By Kristie Snyder, GreenStar Marketing Staff Bespoke Apothecary’s story started ten years ago with words no one ever wants to hear: "You’ve got cancer.” Determined to beat her disease with a holistic approach, April Hart and her husband, Bill Krovetcz, began a journey of education and experimentation. Their discoveries put her breast cancer into remission and gave birth to a business, offering to our community the natural, health-supporting products that sustained April during her recovery. In the quest to eliminate toxins from every corner of her life — diet, cleaning and other household products, skin care — April discovered that many brands she was relying upon contained carcinogens. She began developing her own natural recipes, which she first shared with [...]

By Kristie Snyder, GreenStar Staff For Surik Mehrabyan, farming is a second career — one that has allowed him to put down roots in the Ithaca area. Raised in Armenia, and with an academic background in physics, he came to Cornell in 2003 to work at the Wilson Synchrotron Lab. When the project lost funding, his family decided they weren’t going anywhere. A long-time backyard gardener, Surik joined the Groundswell Incubator Farm Program, becoming their first graduate in 2016. Now still in the process of purchasing a plot of farmland, he grows vegetables, fruits, and fruit trees at his home in Ithaca and on various small leased plots around town. Surik’s beginnings at Groundswell, before they’d installed cooler facilities, [...]