"Growing up working in the family landscape construction and nursery retail business, I was steeped in horticulture and design. Over time, there grew a realization that something didn’t feel right. The landscapes that we were creating paled in comparison to the landscapes that I loved in more natural areas. I took some time to travel and explore more of the world's ecology and approaches to land design.
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After returning from travel I moved to Philadelphia to work with a company that specialized in native plant and meadow landscaping. They were proving that functional and beautiful landscapes for homes and businesses could also serve as refugia for pollinators and other keystone fauna and flora. These ecosystems seemed useful to the wildlife, but I observed a distance between those we worked for and the bountiful landscape they hired us to create. Couldn't we, like the pollinators, also partake in the buffet of food and medicine growing right outside our doors?
To learn more about growing edible plants I moved to Vermont and became a farmer. However, it did not take long to see the same problems in agriculture that I was familiar with from landscaping: working against nature instead of with it. I sought training in more regenerative approaches provided first by a permaculture design course, where I learned and practiced the value of patience, observation, humility and resourcefulness to minimize inputs while maximizing outputs. Later I enrolled in Dr. Elaine Ingham’s Soil Food Web School to study soil ecology and the use of microscopy to conduct microbiological assessments, becoming a certified lab technician 6 months later.