Empowering Self-Reliance and Sustainable Living & Microbiomes
Empowering Self-Reliance and Sustainable Living & Microbiomes
Lately I have been doing a lot of sorting, and I do not mean closets, drawers or old papers. I mean sorting through the pieces of my life and the pieces of Living Ground, looking at what still belongs, what is working, what is asking for more attention and what …
I use collagen-rich broth regularly when I am working with microbiome-healing protocols because the gut microbes are only part of the picture. They live against a mucus-covered intestinal lining that has to be hydrated, nourished and continually rebuilt. A good gelatinous broth brings water, minerals and the amino acids from …
(this is an excerpt from my new upcoming book “Plant & Kitchen Alchemy“) There is alchemy when a green tomato turns red. It may look as though the fruit is simply ripening, yet inside it an entire chemistry is rearranging. The green chlorophyll is disappearing, and the sugars and acids …
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, …
Women, Autoimmunity, Iodine, the Gut and the Strange New Science of the Ovary! I am not a doctor, nor do I want to approach health education from a place where someone else is expected to have all the answers. I am much more interested in what happens when we put …
I am deep into writing a new book, Plant & Kitchen Alchemy, and it is will become the foundation for the student manual and teaching material for our upcoming Plant & Kitchen Alchemy workshop at Living Ground. The next workshop will be held November 7–13, 2026, here in southern Ecuador, …
I was reading about the latest dietary trend called “fiber maxxing,” where people deliberately try to push their fiber intake higher and higher, sometimes to 50 or 60 grams a day. I am certainly in favor of eating more fiber, especially when modern diets contain so little of it, but …
There is another project quietly taking shape here at Living Ground, and this one has actually been circling around us for about a year. We are creating a small spa area with a sauna, hydrotherapy baths, herbal baths, Epsom salt baths, oils, herbal body treatments, Ayurvedic-inspired treatments, facials, clay treatments …
I have been on a deep and very determined dive into the world of technology lately, and it has been tedious, arduous, frustrating and, at times, completely depleting. It is also necessary. I never imagined I would spend so much time working on websites, tablets, coding, order systems, inventory flow, …
Living Ground has already been sprouting alfalfa, mung bean and sunflower at the café, and we have also been freeze-drying the sprouts into these ridiculously good little crunchy packets of nutrition. Now we are ready to expand and we are in investigative and research mode. We are testing broccoli, carrot, …