Field Notes from my journey creating Living Ground, Ecuador.
“If I want people to care about the Earth itself, about the land and soil that feed us, about the way our food, medical, political, and religious systems are shaping us, and about how divided and dysfunctional we have become, then I need to plant those concerns inside stories that are wide enough and deeply connective enough that others can recognize themselves within them.” Leisha of the Living Ground Project.
Living Ground Recent Posts
Hot Flashes & Misunderstanding Estrogen
One of the most common things I hear from women moving through menopause is the statement that they no longer have hormones or estrogen. It is usually said with certainty, resignation, and often with the belief that the body has lost something essential and irreversible. This idea is repeated so often that it has become accepted as…
Purple Carrot Club
The Purple Carrot Club did not begin as a plan. It began as a pull I could not ignore, something that felt both clear and uncertain at the same time. At first, it almost felt childlike. The name, the idea, the way it came together. There was no structure, no strategy, no business model behind it. Just…
Living Path of Vitamin B
We talk about “B vitamins” as if they are a single substance you can swallow, measure, or fix with a pill, but in the body they behave more like a living network. Vitamin B is never just one thing, and that is where the misunderstanding usually begins. They are a family, a cooperative system, a relay team….
Cholesterol, Confusion, and the Story We Are Not Being Told
Cholesterol has become one of the most misunderstood substances in the body. It is often spoken about as if it were a toxin that must be lowered at all costs, yet it is one of the most essential molecules for life. Every cell membrane depends on it. Hormones depend on it. The brain, which is largely made…
Curry Tree Medicine
I had never even heard of the curry tree before coming to Ecuador. Now I cannot imagine this place without her. She is one of the most beautiful small trees in the garden, graceful and decorative, with glossy green leaves that seem to shimmer in the light. Birds adore her. In truth, she could easily be called…
Still Becoming Living Ground
Sometimes I stop and honestly ask myself what I am doing. Not in a dramatic way. Just a real, quiet question that comes up when I look at the land, the work, the responsibility of it all. There are moments I wonder how I got here and why this is the path I am on. And the…
The Life You Have and the Life You Want
Author note:I am at the seaside…a space that always conjours a deep need to write, reflect and share…. I have been watching change move through my own life for a long time now. This has not been in theory or as an abstract concept, but in the quiet way it reveals itself when I finally slow down…
Listening to What Is Already Speaking
I am at the seaside…which always provides me with an instinctual thrust to muse and write….to reflect and respond…. There is a steady learning that comes through living, not only through ease, but through pressure and challenge. It often arrives at points in life when something we care about deeply cannot move forward in the way we…
When Moonflower Reaches
She is one of my favourite not beause she is a medicine for the physical but because she is a witness to tenacity, beauty and strength….always reaching and bursting her fantastic flower at night. Moonflower is a luminous night-blooming vine whose large white flowers unfurl from tightly coiled spirals at dusk in one fluid, almost theatrical motion,…
Goji, Coffee Berry and Clove Bud
Morning and Evening Elixirs For Blood, Liver, Brain and Microbial Balance When I started to really understand microbiology, I quietly moved most of the strong germ fighting herbs and foods out of my apothecary. I began to see those “kill the bugs” tools as blunt instruments that did not care who they pushed back. That never felt…
What is Living Ground
,The Living Ground Project is a living classroom in southern Ecuador, built from soil, food, plants, microbes, and community.
Here, we grow much of what we serve and teach. The gardens feed the café, the apothecary, the workshops, the books, and the people who come here to learn a different way of living. Everything begins with the soil, because healthy soil grows stronger plants, stronger food, and stronger people.
Living Ground is a place for practical self-reliance. We teach gardening, soil regeneration, fermentation, herbal medicine, food preservation, natural health, and the connection between the human microbiome and the soil food web. Our work is not theory. It is lived every day through the gardens, the kitchen, the store, the café, the animals, the workshops, and the land itself.
The vision is simple. Restore the soil, grow real food, preserve knowledge, create local work, and help people remember that health does not begin in a bottle. It begins in relationship with the land, the microbes, the plants, the food, and each other.
Living Ground’s Online Courses in Self Reliance
