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.