Jennifer Foster loves to get her hands dirty.

"It feels good. It feels right," she said. "There's something very soothing about running your fingers through the soil ... . In a sense, it's a lot like art."

But Foster is not an artist.

She's a restaurant owner building a relationship with her food.

Foster, who owns Señorita Burrita at 227 N. Prince St., soon will be serving her customers organically grown foods cultivated on a local farm.

Lettuce, tomatoes, peppers, onions and garlic are just some of the foods Foster and her employees have planted at Culton Organics in Silver Spring.

The foods will be used to prepare the restaurant's California Mission-style burritos, fresh salsa, soups and salads.

"It's always been about buy fresh, buy local but this takes it one step further," Foster said last week at the Culton farm. "We're involved with the food from the very beginning, and that makes it personal for us. At the same time, our customers are getting the healthiest food possible."

Organic gardening was something Foster said she thought about, but knew a small garden in the backyard wouldn't give her the quantity she needed.

And that's when she met Tom Culton.

Both are stand holders at Central Market, and they struck up a friendship over organic foods.

Culton offered Foster about a half-acre of land — for which Foster said she pays a "very nominal" fee — on his family's farm to grow herbs and vegetables for her restaurant.

"He's so knowledgeable and feels such a passion for what he does," Foster said. "As time goes by, and the more I learn, I feel closer to it. It's been a great experience for me and for my employees, which we probably wouldn't have had without Tom."

But Tom gives much of the credit to Foster and her crew.

"I'm just supervising — they're the ones doing all the work," Culton said. "I don't think I put one seed in the ground."

Culton, 27, grows all the foods on his farm without using chemicals such as herbicides and pesticides. He does, however, plant his crops using biodynamics, a method in which sowing is done according to the position of the moon.

Among the foods Culton grows on his 53-acre Marietta Avenue farm are 75 different kinds of tomatoes, 40 varieties of eggplants, blue corn, artichokes and a French variety of lettuce called Devil's Ears.

By working with Culton, Foster said she has developed an enhanced appreciation for healthy food and wants to pass that onto her customers in an affordable manner.

"There are other organic restaurants, but they're more high-end dining and not everyone can afford that," she said. "I want to provide a healthy, quality product that is accessible to everyone."

Foster said her employees, mostly young people, have eagerly jumped into the gardening arena and spend several days a week at the farm.

"They're very 'green,' so they're very excited to be doing this," she said. "It's not something you need to try to get them to catch onto. They're already there."

For Foster, the organic gardening effort has given her a renewed sense of pride and passion she is only too happy to pass along to her customers.

"You're really forming a relationship with the food," Foster said. "You're there from the very start, caring for it, nurturing it ... . We've always given our customers the best possible product, but there's a different element to it now. There's a lot more invested and ... just a lot of love."

E-mail: jtodd@lnpnews.com