HVADC Client: Weeds Belong

Ask Stayc St. Onge about mugwort and she’ll tell you she didn’t seek it out. It was already there, doing what mugwort does: Growing where it pleases, offering what it has. Most people try to get rid of it.

For St. Onge, founder of Weeds Belong, mugwort is an invitation: to look differently at what grows without being asked, and to consider what it might be offering.

“Weeds are common, abundant, and generous,” she remarked. “We don’t necessarily have to go seeking outside our own bioregions for food and medicine support.”

The herbalist and longtime film and television makeup artist lives and farms in Livingston Manor, in Sullivan County, where she cultivates medicinal herbs and creates small-batch tinctures, oils, balms, and elixirs. In the off-season, she works in the city to help support the farm. Along the way, HVADC helped her sharpen the business side of what began as an intensely personal calling.

From Set to Soil

St. Onge hadn’t planned on becoming a farmer.

For more than two decades, she worked in film and television production, spending long days on set while studying herbalism on the side. Then the pandemic shut the entertainment industry down almost overnight. An opportunity to leave the city and help steward land at a nonprofit children’s camp in Sullivan County changed everything.

“I had already been studying herbs and making medicine for years, but now I had this chance to work with plants from seed,” she recalled. “I started building beds, trying different techniques and just observing everything — the seasons, the animals, the fungi. It lit my brain up.”

She eventually developed nature-based programming for children at the camp, teaching plant identification, foraging, and medicine-making. She didn’t want to leave. So she spent years working small parcels wherever she could find them, figuring it out season by season.

This year — her sixth growing season and her first with a larger parcel — she’s ready to scale up. She cultivates medicinal herbs including St. John’s wort, valerian, calendula, elderberry, tulsi, and elecampane. She also forages certain plants in the wild, many of which happen to be called weeds. That distinction is central to the message of Weeds Belong: that the plants most often dismissed as unwanted happen to be some of our most important medicines.

She also maintains a spot at the Livingston Manor Farmers’ Market. It’s a foothold, and increasingly, a home.

“Starting from scratch is kind of what I know how to do,” St. Onge reflected. “But it’s going to feel really good to scale up a little and stay rooted somewhere for a while.”

Learning the Business End

Growing the plants turned out to be the easier part.

St. Onge came to HVADC through the CCE Sullivan County Beginner Farmer Program. HVADC supports the CCE program with business technical assistance. HVADC paired her with Business Advisor Brian Zweig, who helped St. Onge with financial projections, funding opportunities, and long-term planning. At first, the process overwhelmed her.

“I just wanted to do what I was doing in an organic way and hope I could manage it all,” she said. “Finances are not my strong suit, and trying to make financial predictions was a real struggle. I thought I had to be really rigid, and that totally stressed me out.”

What shifted things, was realizing that flexibility and planning weren’t opposites. Zweig helped her see that a solid business plan could reflect real growth while still leaving room to adapt.

“Stayc is very passionate about her mission for Weeds Belong,” Zweig said. “Like many entrepreneurs, the challenge is to translate that passion into a plan to accomplish her mission. By developing her business plan and financial projections, Stayc was able to get a better handle on what it will take to create the business that she envisions.”

St. Onge stopped seeing a business plan as a constraint and started using it as a tool. She returns to it often, and it's changed how she talks about Weeds Belong to potential funders, collaborators, and landlords.

“Clarifying the business plan helped me think about goals and purpose in a concise way,” said St. Onge. “I feel good about having something solid to represent me.”

Her definition of growth isn’t purely financial. It’s about reaching more people while keeping the work sustainable and the mission intact. The business plan, she said, helped her put that into words for the first time.

A Future Rooted in Community

This season, St. Onge hopes her Saturday market table becomes an entry point for conversation.

“I really love talking to folks at the market and hearing about what needs aren’t being met,” she said. “Having this space is a great introduction for folks to the conversation of plant medicine.”

She’s also hoping to find time to hold a few local workshops on plant medicine. The idea of putting down roots — literally and figuratively — feels like the next right step.

HVADC supports agribusinesses like Weeds Belong at every stage through its Business Technical Assistance programming, offering one-on-one individual consulting services to accelerate their growth and increase their chances of long-term success. Learn more at https://www.hvadc.org/incubator-without-walls.