AGRICULTURE
PRODUCING PRODUCE
BY RACHEL INSWASTY
Vin Bellezza, owner of Vin’s Food Forest Builds, started the business in the backyard of his quarter-acre suburban home.
Backyard garden grows into new
lifestyle and prosperous business
“As humans living in the modern world, we have
lost valuable knowledge of growing practices,”
Vincent Bellezza, owner and operator of Vin’s
Food Forest Builds, says, “But once you get it,
you get it.”
Bellezza moved to the Fort Lauderdale area from Pennsylvania
in 2011. After moving to Port St. Lucie in 2017, he
and his growing family began to explore gardening in their
backyard in 2019. Bellezza and his wife, Amanda, were becoming
more aware of the many extra ingredients added into
seemingly regular grocery-store food products.
ANTHONY INSWASTY PHOTOS
With this new knowledge, they felt empowered to pivot
toward a lifestyle that included eating more whole foods and
growing their own fruits and vegetables. His goal was to replace
as much of the store-bought food as possible with their
home-grown produce.
“At some point I was starting to realize that the food on the
shelves was full of artificial garbage,” Bellezza says, “I have a
7-, 5- and 2-year-old so I was becoming more aware of what
we were eating and buying from the grocery store.”
Before this new lifestyle shift, Bellezza was a licensed insurance
16 Port St. Lucie Magazine
agent until 2015 but stayed in the industry as part of >>