Ration & Seed

05/31/2026

Awesome!! Can't wait to see what the next chapters look like. Crushin' it down there! Rustic River Outfitters x Smiley Face Media

05/14/2026

FRIDAY, MAY 15th!!!🍃🙌✨ This will probably be our last Market on Main selling plant starts for the year, so don't miss out!

Help us re-coop the expenses of starting thousands of plants, and take home some unique varieties that we promise, you WILL NOT find in the stores around here.

Can't make the market and still want starts? No problem! We will be planting the homestead gardens this weekend and will surely have "extras" for sale next week. Location TBD (since our house is up a bit of a hidden and potentially intimidating-if-you've-never-been-there driveway, and toting around THOUSANDS of plants is a back-breaking nightmare, we've got some decisions to make) 😅

Appointments are honestly our favorite - not just scheduling wise, but because we can really dial in the plants that are perfect for YOU! ✨ Stay tuned - cold hardy produce is coming in strong and that's exactly what you can expect from the next months of Ration & Seed!

05/11/2026

SOLD OUT Aji Mango! 🥭🌶

Perhaps it's because I favor taking more pics of my favorite varieties when I keep saying, "Look at one of our favorite varieties!" but... look at those! The color is just as intense as the flavor. Quite a bit of heat and honestly tastes very mango-y! 🔶

The Aji Mango is a highly productive Capsaicin baccatum pepper variety, originating from South America (Peru/Colombia), known for its bright orange, 2–3 inch pods and sweet, fruity, mango-like flavor. It is a medium-hot chili, ranging from 100,000 to 150,000 Scoville Heat Units (SHU), making it about the same heat as a habanero! 🥵

Plant Height: Plants are bushy and tall, often reaching 3–5 feet, and usually require staking

Production: Highly prolific, producing dozens to hundreds of peppers per plant!

05/09/2026

Come on down!

05/07/2026

Sweet Aji Dulce!

My favorites are the ones with a bit of a kick - which we think of more as a true Aji Dulce - however, it starts to get a bit complicated. Really, purchasing pepper seeds can be in and of itself quite complicated... as is saving seeds for true varieties, and pronouncing the names correctly! Even really good pepper seed producers can get it wrong... and we aren't 100% sure that isn't what happened here with our "sweet aji dulce" seeds last year 😅 which is why we won't have any of this variety for sale as plants. But how cool is that plant shape!?

I did start a few to grow myself though, because the plants are gorgeous and the peppers are great for pickling! The Aji Dulce plants we are selling are true to the mildly spicy, sweet, smoky Caribbean flavor this genus is known for 🌴
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From Wiki "AJI DULCE":
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Ají dulce, ají cachucha, quechucha, ajicito, or ají gustoso is any of a variety of sweet perennial peppers found in Latin America and the Caribbean. It is most widely known in Cuba, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic and Venezuela, where it refers to a specific native variety of Capsicum chinense that is related to the habanero but with a much milder, smoky flavor. In the English-speaking Caribbean, it is known as seasoning pepper and is essential to a variety of traditional dishes.
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In South American Spanish, ají [aˈxi] means 'chili pepper' and dulce [ˈdulse] means 'sweet', so the name translates to 'sweet chili pepper'. Cachucha is the Latin American Spanish word for 'cap', so ají cachucha means 'cap chili pepper' and refers to its cap-like shape. Gustoso means 'tasty', so ají gustoso translates to 'tasty chili pepper'. Ajicito is the diminutive of ají and translates to 'little chili pepper'.

05/05/2026

Inside again we go! Weeee! 🍃
Plant sale IS HAPPENING this weekend!! 🎈
Stay tuned for an event post with times and details!

05/04/2026

Circling back to the first time we publicly mentioned Ration and Seed! We named "Ration and Seed" in 2020! This is the video we made (video via Smiley Face Media 🫶) in May of 2021 about the whole project... several months before we actually closed on the building 😅 (that'll be a story for another post).

A lot has changed since then, but our plans (aside from a few inevitable details and timelines) have not.

Before we got here we were pretty well screwed. We had been out of work for longer than we could manage (LA closed the studios, my storefront, and all in-person production well before the shutdowns... and all of our clients pulled their future bookings and contracts due to their own uncertainties).

We had been living off of cans of artichoke hearts and counter-thawed bags of frozen peas (because that's what was available, and what we could afford). Both of our cars broke down - Rick's engine block cracked and the computer fried on mine. There was no unemployment options, PPP funds, none of that. No guarantees that we weren't going to lose our studio apartment (rent relief hadn't happened yet - and never happened for us).

As my dad always says, "Necessity is the mother of invention." Or as we say, "Necessity breeds innovation" - both phrases apply. As much as that time period tried to break us, it also lit a FIRE. My self talk was, "You gotta fight, and you gotta think."

There was always this thought in the back of our minds that something bad was going to happen in the cities - that's where our house comes in. Also a story for another post. But thank goodness for a few friends and family that helped us cover the gas money and car rental to even get out here. We had been through plenty of tough times before, but this was the real deal. Before we left, we sent out THOUSANDS of cold emails about "contactless content creation" and booked a great client the DAY we arrived in Indiana! Then another. And so began the changing of the tides.

Kitchen 17 was also forced to shut down in Chicago - but Jennie and I had been discussing launching frozen pizzas for about two years leading up to this, and she was ready. She did it. And it worked.

I've tended to shy away from this part of the story, not really wanting to put emphasis on the fragility of that time period. Nope nope nope. I'll always be proud of how we pulled it all together - from getting out here with negative thousands in our account (still paying for the apartment and storefront rents and utilities with no income... so fun), to purchasing the Herald Press building. It took a lot of all-nighters, but we did it. We fought for it. We earned the money. We got the loans. We did the hard work. And now, it's all coming together!

This is "Kitchen 17 - WE ARE EXPANDING" by Rick Amieva on Vimeo, the home for high quality videos and the people who love them.

05/03/2026

Spoon Tomatoes! 🍅

At only 1/4 to 1/2 inch, these little babies are so fun to pick and eat! They've also been a fave selection from you fine folks, so I'm going ahead and doing ONE LAST seed start 😅

It's kinda late to be starting seeds, but also... it's fine. The varieties we grow are all indeterminate - they will continue flowering and producing through the whole season! Spoon tomatoes are considerably more spindly plants than the large, hearty heirlooms and do well planted close together and supported by tomato cages (unlike most of the big boys who outgrow those cages in 2.5 seconds). This will be our fourth succession of seeding these, and I've got a few left that are already several feet tall. COME ON WEATHER DON'T DO THIS TO ME 😆😅🤪

Who else is absolutely antsy to start getting the warm-requiring plants in the ground!!? 🌶🍅

11/08/2025