And it was gardening—and, more specifically, composting—that brought Arturo and Sarah together. While Sarah was a college student in Tallahassee, she volunteered at I Grow, a community garden designed to feed the surrounding neighborhood. “That’s where I learned about composting,” she says. “Many of my volunteer hours were spent flipping piles of compost, feeling the heat, and seeing how it could be used to grow plants.”

Sarah and Arturo were working at the same Italian restaurant, and Sarah convinced the restaurant owners to start composting. “After our shifts, Arturo and I would pack the compostable items from the restaurant into my Ford Focus and drop them off at I Grow,” she says. “That’s where it clicked for me. I knew that I wanted to pursue a career in the culinary world and I saw how beautiful it can be when it is full circle.”

The couple went on to work in New York State, at Blue Hill at Stone Barns, with Dan Barber, a chef and pioneer in sustainability. Arturo worked in pastry, while Sarah was in the main kitchen, and they both did farm work, including harvesting and packing CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) boxes; they even foraged in the Catskills.

Next, they moved to Orlando, where they turned their backyard into a garden. In their work for Hyatt Regency, they learned how to work a corporate job, how to do banquet kitchen events—sometimes cooking for thousands—and how to execute high volume. At the same time, they were learning by trial and error in their own garden and experienced some great successes with lemongrass, mammoth sunflowers, daikon radishes, peppers, and tomatoes.

When they moved to Memphis, they lived downtown, with no outdoor space of their own for gardening. During the Covid days, they would drive to Sarah’s parents’ house in Germantown and garden in their yard. But then they opened Good Fortune and didn’t have time for gardening anymore. 

Fast forward to July 2024, when Sarah and Arturo bought a house in Cooper-Young. “We chose it because of the incredible backyard,” says Sarah. “Our main stipulation was lots of space to grow things. The very first day we moved in, Arturo rented a tiller and tilled the entire backyard!”

They had beds to plant in before they even had beds to sleep in, says Arturo with a laugh.

They initially fortified their garden beds with a couple of tons of finished compost from Compost Fairy, who they compost with at Good Fortune. “We liked thinking that maybe our chicken wings ended up in our garden,” says Sarah.

That first summer, Sarah and Arturo didn’t do much garden planning. For her pollinator flower bed, Sarah took a “chaos garden” approach and dumped a whole bag of seeds labeled “wildflower mix.”

“As it started growing, I thought, ‘I wonder what flowers these are; they look like basil,’” says Sarah.

As it turns out, they were basil—Italian and Opal basil, in addition to the Thai basil they had planted on purpose. There was a LOT of basil. “Every time someone came over I was like, ‘Do you want to take some basil home?’” says Sarah. “Then we started bringing the excess to Good Fortune to use in our lemongrass mojitos and coco curry bowls.”

For the 2025 growing season, they plan to be a little more intentional. “It’s going to be a big pepper year,” says Arturo. “We’re going to grow peppers for our spice bomb that we use at Good Fortune. 

They hope to get to the point where they always have one special on their menu that comes from their garden. And Sarah still has a vision for wildflowers.

Ultimately, they garden for the pure pleasure of it.

“It all ties into our passion for cooking, because what’s better than the full circle of growing something, nurturing it, harvesting, cooking, enjoying, then sending it back into the earth?” says Sarah.

Good Fortune Co.
361 South Main Street

Stacey Greenberg is the editor in chief of Edible Memphis. You can follow her at @nancy_jew.