reduced labour and transportation and eliminated climate issues year-round.
They occasionally started giving away what they grew to friends and family. It wasn’t long before people in the local community were asking where they could buy their leafy greens. Rachel started selling her produce under a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) model, building a loyal following, with some people driving as far as 30 minutes across the city to pick up their fresh greens.
“Les Verts offers us nice, fresh and different lettuces – and we eat a LOT of salads.”
-Brenda Dubeck
“They were beautiful, just sitting there on the counter. I got more compliments about the lettuce than any other plant in my house.”
-Judy Minkus
Our solution
Over 6 years, they measured the data from all their trials, and designed and refined a growing system that would meet their needs, making connections with other local experts, testing 100s of different crop varieties, lighting (they were the first in Canada to add LED light spectrums), fan systems and fertilizer blends to optimize for growth, taste, nutrition and extended shelf life.
Les Verts Living was born
In 2022, they decided it was time to share their knowledge and expertise with the world. They sought out and brought on additional indoor farming experts and former colleagues, Andrew Vickerson, Oliver Kaulfuss, Victoria Leung, Will Logan and Wendy Riches to help launch a new indoor growing system called the Les Verts Terrace Pro.
The new system incorporates all their learning from over a decade of selecting curated seed varieties and optimizing light spectrums, nutrient blends, growing media and indoor growing know-how.
It aims to decentralize production and increase food security on a local level, and allow anyone, anywhere to grow their own produce simply and efficiently, and even produce enough to share with family and friends, give away or sell to the local community – just as Rachel had done for so many years.
“After growing for so many years and fine-tuning all the equipment and techniques, we realized just how easy it was for anyone to use our system and grow beautiful gourmet produce. We want to share what we’ve learned to encourage more people to grow and have access to fresh, local food all year long.”
-Rachel Green
Ready to start your own indoor farming journey?
Explore our Les Verts indoor gardening systems today.