Farm Profile: Persephone's Garden partnership
An organic partnership Intensively Market Farming with Chris Theis and Christy Wynkoop
by Guest Author, Jen Grant
We’re featuring Persephone’s Garden in January 2026, because they are the source of all of ARCD’s Backyard Garden program’s plant starts. During this dark and cold season, as the days lengthen, Chris and Christy get their greenhouses going and start thousands of seeds for clients all over the region. We’re so glad they continue to fit us into their program! They will nurture baby brassicas, swiss chard, lettuces, peppers, onions, leeks, celery, dill, herbs, tomatoes, eggplant, melons, until they are ready to hand out to our roughly 50 household backyard gardeners.
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Before Chris Theis started market garden farming, he was a plastics engineer and worked in IT for 18 years. During a sabbatical from that work, he realized he wanted a change. He wanted to become a farmer. He spent the next eight months researching farming methods to decide what path he wanted to take and to learn how to farm.
The methods he learned then, which serve as his model now, are based on Canadian market gardeners using a version of French intensive methods for market gardening.
French intensive gardening is a method that Parisian gardeners have been using since the 1500s. Plants are grown closely together and strictly managed. Farmers obtain high yields by using raised beds and maintaining a tight schedule of succession planting and crop rotation. This is the foundation of Chris’ first farm, Opossum Bottom Farm. They sold at Johnson City Farmers Market and other channels.
His operation started in 2018 with a small piece of property and a handful of low tunnels and has continued to grow since then. In 2024, he and his new business partner, Christy Wynkoop, owner of Timshel Farms, merged to create Persephone’s Garden and they are expanding still further this year with the acquisition of new land.
“It’s a very intensive method. In each bed we’ll have 180 cauliflower and broccoli plants. We do tomatoes with one foot spacing—one foot down the row with four feet on the sides. So, we’ll get 200 tomato plants in total in a 50-ft tunnel,” Chris says.
Chris and Christy grow wholesale starts custom for family farm customers all over the region. In the 2020’s the regional powerhouse greenhouse company Banner Greenhouse closed, leaving a wide open gap for this need.
Persephone’s Garden also gets hundreds of their starts into the ground, to raise into wholesale quantities of vegetables at a 50-unit minimum to food hubs in North Carolina and Virginia,. Most of those vegetables end up in local restaurants in those areas. Chris says that recently that diversity included “35 different varieties of lettuce, 200 varieties of tomatoes, nine varieties of eggplant, and all the specialty greens like arugula, komatsuna, mizuna, mache.”
They grow in several properties, higher and lower elevation. “Our main bottomland is really wet, so we don’t do a lot of root crops. They tend to do bad because it’s a creek bottom, but we’ll do some radishes and turnips, because they’re basically above-ground, and kohlrabi, cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, and all kinds of greens.”
Chris is looking to expand to more local restaurants in Tennessee soon, so keep an eye out for Persephone’s Garden greens and veggies at your favorite local restaurants!