AFFTON • Two years ago, Justin Leszcz was making good money as a car salesman but yearned for a greener existence.

He traded in his former life for his current one as an urban farmer, raising heritage-breed animals and selling heirloom produce that he and his wife grow in the back yard of their Affton home. Their business, YellowTree Farm, comprises less than half an acre around their ranch-style house, plus a patch of land they recently began using in Waterloo.

"I'm still a salesman, I guess. I'm just selling things that get me way more excited than cars," Leszcz, 33, said with a laugh, adding, "I don't even have a car anymore." To make deliveries, the former Bommarito Automotive Group employee borrows his wife's car or gets rides from friends.

When he's not tending his crops and animals or researching the next seeds or hatchlings he'll buy, Leszcz is often at the back doors of some of St. Louis' best restaurants. Sometimes he shows up with the produce chefs have ordered; other times, he brings them something new with which to experiment.

"Justin's the guy who's always coming by with a different odd herb or flower, saying, 'Here, try this. Have you ever seen this before? Here are some things you can do with it,'" said Gerard Craft, chef-owner of Niche in Benton Park. "As chefs, we love to get to play with new stuff and expand our knowledge of food."

At Jim Fiala's The Crossing in Clayton, chef Ian Vest sautées and roasts YellowTree's white-flesh cucuzza, an Italian squash, and he uses the farm's tingle-inducing Szechuan buttons to perk up customers' taste buds.

"What's cool about Justin being so passionate is that it's like everything he brings us is a gift, not just something that came out of the ground," Fiala said.

Fiala, who is also chef-owner of Acero, Terrace View and Liluma, bought almost all of YellowTree's cream sausage tomatoes — a sweet, white variety. Over the summer, YellowTree's green, yellow, red and purple tomatoes were menu staples — and dining-room decoration, laid out on a sheet pan visible to customers — at Farmhaus restaurant in south St. Louis. The Good Pie in midtown St. Louis uses YellowTree's produce on some of its salads and wood-fired pizzas.

"One day we stopped in the Good Pie to eat, and they were making a salad with all of our food," said Danielle Leszcz, 29. "That was a great feeling."

For the winter, the Leszczes are planning to grow microgreens — young plant leaves with concentrated flavors — in their backyard greenhouse.

They also raise and slaughter rabbits, the next batch of which is going to Monarch restaurant in Maplewood. And this month they are getting ready to buy squab — tender, domestic pigeons not often seen on St. Louis restaurant menus — to breed. "Gerard says he'll take as many squabbing pigeons as I can grow," Justin Leszcz said.

The Leszczes say their philosophy is simple: Grow food that they want to eat.

"We're not going to plant vegetables that we hate. Because the stuff we don't sell, we eat. And everything else, we give to them," Leszcz said, pointing to a pen of chickens, Pekin ducks and hens that lay blue-green eggs.

"The whole reason we got into this was to feed ourselves," Danielle Leszcz said.

They grow garlic, onions, celery, carrots and lettuce, and they have chicken and rabbits at the ready. An excess of fruit and sunchokes at the end of last year's growing and foraging season provided enough homemade wine for the couple to drink for 10 months. Their trips for groceries are few and far between.

"We can bypass the produce section completely and just pick up maybe some flour, sugar, milk and meat," she said.

YellowTree's neighbors have embraced the project; one has let the Leszczes take over his yard, and none has ever complained, even when the farm housed a noisy goat and an active rooftop beehive.

YellowTree has a clean record with the St. Louis County Department of Health, which oversees animal-related ordinances, spokesman John Shelton said. Federal law allows small farms like YellowTree to raise and slaughter their own poultry, provided they process fewer than 1,000 birds a year. (Danielle Leszcz, a full-time paralegal, keeps up on agricultural regulations.)

The Leszczes are well below that limit, and they say they intend to stay that way, not wanting to expand too fast. After mentions in local media and food magazines, YellowTree has begun to attract visitors who want tours, gardening advice or a pound of tomatoes.

The couple are happy to oblige, but Justin Leszcz, a former restaurant cook, said he'd rather work directly with chefs.

"They're the ones who push me to grow things no one else here is growing," he said. "And by putting all this unique stuff on their menus, they're able to expose more people to it than if I were selling it from a stand in front of my house."

The dirt-packed path that Leszcz started down two years ago hasn't been all smooth. A family of raccoons killed YellowTree's first flock of squab this summer, most of the rooftop bees didn't survive the winter, and crops sometimes don't turn out as expected. Those setbacks can be costly, especially for a family that ditched half its income to start a backyard farm.

But the Leszczes said they have everything they need, and the former car salesman said he couldn't put a price on pursuing his dream.

"Money, money, money — that's what life used to be about," he said, surveying the season's last green tomatoes and red peppers. "I'd say things have definitely changed for the better."