"I came to this work the long way around — from the ground up, for my health. I learned to recover from chronic illness through my relationship with food. After college I spent six years as farm educator at The Mountain Retreat and Learning Center in the Nantahala mountains of North Carolina — creating food forests, paths, and maps; hosting farm festivals, mushroom growing workshops, and gourmet forest-to-table meals. Somewhere in the middle of all that, I began to notice that the work itself was a kind of practice. The garden was patient with me. The land had things to say about pace, peace, attention, and humility that no book ever quite said the same way.

 

That formation pulled me toward more rigorous ecological training. I took a permaculture design course at Wild Abundance in western North Carolina, then a month-long immersion at Verde Energia in Costa Rica, working a site that applied permaculture principles across a tropical landscape. Both sharpened the eye — taught me to slow down in front of a place and read it before deciding what it needed.

 

I moved to Vermont to farm for myself. I lived for a time at Metta Earth Institute in Lincoln, where I first met Joe. We stayed in touch across the years that followed, bound by mutual respect and a shared sense of how land should be approached — as kin rather than inventory, with care that outlives a season.

 

I now live in Lincoln with my partner Sky and write on farming as vocation. What I bring to Growing Wise is a long apprenticeship to land and practice — and the conviction, which is Joe's as much as mine, that the landscapes we tend can be more than pleasing to the eye. They can feed us, teach us, and return more than we put in, if we let the place itself be the first teacher.

 

There's a longing in this work, for me, to make beautiful, inspiring, sacred places — to enhance and steward what Life has already given and made glorious, to recognize it and celebrate it. And a second longing beneath that one: to pass the vision on, to help restore others' relationships with the landscape, and to take part in the healing of psyche and land that mirror each other."