Christy & Jordano — Queen Creek
Christy and Jordano came to me with a very specific dream: a regenerative food forest and community event space where they could host farm-to-table dinners, supply local restaurants with hyper-local produce, and feed the community with any surplus.
They'd already started on their acreage in Apache Junction — a garden, the beginning of a fruit tree collection, chickens, architectural plans. But the math of establishing a working orchard in the Arizona desert from zero was overwhelming. Years of babying bare root trees through brutal summers before their first harvest. The dream was possible. The timeline wasn't.
Then they found my listing: a flood irrigated acreage in Queen Creek with over 100 fruit trees that had been growing on part of Dr. Alexander Chandler's original citrus orchard for nearly twenty years.
The trees were already there. The water rights transferred with the land. Everything they'd been trying to build from scratch was already built.
"Six months after closing, that yard hosted the first GLEAN Sanctuary harvest day — dozens of volunteers picking thousands of pounds of heritage tangerines for the St. Mary's Food Bank."— Camille Fairbanks, on the Christy & Jordano transaction