Christine Henke and her daughter, Tammy Aaron may not have always thought of farming as their first career choice, but after more than three decades of successfully operating and expanding Henke Farms in Good Hope, neither can think of anything they would rather be doing.

Born and raised in Good Hope, Henke grew up on the Maize family farm — like her parents before her — so when the time came, she naturally married a farmer. After traveling the country for her late husband’s Air Force career, their family returned to Good Hope to the Henke Farm.

Aaron said that she remembers all of the early mornings falling asleep in the back of a pickup truck when they would go out to harvest their potato crops before the heat of the July sun made the work unbearable. These early mornings and the labor intensive work caused Aaron to enroll in nursing school, charting a different path for her future.

It was in 1991, when her father passed away, that Aaron returned to the life that she grew up with helping Henke with the demands of operating even a small family farm and after 30 years there is nothing that she would rather be doing.

“It’s like it gets into your blood,” Henke said “Sometimes as teenagers you think there is something else that you want to do but you just come back to it.”

In many ways, Henke said that returning to a life in the field helped her to cope with the loss of her husband, but operating a farm as two women with only the occasional helping hand from family and one employee — Henke’s son’s father in-law — did present challenges. They quickly had to learn how to perform routine maintenance and repairs on the equipment.

“It was a lot of us just trying to figure out how to work on stuff,” Aaron said.

But they caught on quickly, and what originally started out as growing just enough crops for their family to eat, began to thrive once they began making the drive to the Pepper Place Farmer’s Market in Birmingham in its earliest form in 1999.

“I think when we first started going it wasn’t even Pepper Place then, there were just about four or five trucks there,” Aaron said.

Once Pepper Place grew in popularity Henke Farms began getting more and more requests from local chefs and a younger demographic beginning to seek out locally sourced produce for their meals. This caused them to expand their crops from what was once mostly sweet potatoes — which to this day is their main crop — to an extensive list of produce that rivals most grocery stores. Rather than devote extensive acreage to a single crop, Henke and Aaron choose to plant smaller fields of everything from blueberries and muscadines to squash, peas, peppers and collards.

Relying on farmer’s markets as the primary means to sell their crops became a problem in 2020 when COVID-19 restrictions prevented them attending. But once again Henke and Aaron found a way to overcome obstacles by transforming the side shed of their potato barn into a makeshift storefront. This store became a hit with the community — even if Aaron says she still gets customers who say they are hesitant to use the “honor system” box available for when they are in the fields — and continues to grow in popularity after restrictions from the pandemic were lifted.

“I think a lot of people started growing their own gardens while they were at home, and once they had to go back to work they realized that it was too hard to maintain a garden and a full-time job. But they know we are here and where it comes from, so now they leave the sweating to us,” Henke said.

But farming is more than being able to have something tangible to be proud of at the end of the day, or the satisfaction of providing a community with food for Aaron. While it is all of those things, for Henke and Aaron it is also a way of life and good therapy.

“I don’t know that I’d want to do anything else. I don’t know what it is, but just being outside — there’s just no better therapy than getting on a tractor and going out and cutting up the ground. It’s just you and the Lord on a tractor,” Aaron said.