Empowering Self-Reliance and Sustainable Living & Microbiomes
Empowering Self-Reliance and Sustainable Living & Microbiomes
Stories and observations from the Living Ground Project in southern Ecuador. These articles document the gardens, experiments, people, workshops, food, mistakes, discoveries and everyday experience of building a soil-to-human living system.
I. like to stay extremely grounded, practical and logical. But every so often, life out here throws something at you, and you just stop and think: What on earth is going on? Homesteading has its share of stories. Sometimes you just cannot make these things up. If you’ve been following …
“Conflictolysis: The Moment the Body Knows It Is Safe Do you ever find yourself suddenly triggered by something? A smell, a song, a familiar place. Sometimes these things bring back warm memories. Other times, they stir something deeper, something heavy. Those moments are trauma triggers, and they can arrive without …
When I was about fifteen, I had an English teacher who was a little unconventional himself, which is probably why I loved his class so much. It came right after lunch, and if I’m being completely honest, I was often a bit stoned by the time I wandered in. He …
What Urine and Live Blood Might Tell Us About How the Body Cleans Itself There is a place where the textbooks go quiet, and I have always been drawn to it. Medicine is very good at telling us what can be measured, yet traditions have been noticing things in the …
My patio outdoor office and the Project Site is currently a landscape of preparation, drying herbs, working the gardens, jars in their early stages, and piles of herbs and foods (as medicine) being sorted. We are deep in preparation for the Plant & Kitchen Alchemy workshop, November 8–14, and I …
What bacteria, plants and immune cells make me wonder about memory Science just sorta proved that bacteria can learn. A single cell with no brain, no nervous system and no one explaining the rules can carry a memory of previous conditions and respond differently when those conditions return. Meanwhile, I …
Fat is an organ! Surprise! Working with people has a wonderful way of sending me back into research. Someone comes along with an interesting health question, we start looking at what is happening inside their body, and I find myself learning something new. Our bodies are quite remarkable in the …
New research reveals another remarkable way microbes communicate and survive. But it also raises a question about what happens when we repeatedly disturb the microbial communities that keep us healthy. I came across a fascinating piece of research this week. Scientists have discovered that bacteria can actually share working proteins …
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 …
I am finishing Plant & Kitchen Alchemy, a book that has grown to more than 550 pages of personal experience, practical knowledge and over 80 kitchen alchemy recipes centered on food as medicine. As I moved through the final edits, I realized I had spent a great deal of time …