It all started back in the late ‘80s when a woman by the name of Donna Bonner got a job at Santa Fe Greenhouses. “I was the Perennial Lady then,” she said recently in a phone conversation. “After awhile more and more people kept asking me to do gardening for them and pretty soon, I left the Santa Fe Greenhouses to do gardening fulltime.”
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“I got down on the ground and mixed it all by hand. Then when I started using it, the plants said, ‘Yum, yum,’ and so that’s what I called it,” she said. “Then other gardeners told me I should sell the mix, but it never occurred to me to put it in bags. I was just putting it in the soil.”

But the gardens where she used her experimental mix began showing a new vitality, and the owner of one garden offered some venture capital for her to go into business. Soon she had trucks bringing loads of the different ingredients to a big barn where she bagged it. She did this for about three years. Then when she went looking for a good compost, she came into contact with Greg Birkenfeld, a man from Texas who was just getting started in the compost business. He hadn’t yet named his company Soil Mender®.
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