When Brent Ridge and his partner Josh Kilmer-Purcell first began hosting houseguests at Beekman 1802, their 207-year-old mansion in Sharon Springs, New York, they felt compelled to send them away with a parting gift. And for an employee of craft queen Martha Stewart, as Ridge was until last September, not just any local tchotchke would do. So he began handing out gifts of the creamy, unscented goat's milk soap that helped him and Kilmer-Purcell get through upstate New York's unspeakably harsh winters.

The guests loved it, and the soap eventually found its way into Martha's already delicate hands. A fan of all things unscented, she became an immediate devotee and soon coaxed Ridge from behind the camera, where he served as Vice President for Healthy Living at Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, to make a batch of the soap on her TV show. The rest, as they say, is history.

In the 15 months since Ridge and Martha cooked up a batch of soap for all of America to see, Beekman, named after the local politician William Beekman who built the house in 1802, has blossomed into a vegetable-growing, soap-making, cheese-churning, goat-milking, llama-petting paradise. Ridge now lives at the farm full-time while Kilmer-Purcell commutes back and forth from New York City. While the farm isn’t supporting them in the way their New York City-office jobs once did, it is a profitable business. “For one year out, that’s a pretty big accomplishment,” Ridge says.

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He credits the farm’s rapid success to products that people adore and the appreciation customers have for a simpler, more agrarian time. And then there’s the internet. “The web has enabled us to reach people so much more efficiently than we ever could have before," says Ridge, who uses Beekman1802.com not only to sell the farm's products, but to create a community with a blog and contests asking readers to do things like post gardening memories.

"It's very difficult to succeed as a farm but we're succeeding because we're putting so much effort into the web. That's not something most farmers can spend time doing. Since we have backgrounds in that area, it comes really easy to us." Ridge says.

The farming part was a different story. "We knew nothing," Ridge admits. Sure, they'd cultivated a rooftop garden on their Manhattan roof for three years and yes, it was an ambitious little spread, producing everything from heirloom tomatoes, green peppers and chili peppers to chives, dill, basil and mint. But the tasks performed at Beekman today—soap making, animal husbandry, stationery production—were well beyond the reach of these two city slickers. But they’re also "hard working, aggressive and entrepreneurial." Ridge apprenticed with a soap maker. The predictably named Farmer John, a local famer, was hired to handle the livestock. Ridge and Purcell leaned heavily on upstate New York's knowledgeable farming community. "Everything we know about gardening we learned by asking our neighbors and farmers," Ridge says.

That knowledge has quickly been put to use in the half-acre of 52 raised planters at Beekman. A hundred different varieties of vegetables sprout from the planters and most find themselves served on the Beekman dining table, or pickled in the Beekman cellar or, on occasion, in the kitchen of the nearby American Hotel. For now there are no plans to sell vegetables but Beekman cheese will be debuting this fall. When it does Ridge knows the biggest advantage he has over other farmers—the relationships he has from his former career—may very well dictate the success of the new product. "We couldn't make a living at farming if we didn't have the connections we have in the city," Ridge says. After all, no one likes soap made from goat’s milk quite like city folk.

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