Happy 4/20 From Our Family Farm at Lost Paradise Organics!
Welcome to our first official Lost Paradise Organics letter!
It is a pleasure for us to share with you our journey and experience within the cannabis space. This is a very special year for us and our company and we’d love to share with you why!
As a couple, as parents, and as partners in multiple businesses over the years our time together has been nothing short of incredible and we are very grateful for it.
When Josh and I were younger and got married our main idea was to form a life in my country of origin in Costa Rica, so we built our first house, created our first tropical garden and yes we also grew our personal cannabis plants on top of our roof!
Our love for cannabis has been always a common shared passion.
From Costa Rica we used to love traveling to Jamaica since our honeymoon took place there, so every year it was like a pilgrimage to us and we planned to make it happen if we could.
There we learned a lot about how the use of cannabis is so connected to spirituality.
This is the place where we developed our interest for hashish making, like the best kind, with real human interaction while the plant was actually alive and by touching it, this way the resin was collected to then be scraped from the palm of their hands, our all-time favorite type of artisanal hash.
In 2007, after 7 years of having our home base in Costa Rica, we took on an invite from a dear friend to come to Humboldt County, almost as far up north as you can go, Titlow Hill, up to the summit point, the view of the mountains and the ocean from up above the clouds is one of the most breathtaking views we had ever seen. And our plans varied a little, now we were Enchanted.
It was the freedom of living far away up in the mountains, the people, the culture they kept well and alive in secrecy, and we became part of it, these were glorious golden times. And our jobs as trimmers evolved into helping manage and grow at a farm producing only small-batch, pure, and organic medicinal flowers.
This new journey we embarked on taught us a lot, incomparable to our previous experiences, like growing plants on top of our roof in Costa Rica or seeing the vast open fields in Jamaica, some located right in front of the church filled with a praising crowd of all ages, this was truly a mighty sight, but Northern California stole our hearts.
And so it happened that our time up in the Humboldt hills transformed our lives. From then on we had two lives, our secret adventure up in the mountains and our tropical setting that started to become more distant as we spent more time in the hills every year.
In 2010 our daughter was born, what a joy for us!
By 2012 the land where we live today found us. As far south from our original Humboldt home all the way to the county line on the sweet Mendocino side.
We finally settled full-time in our new Mendocino County home in 2015. Right on time for us to start our recreational legal journey in Cannabis.
Believing strongly in the medicinal values of cannabis (since Josh has been a patient since he was 17 years old, now 47), we will never regret our decision of following the legal path, it has been an honor for us to openly present the value this plant has to offer to humanity in its purest form.
And this year 2024 is very special to us since October 10th will mark the six year anniversary of Lost Paradise Organics formation and 17 years since we touched California soil; on July 10th our daughter will turn 14 years old and on October 2nd Josh and I will celebrate our 25th anniversary!
They say that time flies and it certainly feels like it does. We hope all of you are being kind to your own selves and others creating this way the harmonious, peaceful and safe environments we all want to live in.
We found joy, safety, and a strong welcoming community with values that aligned with who we are in our beautiful Emerald Triangle and we will forever love these sacred grounds.
Wishing you a happy and full of bliss 420!
In love,
Josh Chestnut & Yeins Ortega
Lost Paradise Organics