Empowering Self-Reliance and Sustainable Living & Microbiomes
Empowering Self-Reliance and Sustainable Living & Microbiomes
Articles about the living biology of soil, including microbes, fungi, roots, compost, nutrient cycling and plant–microbe relationships. These pieces explore how healthy soil biology becomes the foundation for resilient plants, nutrient-dense food and healthy ecosystems.
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 …
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 …
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, …
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, …
Creating something like Living Ground Ecuador is not simply about having ideas. I have lots of ideas, probably far too many, but I can usually see the bigger picture very clearly. I think that is one of my gifts. I can look at a piece of land, a café, a …
Living Ground is opening its doors for small, hands-on workshops in southern Ecuador. Come learn Live and Dried Blood Analysis, Soil Food Web science, fermentation, herbal medicine, food as medicine and practical self-reliance, all within a working project where soil, microbes, plants, food and human health are deeply connected.
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 …
A Love Letter to Place, Soil, and the Foods That Remember There are moments at the Living Ground Project when I bite into something from the garden and have to stop everything I am doing. Usually, it is a tomato. I stand there in the middle of the garden, juice …