Empowering Self-Reliance and Sustainable Living & Microbiomes
Empowering Self-Reliance and Sustainable Living & Microbiomes
Articles about minerals, nutrient balance, food quality, absorption and the relationship between soil fertility and human nutrition. These pieces often follow nutrients from the soil, into plants and food, and finally into human physiology.
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 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 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 …
I have never been one for protocols, which is a little ironic because protocols are part of my work. I understand why people need them. I create recommendations, work with herbs, tinctures, minerals and food, and spend a lot of time looking at the terrain of the body. Personally, though, …
Magnesium is a funny mineral. It does not get the attention that calcium gets, and it certainly is not as glamorous as some of the supplements that come and go in popularity, yet quietly behind the scenes magnesium is involved in an extraordinary amount of what keeps us alive and …
I often see what I recognize as uric acid crystals when I am looking at live blood under the microscope. Sometimes there are only a few, and other times there are many scattered throughout the plasma. It is something I have seen often enough over the years that I recognize …
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, …