Design Your Edible Garden Today!

Edible Garden Design
For All Kinds Of Locations & Needs

I am edible garden designer.

For my whole life growing up, I didn’t know that’s something you could be. At 21, I approached my Environmental Studies thesis advisor in despair, asking, “But what am I going to do?” I’m not a policy and lobbying person (thank you from the bottom of my toes in the dirt to those who are!), and seem to shrivel if I spend more than one day indoors.

“Have you thought about edible landscape design?” she asked? I had not. I had never even heard of it.

It would be many more years working and learning in community food systems, sustainable agriculture, farm-based science and skills education, and permaculture design and practice, before I remembered that this was something one could do. And I remembered because I was slowly realizing it was something I really, really wanted to do.

And so I trained. I have practiced visual arts my whole life, with a particular focus on sketching and a love of designing spaces. I had also trained and worked for many years in garden-based education. Now, I began to learn the magic of design-thinking, the art of facilitation and client conversations, and the ecology-based, natural-pattern-filled design specialty known as permaculture design. All the while continuing to put literal seeds in the ground.

And so it was that I started designing edible gardens. I loved it. I still do! I help current and hopeful home gardeners design delicious edible gardens for their particular spaces, desires, and accessibility needs. I use analog sketching and hands-on design tools to create a beautiful, bespoke design for your garden, then deliver it digitally so you can access it easily, along with easy-start materials lists and first-steps guides to get you going.

I’m an artist and designer who has worked in sustainable farming and gardening for over a decade. I’ve completed several permaculture design certifications, trained in and taught regenerative and ecological agriculture, and helped map, plan, and install gardens in urban and rural settings, from front porches to multi-acre sites.

As a disabled and chronically ill gardener myself, I love innovating and designing for accessibility and adaptations in the garden. I also love a creative challenge - ancestral plants themed garden? Let’s do it! Plants from a particular beloved cookbook? Here we go! Reach out with your creative and weird garden ideas!

I offer gardening tutoring and client co-work-and-learn sessions, in which I teach you organic gardening skills and practices as we put your new garden design into the ground together. Or if you have an existing edible garden but feel like you have no idea what you’re doing, I’m here to help! If you’ve always wanted to garden, but feel intimidated or locked out of the “mystery,” or if you’ve got the beginnings of a garden but just can’t seem to get it thriving and want to learn more, I will help you get growing with a series of hands on lessons. I also work with experienced gardeners who want to dig down - folks who want to deepen an existing practice, and weave in deeper and wider homesteading and permaculture crafts and skills.

I’ve taught gardening and farming to all ages and skill levels, in rural and urban settings, across many different access needs, always with an eye on social justice, reparation and repair, and radical re-connection to our membership in our own ecology. I love the look on someone’s face the first time they hold a tomato in their hands that they grew from seed.

Supporting Groups Of Friends, Families, Colleagues & Collectives

I love creating garden learning experiences for small groups and teams - whether you and your family want to learn to garden together through once-a-week lessons, or you and your team are in search of a professional development workshop in permaculture design (an ecological design process that can be applied to everything from gardens to organizations themselves), or you’re a community collective who wants to learn to install and care for a shared garden space, I have something in my gardener’s bag for you. I’ll work with you to come up with a workshop or ongoing lesson design that meets your group’s needs. I particularly love training garden educators in specialty skills like permaculture design, fermentation and land-based crafts, designing for animals in the farm ecosystem, and accessible and adaptive gardening. I also love working with my fellow chronically ill “spoonie” and disabled community to build garden practices and skills that work for and nourish us, whatever our access needs may be.

A Letter to Our Members - And to YOU!

December 2020 / Solstice / Changes!

The following is my December letter to our Village Members - a Village you can become a part of! - as we close out the year and approach some exciting changes that will make our monthly Member Village content more accessible to all. Want to join in or learn more? Shoot me a line!

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Hello, dear I4NW Village Members!

As the roiling year of 2020 comes to a close, and we approach the Winter Solstice as well as the turning of the calendar year, I want to share some exciting upcoming changes here in the Member Village, as well as two videos that I feel might be particularly supportive to you in this time of sinking into darkness, green things in winter, and bright stars.

FIRST: Starting around February 2021, the I4NW Member Village will switch to being FREE! You will be able to subscribe, get the monthly members-only newsletter (with some added recs and resources), and watch 1-3 videos made by me, all for free. Please watch the update video below for more details about why this is happening, why it's so exciting for me, and why I hope you'll join me in that excitement and in the next iteration of the Village!

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW - TLDR;

- We're making a new Member Village - a one-stop place where you can subscribe, for FREE, to I4NW's monthly village content

- During January, you'll receive the link to switch over to the free subscription - please click it when you do! I don't want to drop anyone from the village through the cracks, so reach out to me if you have any trouble switching over at rachel.nextworld[AT]gmail.com

- The current (paid) Member Village subscription will stay live until the end of January, as will the Practice Patreon. At the end of January, I will cancel these paid subscriptions (you don't need to do anything to make that happen!)

- I won't add any new content during January, and subscriptions will continue to the end of the month, in order to give folks a chance to catch up on content during January. If you want to cancel your subscription earlier than the end of January, that's totally fine!

- This next, free version of the Member Village will include video captions, the ability to leave comments on videos and share them with your friends, and more topics in the videos!



SECOND: Submissions for the Winter Issue are Still Open!
We're accepting submissions through New Year's for our winter issue, themed "Edge," and we would love to receive submissions from village members and your friends! Please spread the word <3

THIRD: This month's videos are here to support both the grief and the creative re-design richness that can arise in winter, especially this year. They're linked below, with more info.

Finally, I want to say a deep thank you to all of you. In the middle of a year of isolation, terrifying disease, increasing exposures of inequities, growing resistance to white-supremacist systems of violence, and ever growing evidence that we are more interconnected than our current systems can even fathom, you came here and helped begin this community. You shared your thoughts, queries, enthusiasms. You reached inward and outward to find tangible, actionable measures of hope, actual practices for imagining and building the worlds we need, now. You also helped me more than I can explain - feeling connected to you through making videos for you/in conversation with you cut through my own isolation and kept me from getting immobilized. Grief and creativity live side by side, and both need community to thrive, and to see the next world while caring for the current one and making repair for the past. It is exponentially easier for me to hold both when I am in connection with you, and I hope the same feels true in your direction to some extent. Wherever you are, however you're doing, you are always welcome here - you are the "us" of this village, and I'm so excited to venture into this next iteration together, and keep seeding the next world together.

Hoping this winter in the Member Village supports you and those around you, including the land and more-than-human, find rest, compost, ease in the darkness, and green things singing quietly about the coming spring.

With love and gratitude,
Rachel Economy
Owner / Lead Editor-Facilitator, I4NW

Morning Routines & Rituals - A Design Process Life Hack For Your Days

Desgin Thinking for Morning Routine - The Video!

We're excited to share some of the resilience skills we teach in free, easy-to-put-to-use ways that you can immediately apply to daily life right now. We're here to support you in imagining and building the worlds you need where you are- the kitchen, the container garden, the morning, each is a little world. Watch this video for a quick-n-dirty design process to support you in creating a morning routine that meets your needs, is pleasurable, and that you can actually implement!

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A post shared by Index For The Next World I4NW (@index_for_the_next_world) on Apr 29, 2020 at 3:42am PDT

Lineages of World - Builders

When we work, play, dance, fight, design, collaborate to build next worlds that serve thriving and justice, we're building on and with, and in service to, the foundations and wisdom of generations of creators and change-makers. People and groups whose work and creations taught us, caused our bodies to sing out in recognition and longing for the worlds they built towards, enabled current and future work and creation. Enabled the gritty, practical experience of hope when we were in despair.
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Who emerges in your personal world-building lineage? Who lights you up?🌿

What is "design?"

If you search the internet, you’ll find a wide array of people and sites defining design and design-thinking in different but overlapping ways. To me, at its most delicious and accessible, the verb design refers to a four-step process that anyone can use as a tool to problem-solve or create change.


I call the four steps:

1. ASSESS
2. PLAN
3. DO
4. OBSERVE.


Now, these aren’t my favorite words for the steps - in my client work, I like to use longer phrases that get at the rich creativity and community-based attention I believe is inherent in each - but they are very clear and easy to get your head around.


However you name the steps, the key point is that they’re in an ongoing loop or cycle - after you observe, you’ve got to start again at “assess.” In more depth, the design process is the cycle of mapping and assessing needs and desires, generating ideas and a plan of strategies to meet those needs and desires, implementing / testing / trying out a first version of that plan (often called “prototyping” or “rapid prototyping” if you’re somewhere that needs to make change or money fast), observing and obtaining feedback on that tryout, and then re-assessing and re-doing the loop.

Theoretically, we could loop forever, and in some ways we need to, if we want to build resilient systems for land and people as we continue to experience escalating and extreme changes in the eco- and human- systems around us.

Design-thinking is one version of resilience - to be able to notice change (and notice which lenses we’re noting through ,and who’s in the room and who’s not), map changing needs, make a plan to meet those needs, try it out, and then re-loop the cycle . We re-loop both to hone in on a design that truly serves the constituents (the people and organisms and land you’re collaborating with), and to deal with continuing shifts and changes that emerge both internally and from the outside.


Design looks a little different depending on what discipline or perspective you approach from - interaction design, permaculture design, interior design, and so many more. I myself have come to know design from many angles, from years as a visual artist, to training as a permaculture gardener, designer and educator, to experiences in democratic pedagogy and inquiry-based curriculum design, to time spent teaching design-thinking and tinkering to kids of all ages (some of whom had large power tools in their hands!)


I also spent my graduate school years developing a framework called Re-Storyation Design, which unites design-thinking with narrative-based practices, to help re-design the stories underneath our systems, as well as the systems themselves . You can see the Re-Storyation Design framework laid out, and learn some ways to apply it in your life and communities, in our member village video series, Imagination as a Radical Muscle.


But throughout all my experiences, almost every single type of design - and in my opinion, all of the ones that are doing their due diligence to avoid rushing/ skipping steps and causing harm - include some version of those four steps mentioned above: assess, plan, do, observe, and cycle through to repeat.


This design process, along with design thinking (the capacity to use the process in everyday endeavors), are key tools in the toolbox of anyone working to re-story their inner or outer world. It can be used almost anywhere, from therapy, to agriculture, to organizational behavior, to curriculum planning, and beyond. It balances deep presence, inquiry, creativity/ideation, and action, and creates a flow pattern for how to move between them. And, I might be biased here, but it’s really, really empowering and fun. 

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Want to learn more about our collaborations with clients, where we use design thinking to co-create everything from gardens, to career-path next steps, to rituals, to meetings, and beyond? Reach out to us on our contact form on the About page - we’d love to chat more, or discuss the possibility of working together.

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Copyright 2019 Rachel Economy