What We’re All About

Growing Wise is a gardening school where we believe that:

Everyone has the innate knowledge of how to connect with the earth, and anyone can learn to grow their own food.

We’re here to help awaken and empower that wisdom through accessible, engaging online education.

Founders and lead instructors Natalie Bogwalker and Chloe Lieberman share our decades of experience growing organic vegetables, along with the life lessons and inspiration we’ve gathered along the way (and are still gathering).

This is a place for gardeners of all experience levels to dig deeper—total newbies and seasoned growers have told us they’ve found our programs super helpful, welcoming, and fun.  

We teach proven techniques with a holistic, permaculture-inspired approach, and guide our students toward becoming the world’s leading experts on their own gardens.

When we work with natural patterns and cycles, rather than trying to control them, their wisdom emerges. This leads to more ease, harmony and bountiful harvests of vegetables and satisfaction.

We can help you:

  • Grow a bountiful garden to feed yourself and your family and friends

  • Prevent pest and disease problems, and learn from those that do arise

  • Minimize backbreaking labor, especially with weeding and bed preparation

  • Conserve water and build vibrant, fertile soil

  • Adapt to a changing climate and keep harvesting food as things get weirder

  • Choose the right crops for your location and your life

  • Reconnect with childlike wonder, awe, and joy

  • Learn how to think holistically and apply permaculture principles

  • Feel confident to explore and experiment 

Origin Story

Growing Wise emerged from the gardening classes we created as part of Wild Abundance, a hands-on skills school that Natalie founded in 2009 and ran through 2025. Chloe worked with her there from 2014-2024. 

Gardening and community-based food systems have long been passions of ours. Natalie started teaching gardening back in 2000. You can learn more about us as people and as gardeners here.  

We created our first online gardening classes as a response to the global COVID-19 pandemic, starting in 2020. At that time, hundreds of Wild Abundance followers reached out to us, desperate to become independent of global food supply chains. We’d already been working on this for many years, so we had a lot to share! More about Natalie and Chloe can be found here.

Our Classes

We created a program that follows garden veggies through the seasons, showing each step of the process of growing them. We also wanted to share the foundational principles, concepts and techniques that we’ve found to be fundamental, and useful! To do this, we curated and refined our knowledge, learned to film clear demonstration videos, responded to lots of questions, wrote up tons of notes and supporting documents, and created some extremely comprehensive content. Peruse our online gardening classes to see the fruits of this labor.

Our Book

Along the way we realized we had already pretty much written a book, so we might as well work on getting it published. Turns out, transforming the written material from an enormous educational program into a real life, beautiful, cohesive, published book is actually a ton of work!

We were fortunate to work with the incredible team at Storey Publishing, and the result is our opus of love, science, and beauty, The New Natural Food Garden: A Comprehensive Guide to Growing a Bountiful Harvest with Less Work, in Partnership with Nature. You can learn all about it here.