I’ve grown up not just loving nature, but being connected to it.

As a child, I would play in the small woods on our property. I gathered seeds, sticks and plants and pretended I was saving food for the winter in my little lean-to my Dad and I built. I was friends with the trees and put band-aids on their trunks if sap was running down. I loved all the creatures (including bugs!) and was curious to learn as much as I could.

As a young adult, gardening was my hobby, yet I always seemed to have some family or friends I would help routinely. In 2018, after landscaping for my friend’s business, I decided to work for myself as a landscaper. For 8 years, I ran my own business in garden maintenance, design, and installations. As much as I loved working the ground myself, I found I was outgrowing my purpose. While I had successes with achieving better looking gardens, the efficiency, sustainability and ethics of gardening did not match my personal beliefs about how important it is to work with nature, not against it.

As I have grown these last eight years, I have been studying Permaculture practices through Bill Mollison’s Permaculture Handbook Manual and Geoff Lawton’s Permaculture Design Course and have felt these methods are fundamental for how we can improve soil health, regenerate the ecosystem and creating thriving landscapes for food production. Practices such as rain gardens, native plantings, leaving the leaves, organic pest management (to name a few) are essential for correcting our ecological footstep. Using these tools, I am passionate about helping other gardeners learn how to reconnect to their landscape.