Two moms, home grown pumpkins, and a friendship that blossomed into a business
The summer the cactus bloomed in Kelli’s front yard in Oklahoma City for the first time, the boys went a little wild.
The prickly pears came on heavy, and the two families’ sons hauled them off by the bagful. They juiced them, then made prickly pear lemonade and prickly pear cookies.
“They were farming,” Andria says, laughing.
The boys weren’t the only ones who noticed the fruit. The neighborhood’s security guard pulled over one morning and asked if he could pick some because his wife made the best jam, he said. A few days later, jars prickly pear jam showed up on Kelli’s doorstep.
That’s the kind of world Kelli and Andria have built as The Soil Sisters, their landscape design business in Oklahoma City. Plants get passed along and handed down, and so does the knowledge about how to grow them. Everybody ends up with a little something from someone else.
Kelli and Andria’s friendship might have blossomed building the Soil Sisters, but it was actually planted through a classroom email when their sons were in elementary school.
Their sons were in class together, and Kelli, who’d just recently moved back to Oklahoma from Los Angeles, had volunteered as a homeroom parent to meet people. She sent out a call for help with a slime-making project. Andria wrote back that she’d help, and asked if the boys could get together, so they met up at Edgemere Park. The kids had a blast, and the moms hit it off.
“We just liked each other from the beginning,” Andria says. “We realized we had so much in common.”
More than they knew at first. Coincidentally, both grew up in Kansas where farming is part of everyday life. Kelli’s family farmed more than 2,000 acres of wheat, corn and soybeans there. To this day, her parents still keep a big garden and cattle on 20 acres.
“Similar to here, when you grow up in Kansas, you can’t not be part of farming” she says. “You’re exposed to it your whole life.”
Both also spent years away from the land in demanding careers. Kelli worked long hours in California until wildfires and COVID sent her family back to Oklahoma at the end of 2020. Andria worked in tech in Austin. On weekends, she and her husband grew vegetables from seed in little backyard greenhouses.
“That was our escape for the pressures of corporate life,” she says. “I finally realized I would much rather be outdoors.”
Kelli and Andria worked together at an Oklahoma City garden spot before deciding to go out on their own. This fall is their third season as The Soil Sisters and their first growing pumpkins on Kelli’s parents land for a booming pumpkin display offering on porches mostly in the core of Oklahoma City’s urban center.
The pumpkins they grow are not only the looks, but for eating as well. There are deep green and blue varieties, round white pumpkins and orange and white pie pumpkins. There are Cinderellas, which taste a little like sweet potato, and a Japanese squash called Shishigatani. Because nothing is treated, all of it can be eaten.
For Soil Sister clients who love to cook, they tuck extra edible pumpkins into the display. Then they record a short video naming each variety.
Growing their own also showed them how much goes into a single pumpkin.
“You think about all the hands it goes through,” Andria says. “It has to be grown, picked, shipped everywhere. And it takes a ton of water.”
Ask them why the business works, and they don’t talk about pumpkins or flowers or any specific landscape design they poured hours into. Instead, they talk about each other.
“If I was doing this by myself, I would have quit years ago,” Andria says. “But we can joke around and get through it together. There’s friendship behind it.”
Being moms also shapes how they run the business. “We have the same mentality. Our families come first, our kids come first,” Kelli says. “If a child is sick, one calls the other: ‘Can you take that meeting?’”
For now, they plan to stay a duo. They’re at capacity, and the work depends on their own hands.
They also give some of that work away from time to time. They recently designed a school garden for Classen SAS, wrote the grant to pay for it and recruited parent volunteers to help plant it. The garden includes an edible space for the community, and they’re working toward a seed library.
Andria says plants remind her of the people who gave them. When she moved recently, she dug up her irises to bring along.
“They’re literal reminders of other people in your yard,” she says. “Of your friendships.”
Oklahomans trust the people who grow their food, and they want to know more about where it comes from. The Soil Sisters teach that one pumpkin and one client at a time. They show people how much work goes into growing food, and how much better things grow when people share, not only the plants themselves, but the knowledge and wisdom from years of hard work.
