Darnestown's Good Life Farm A Dream Come True For Owner

It was 1995, and Larry Ledgard’s dream since he was 10 had just been put up for sale.

Right across the street from his seven-acre farm, a 40-acre plot had been put on the market for the highest bidder. A winning bid later Ledgard’s lifelong dream of running his own commercial farm had been accomplished.   

“There were about 12 or 15 serious people at the auction,” said Ledgard, better known as “Farmer Larry.”

“It boiled down to me and one other person, and I had more stamina,” he said.

The newly acquired farm, which he named Good Life Farm, began as a vineyard, and for the first seven years Ledgard and his wife would use a few acres to grow grapes. However, grapes had just one harvest per year, and they found the same recurring problem: deer.

“Deer would come in one night and eat everything you worked all year for,” said his wife Laura Ledgard who runs the business side of the operation. “And to have a once-a-year harvest, we couldn’t produce enough to market to make any money.”

The pair decided to switch to vegetables, and they planted as much as they possibly could: string beans, lima beans, beets, broccoli, cabbage, carrots, cauliflower. You name it, the Ledgards planted it.

Larry’s experience with farming prepared the Ledgards for the change to vegetables. He had grown up on a 10-acre farm on Seneca Road, one acre of which was devoted to vegetables, he said. He helped with the farming as well as raising Black Angus cows, and even raised a calf on his own as a 4-H project at Bullis Junior High School, he said.

“I was pretty much its mother,” he laughed. “It was probably between the ages of 10 and 15 I realized I wanted to go into farming.”

But his passion for computers initially won over his love for the fields and pastures. After graduating from Chaminade University in Hawaii, the Ledgards began an IT business called Logical Concepts.

The two also owned the seven-acre Spring Meadow Farm, but Larry wanted to go back to commercial farming. “When the farm came up we just bought it,” Laura said. “We sold Spring Meadow Farm within a year.”

Larry’s zeal for local farming has since spread throughout the community, making residents aware of the importance of locally grown vegetables over those shipped from around the world.

“It’s a critically important thing,” Ledgard said of buying locally grown products. “In the 1950s we went to large-scale farming and it worked for a while. But now, with how high the prices of gas have become, we have to go back to the local level and create a model that combines the two.”

To help inform the community, Ledgard is opening an educational center called Farm Fun. The center will feature a miniature golf course highlighting a vegetable on each hole, a flower maze and a forest maze that explains the tree types on the property, some of which are 200 years old.

“We’re really fortunate here in Montgomery County that we’re still an incredibly vibrant, green community,” he said. “It’s incredibly important for the future, for all of us, to understand the value of locally grown products.”

To try some of Farmer Larry’s crops, call the Good Life Farm at 301-968-7987 to get a subscription for the fresh produce that the Ledgers have grown that week. Unlike some farm stands, the Good Life Farm is not one where customers can pull up and buy produce. A box of pre-ordered vegetables will be prepared each week based on each customer’s subscription.