Leisha This November, from November 8–13, 2026, I will be teaching a new six-day workshop here at Living Ground Project in southern Ecuador called Plant & Kitchen Alchemy: Food, Medicine & Microbes. It brings together many of the threads that have been part of my work for years: soil, compost, plants, sprouting, fermentation, preservation, broths, herbal medicine, the human microbiome and the simple art of making useful things with our own hands.
I am also in the process of gathering many of the ebooks I have written over the years and weaving them into one cohesive new book, Plant & Kitchen Alchemy. Some began as separate little worlds, including broths, fermentation, herbal preparations, preservation, dehydration, minerals and kitchen medicine, but they are starting to reveal themselves as parts of the same larger story.
Nature has been practicing alchemy all along, and once you start looking for it, you see transformation everywhere. A compost pile changes plant material into fertile living matter, microbes participate in cycling nutrients, roots release sugars into the soil, and plants use sunlight, carbon dioxide, water and minerals to create colours, flavours, aromas, oils, acids and thousands of other compounds.
Then we walk into the garden with a basket and become part of the next stage. What happens in our kitchens is not separate from what happened in the soil, because we are continuing the same process of transformation with our hands, our tools, heat, water, microbes and time.
Why This Matters Now
This information matters because so many people have become separated from the processes that once made food and medicine part of everyday life. Food often arrives already packaged, processed and removed from the soil, the season and the plant it came from, while practical skills such as sprouting, fermenting, preserving, making broth or preparing herbs are becoming unfamiliar.
We can have cupboards full of products and still not know how to make much from what is growing around us. Plant & Kitchen Alchemy is partly about changing that relationship and recovering enough practical knowledge that the kitchen becomes a place of creativity, nourishment and self-reliance again.
There is another layer that feels especially important now because soil health, plant health, food quality and human health are not separate conversations. Microbes, minerals, plant compounds, fermentation, digestion and the biology of living systems connect them all, and once we begin following those connections, food becomes far more interesting than a list of nutrients on a label.
The First Laboratory Is the Soil
I cannot teach food or plant medicine without beginning in the soil because every plant carries something of the conditions in which it grew. Roots live within active biological communities, and bacteria, fungi, protozoa, nematodes and other organisms participate in nutrient cycling, soil structure and the environment surrounding the root.
Plants send carbon-rich sugars into that root zone, feeding microbial communities and entering into relationships that influence how they grow. The soil beneath a healthy plant is not empty space or inert dirt, but a living system full of exchanges and constant biological activity.
Compost allows us to watch this transformation in a wonderfully visible way. Leaves, stems, kitchen scraps, woody material and other organic materials enter the pile looking like separate ingredients, and biological activity gradually turns them into something completely different.
There is a little magic in opening a mature compost pile and knowing that what you are holding used to be stems, leaves, peelings and branches. Nothing simply vanished; it was broken down, rearranged and transformed into material ready to enter another cycle of life.
Plants Are Alchemists Too
Plants are extraordinary chemists, even before we begin doing anything with them. A green leaf captures sunlight and turns that energy into sugars, while roots interact with water, minerals and microbial life and the plant creates pigments, aromatic compounds, bitter compounds, oils, acids, resins and a vast range of other molecules.
A rosemary plant is not simply “rosemary,” and basil is not simply “basil.” Each plant is a living chemical factory responding to soil, sunlight, water, season, microbes and the conditions around it, which makes the act of harvesting far more interesting than simply cutting a few leaves.
Once we understand that, we start asking better questions about how to work with plants. Which part do we want, when should we harvest it, and should we use it fresh, dry it, ferment it, simmer it, infuse it or extract it into another form?
The plant gives us possibilities, while the kitchen gives us tools to continue the work. That is where our own role as kitchen alchemists begins.
Turning the Kitchen Into an Apothecary
I love the idea of the kitchen becoming an apothecary because it removes the artificial wall between food and medicine. A broth can be nourishing food, a fermented vegetable can be part of dinner while carrying the story of microbial transformation, and a handful of sprouts can be both fresh food and a tiny lesson in plant biochemistry.
Herbs can become teas, tinctures, infused vinegars, broths and culinary ingredients, while vegetables can be fermented, dried, frozen, cooked slowly or eaten freshly harvested. Seeds can sit dormant in a jar one day and begin waking into living food only a few days later, which is one of the simplest examples of transformation we can watch with our own eyes.
During the workshop we will be sprouting, fermenting, preserving, making broths, working with herbs and preparing tinctures and other natural medicines. We will learn the processes by actually doing them, tasting what we make and understanding what is changing along the way.
There will be jars bubbling, seeds germinating, herbs spread across the tables and plenty happening in the kitchen. I want people to understand the science and the traditions behind these methods, but I also want the knowledge to move through their hands because that is when it becomes useful.
Sprouting: Waking Up a Seed
Sprouting may be one of the simplest forms of alchemy we can practice in the kitchen. A dry seed can appear almost lifeless, yet give it water, oxygen and the right conditions and an entire biological program begins to wake.
Enzymes become active, stored nutrients begin shifting, the seed coat opens and a tiny root appears. Within days, something that could have sat on a shelf for months has become fresh living food, and we have watched the transformation happen from beginning to end.
Sprouting is also wonderfully practical because it does not require a farm or even a garden. A jar, some seeds, water and a little attention can produce fresh food on a kitchen counter, which makes it a beautiful skill for anyone interested in greater self-reliance.
Fermentation: Inviting the Microbes Into the Kitchen
Fermentation brings another kind of life onto the counter and gives us a completely different way to work with food. Cabbage becomes sauerkraut, vegetables become sour and complex, cultured foods develop new textures and flavours, and microbes carry out much of the transformation while we create the conditions that allow it to happen.
I find that especially fascinating because the biological lens we use when looking at soil becomes useful again in the kitchen. We can ask which organisms thrive under certain conditions, what they are transforming and how that transformation changes the food.
Then the food enters another living ecosystem, the human digestive tract, which carries its own vast microbial community. The soil microbiome, plant microbiome, fermented food and human microbiome are different ecosystems, but they are connected through food, microbes and the movement of biological material from one living system into another.
Preserving the Harvest
Anyone who grows food knows that nature rarely gives us one tomato, one zucchini or one basket of herbs at exactly the moment we need it. Abundance tends to arrive all at once, which is wonderful until the kitchen bench is overflowing and everything needs to be used.
Preservation turns that challenge into possibility and gives us ways to carry the harvest forward. Tomatoes can become sauce, salsa, dried slices or powder, while herbs can become teas, tinctures, infused vinegars or dried culinary blends.
Fruit can be dried, fermented or transformed into preserves, and bones, herbs and vegetables can become nourishing broths. A good kitchen alchemist starts looking at abundance differently and begins asking not only, “How do I use this today?” but also, “What else can this become?”
That question can change the way we see waste as well. Stems, roots, peels, seeds and trimmings sometimes have another purpose waiting for us to notice it, and preservation teaches us to look more closely before something is discarded.
Broths, Tinctures and Everyday Medicine
Broths are another beautiful example of transformation through time, heat and water. Ingredients slowly release minerals, gelatin, flavour and plant compounds into the liquid, creating something richer and more useful than the raw ingredients that went into the pot.
Tinctures use a different kind of extraction, giving plant compounds time to move into a liquid that can be stored and used over a longer period. Learning these processes gives us choices because we begin to see that a plant does not have only one possible preparation.
Some plants lend themselves beautifully to water, while others can be dried, infused, simmered, fermented or extracted in other ways. Understanding those options makes herbal medicine more creative and practical because we are no longer trying to force every plant into the same method.
Food as Medicine
“Food as medicine” can become a slogan very quickly, but I want to go deeper than that during this workshop. A plant carries the story of its soil, growing conditions, microbial relationships, harvest and preparation, and then our own bodies bring another layer through digestion and the microbial ecology within us.
How we prepare food matters because sprouting, fermenting, simmering, preserving and eating something fresh all change what reaches us. The workshop will explore that larger picture, not as a list of miracle foods, but as a way of understanding how nourishment is created through relationships and transformation.
For me, that is a far more interesting and useful way to think about food and medicine. It moves us away from simply buying the next product and brings us back into relationship with what we can grow, prepare and understand ourselves.
A Book Growing Alongside the Workshop
Plant & Kitchen Alchemy is becoming a book because I realized I already had many of its pieces scattered across years of writing. I have written ebooks on broths, fermentation, herbal preparations, preservation, dehydration, minerals and other parts of kitchen medicine, and I am now bringing those pieces together into one larger and more connected work.
As I combine and rewrite them, the common thread becomes clearer. Soil leads naturally into plants, plants lead us into the kitchen, and the kitchen opens into sprouting, fermentation, preservation, broths and herbal medicine, with microbes and transformation running through the entire journey.
The workshop and the book are now growing together, and participants will receive the new Plant & Kitchen Alchemy book along with the manual and recipes we work with during the week. I hope it becomes the sort of book that eventually gets stained with beet juice, broth, herbs and whatever happens to be bubbling on the kitchen counter because it is actually being used.
November at Living Ground
Plant & Kitchen Alchemy: Food, Medicine & Microbes will take place November 8–13, 2026 at Living Ground Project in southern Ecuador. The six days will be practical, hands-on and rooted in the idea that understanding nature’s transformations gives us more confidence to grow, prepare, preserve and make things for ourselves.
also have a special local price for people living here in Ecuador, because I really want local gardeners, cooks, growers, herbalists and curious people from our own community to have the opportunity to participate. If you live here and are interested, contact me directly and I will send you the local details.
For me, Plant & Kitchen Alchemy is an invitation to notice how much transformation is already happening around us and then learn how to participate in it. Compost becomes fertile soil, soil supports plants, seeds wake up, plants become food, microbes transform that food, herbs become preparations, and all of it eventually enters another living ecosystem inside us.
There is something deeply empowering about knowing how to work with those processes ourselves. A kitchen can become a laboratory, a fermentation room, a preservation space, an apothecary and a place where the work of the garden continues long after the harvest basket comes through the door.
Elizabeth Wysen will also be offering her retreat here immediately before Plant & Kitchen Alchemy, exploring the spiritual and emotional dimensions of healing through Quantum Healing and The 12 Dimensional Path. There is a day between the two experiences for rest and integration, and people can attend either program independently or join both.
