Consider a Foodscape 

When Luci Imbach moved to Nantucket in 2018, she brought with her a love for food, agriculture, and the systems that connect them. After studying environmental studies and food systems at the University of Vermont, she went on to work at an island farm, where she learned how to grow food. At the same time, she was helping a friend with landscaping and quickly realized how big that industry was on Nantucket. That’s when the idea clicked: What if she merged the two — food and landscaping — and started her own business? 

“I saw the opportunity there,” she says. “I knew there was no one doing foodscaping on the island, and I figured, why shouldn’t I do that?” 

Luci launched Island Harvest Vegetable Gardens in 2020, combining her skills and studies with a desire to demystify growing food at home  — “making it simple, and just helping people see the beauty of growing their own food,” she says. 

She started with about 10 clients, and six years into business she has well over 40. It’s a small team — just her and two others — and they offer a full range of services, from garden design and construction to maintenance at every stage of the growing season. 

Each spring, Luci and her team send clients a Google Sheet listing everything they grow. “And that’s really mostly every veggie,” she says. “Nantucket is pretty cool that way — it’s a temperate climate. It stays a little cooler in the summer and a little warmer in the winter, so we have a long enough season to do most everything.” 

Clients fill out the sheet, and then Luci’s team creates a crop plan, which is a two-dimensional view of the garden, mapping out what’s going to be planted and when. “And we just execute that based on what the client wants to grow,” she says. Lettuce, tomatoes, and cucumbers are among their most-requested crops, and they do corn for many clients, too. “Pretty much any veggie you can think of, we grow,” Luci says. “And we also do a little bit of perennial stuff, like berries, cane fruit, blueberries, and fruit trees.” 

Island Harvest’s clientele is as varied as the services they offer. Nantucket being Nantucket, many clients have the resources to simply enjoy having a thriving vegetable garden without tending it themselves. Others are more hands-on — people who love gardening but don’t always have the time or confidence to manage it. Luci’s team handles the maintenance while some clients harvest on their own. Then there are a handful of local clients who prefer to do as much as possible themselves, working with Island Harvest for a season or two before taking over the gardens entirely.

“It’s everywhere from people who just want a little bit of help and want to get their foot in the door of growing food and feel that confidence, to people who just like seeing their garden out their kitchen window and want it to be taken care of,” Luci says. 

While most of Island Harvest’s work is residential, the company also partners with local businesses, though those partnerships are still few. Last winter, they built a vegetable garden for Something Natural, the popular sandwich shop on the island. Luci says she’d love to collaborate with more local businesses in the future.

The work follows a steady seasonal rhythm. The planting season starts in early May and goes into June. “Gardens are full of plants and ready to go. With some clients, our services will just stop there,” Luci says. Some opt for a midseason visit in August for a quick cleanup and fall planting. For full-maintenance clients, the team tends gardens weekly or biweekly through early October. By November, it’s time for fall cleanup. “We clean all the annual plants up and we put a layer of compost onto all of the beds,” Luci says. “We test the soil and make sure it doesn’t need anything, and that compost kind of insulates the soil for the winter and keeps it healthy.”

During the winter, Island Harvest builds garden beds and other structures. “I usually take some time off in January or February,” Luci says. “And then by March, we’re doing a few builds and starting up in the greenhouse.” She grows most of her starts in a hoop house on the property where she and her husband live. “I’m able to grow pretty much all of our starts out of here,” she says. “I rely on local nurseries for herbs and flowers and perennial plants, but mostly all of the annual veggies are coming out of [the greenhouse.]”

When it comes to easy versus difficult plants, Luci says it depends on the time of year. Fruit cane and blueberries are “pretty easy to grow. The only challenge with them is figuring out a place to put them because they do take up space, and with our deer population and bunnies, everything needs to be fenced and protected, from birds too.” Lettuce and tomatoes are most requested: “Lettuce is really easy for most of the year, except for the heat of summer … Tomatoes are more labor intensive, a lot of pruning, a lot of fertilizing, and they get disease easily. Nantucket is a maritime climate, so it gets really humid and foggy and kind of wet here, and that causes fungal issues.”

Luci started Island Harvest at the right time: during Covid, when people were thinking more about having food close to home. Six years in, the excitement continues.

“I think that’s kind of one of the cooler things about this job — seeing all different kinds of people, all different kinds of socioeconomic backgrounds. No matter who  you are, whether you’re a master gardener or you’ve never planted anything before, anyone who sees food being grown and picks a tomato off a plant and eats it is just psyched about it. I think it tickles something in our human brain. People gravitate toward growing food,” Luci says. 

But successful gardening takes experience and trial and error. “I studied this in college, but they didn’t really teach us how to grow a tomato or a cucumber. There’s just so much information out there, on the internet, on YouTube, and not all of it is good information,” Luci says. “So being able to talk to someone and help them kind of filter through the bad information and learn the good science-backed information to grow in their garden — that’s very satisfying for me.” 

One common mistake novice gardeners might make is planting too much of one crop at once. Succession planting, planting continuously throughout the season, prevents that. “You have to keep in mind the crop you’re planting and how long it takes to mature,” Luci says. “If we have a four-by-eight raised bed for lettuce and plant it all at once, that’s going to be more heads of lettuce than anyone knows what to do with.” Succession planting spreads it out so the garden space isn’t wasted, and neither are the crops. “That’s a big one we practice a lot, and I think is important in a home garden where it’s such a small space — when you’re trying to get as much as you can out of it,” Luci says.

Looking ahead, Luci hopes Island Harvest can help with food insecurity. “We’re trying to figure out how to get more food that’s extra to people who need it on the island,” she says. Donations to the Nantucket Food Pantry could be one option. “There are clients with really large gardens that sometimes can’t use all the food. Or they go away for vacation and they don’t want it to go to waste. How do we make it easy and worth it for us to conveniently give food to people who need it? There’s a big food insecurity issue on Nantucket that a lot of people don’t think about.” 

Luci sees “huge value” in giving back to the community, an area where there could be opportunity to do more. But through every foodscape she creates, she brings people one step closer to the land, to broader environmental stewardship, and to a deeper connection with the meals we share.