Matt grows herbs the way some people keep journals: as a record of what matters. He believes in soil before anything else - compost, biochar, cover crops, and amendments added only when they serve the life beneath the surface. The work is quiet and deliberate. The soil answers back with plants that are fuller, sharper, more alive than what passes for herbs on the shelves.
It started, as these things often do, with a garden and a need to feel better. He was around thirty when illness pressed him to look at food differently. Food from the ground tasted different - cleaner, truer, like health itself. Gardens became a kind of recovery. Chickens followed. Then less land, less time. What remained was the question: how can I still do this? Out of that question came a drying room in Maine, partnerships with local growers, and the beginnings of The Maine Ingredient.
He calls his approach “better than organic,” though it feels less a label than a direction. Compost and cover crops, the quiet labor of microbes - these are his materials. Matt believes good soil is not a given but something you build slowly, with attention and patience. The goal is simple: make the soil alive, so the plants can be alive, too.
His process is slow, almost reverent. Herbs are dried at low temperatures, by hand, until they hold their color and scent - until they still feel like themselves. The work values detail over speed, care over scale. The result is something local, trustworthy, alive; a product that remembers where it came from.
One day, Matt hopes for land of his own, a place to deepen the biodiversity of a field and let the soil teach what comes next. Until then, there is the work - steady, deliberate, rooted in care. His hope is that people taste these herbs and recognize, even for a moment, what real food can be.
