Empowering Self-Reliance and Sustainable Living & Microbiomes
Empowering Self-Reliance and Sustainable Living & Microbiomes
It is raining tonight, a gentle, real rain. It isn’t the quick passing kind, but the kind that settles in and stays, and I think it is making me reflective. I love the rain. I love the sound of it trickling and pattering on the roof and the leaves, and …
Jim was a man’s man. It has been almost 6 years since he left us. Tough. He was the one who fixed things, carried things, handled things and he did not talk about discomfort… not to his doctor, and not to me. That was a problem we didn’t fix. His …
What My 3 A.M. Wake Taught Me About Cortisol I’m winding down by 6 to 7 p.m. The sun sets here around 6:30, and when the dark settles in, my body responds just like the birds. And, it really doesn’t matter what time I go to sleep, I always awake …
September 23, 2026 | Living Ground Project, Ecuador Whew! What a marathon. My Plant & Kitchen Alchemy book is finally finished, uploaded to Amazon and waiting to be published. After months of writing, experimenting, editing, illustrating and wrestling with page numbers, indexes, formatting and Amazon’s publishing requirements, I can hardly …
(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, …
Every meal sets in motion a carefully coordinated process involving the liver, gallbladder, pancreas, intestines, microbiome, and the production, storage, release, and transformation of bile. The liver produces much of the cholesterol the body needs by assembling it from nutrients and smaller compounds created during the metabolism of fats, carbohydrates, …
One of the things I enjoy most about working with clients is that every person teaches me something new. Each case encourages me to ask more questions, read more research, and continue learning. I have never believed that we know everything there is to know about the human body. In …
I often wonder where my fascination with gardens, herbs, and growing food really began. Looking back, I think it started in my mother’s rose garden. I didn’t realize it then, but perhaps that was also the beginning of learning about self-reliance. As a little girl in England, I decided I …
This is a long article and was inspired because I was working with some workshop participants and friends and I wanted to go deeper into understanding the thyroid and most especially, Hashimotos. Over the years I have worked with many people diagnosed with Hashimoto’s thyroiditis and I did not have …