By Sustainable Solano

Bless’d Blossom owner Hannah Hartley inspects trellised cucumbers / Photo credit: Lan Ngo

Hannah Hartley’s face lights up as she gestures at the trees and soil around her and talks about regenerative farming, growing, and sharing the harvest and love of the Earth with her community.

“It’s a perfect design. From the soil community to the local community,” she said.

Hannah runs Bless’d Blossom, a regenerative market garden now in its third year on 1 acre she leases at Be Love Farm in Vacaville. The business brings together her love of farming, of growing healthy, nutrient dense, novel produce, and educating and serving others. It is a reflection of the connection she wants to have with the health of the soil and stewarding its care for the future while feeding people.

“For me, farming has always been a lifestyle — having the passion to cultivate garden veggies, and to pick them fresh at the utmost ripest moment for those around me and myself have been a cornerstone of my life,” she said. “It has naturally evolved into my career.”

Sustainable Solano is naming Bless’d Blossom as the recipient of our 2026 Doing Good business award. Hannah’s commitment to Earth Care and community makes her stand out. As does her beautiful heirloom produce and edible blooms.

Hannah specializes in greenhouse growing — pruning plants to grow vigorously, and trellising vertically to make the most of a small space and increase yield. In a 100-foot greenhouse, she can fit eight rows of tomatoes. That equates to more than 600 heirloom tomato plants towering more than 12 feet high. She envisions a future with market gardens built on the foundation of healthy soil in each city, which could revolutionize the food system.

Hannah has sold at farmers markets and farm stands. She also sells directly to many private chefs and local chefs who know the value of local food and seasonal menus, including Backdoor Bistro’s Chef Lindsey Chelini. This season, she has been selling most of her produce to the Food Bank of Contra Costa and Solano. The Food Bank has a grant that helps it pay her organic prices. She picks the food the same day it’s delivered and it stays in Solano County to go to people who need it. That grant has been a huge boon, but it ends in June, and she’s not expecting that it will be available again. Hannah is hoping to have a flower/vegetable Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) subscription soon. She can be found @blessdblossom on Instagram for updates.

Hannah harvests from the Bless’d Blossom market garden / Photo credit: Lan Ngo

Her market garden continues the regenerative farming revolution that Be Love Farm was founded on by original owners Matthew and Terces Engelhart. Regenerative farming places more physical demands on farmers, though once established can yield more through balanced, healthy systems. Hannah notes that weeding by hand is a constant “labor of love” in the regenerative garden. But there are parts that are simple that everyone could be doing as well. Hannah said cover crops are her favorite regenerative practice because they add life back to the soil and help it to flourish.

Hannah met her partner, Terry Ryan, when he was her most loyal customer at the Vacaville farmers market. Their paths aligned, and it turned out he was a regenerative shepherd, tending a flock of St. Croix heritage sheep, grazing them for fire prevention and soil health.

“He is an endless wellspring of inspiration,” Hannah said. “His honorable stewardship of the land and most tender nurturing of the creatures have deepened my understanding in devotion, and in regeneration and animal integration, to such a profound level I did not know was possible.”

At the end of Hannah’s garden season, her partner’s flock grazes on the cover crop, nourishing themselves as well as the garden — and the community of microbial and fungal life under the soil.

As she talks, Hannah returns to community, which has supported her career over the years. A love of gardening and growing started when she was a child in her mother’s backyard garden, lovingly built by her father. The setting allowed both plants and young Hannah to flourish. Her mother instilled a lasting love of nature, while her father encouraged her that any dream was possible if she put her heart and soul into it.

She said her older brother, Holden, instilled in her “the strength to persevere” mentally and physically. She didn’t realize just how much she would need that fortitude: on a midsummer day trellising up another tomato in the 110-degree greenhouse, or going another week of working nonstop during the busiest parts of the season.

And she has Jon, a friend whom she calls her “regenerative farm angel”, who volunteers to help her and offers encouraging enthusiasm on the hardest of work days and guidance on regenerative farming.

Bless’d Blossom greenhouse gardening / Photo credit: Lan Ngo

When she first approached Be Love Farm about leasing an acre, owners Rachelle and Loren Ditmore encouraged her to grow not out of necessity, but out of love. The Ditmores have since moved, but Hannah keeps that connection. She is building a regenerative flower farm in Yuba City, where she will grow flowers for Rachelle’s nonprofit, “City of Refuge,” a shelter providing housing and services for women and children.

She hopes these women can find peaceful restoration amongst the flowers, recognizing “there is still an abundance of beauty, grace and life to be lived. That there is still so much goodness all around us, to be savored and shared.” Hannah has found that divinity of goodness is most accessible in the natural world and most specially in the tender unfolding of the garden; this is her favorite part to share from the garden with her fellow community members.

She continues to have support from Be Love farm’s current owners, Rob and Zina Kirtlink, who have made her feel like a part of the family. Hannah also holds gratitude for her neighbors on Bucktown Lane, who took such tender care in her daunting early years of becoming a small business owner and farming regeneratively.

“They have always consistently shown up to my beginning farm stands and markets, poured so much life-affirming encouragement over me, and they purchased from me (even when I knew they were purchasing too many vegetables to be able to eat themselves!” she said. They check in on her to see what she needs. They are the epitome of what it means to “support your local farmer.”

Hannah grew up in Vacaville, but spent years traveling and overseas, with many of those spent with World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms (WWOOF), a program where participants learn to farm sustainably and provide their labor in exchange for room and board. She felt called home in recent years, and now is putting down roots.

“The lifestyle of farming calls for you to be grounded,” she said. Planting a tree is a long-term commitment. “These plants demand your devotion.”

She has a degree in childhood education, and she can see a future where she’s pairing that love for learning and teaching with her passion for farming. She has future-focused approach and wants to instill that love, and the joy at watching that first sprout shoulder its way out of the earth, in the next generation of farmers. She feels it is her responsibility to not only share her knowledge and joys from the garden, but to also pass on the soil to the next farmer, in better condition than she found it. That is why she remains committed to regenerative farming.

“It’s so profound to ponder the garden,” she said. “The miracle of the garden and life itself.”