About Natalie and Chloe

Here’s a little bit more about us as people and as gardeners…

We’re Natalie and Chloe, two middle-aged moms with sharp, analytical minds and sensitive, caring hearts. We love plants of all kinds, especially the fruits and vegetables that become the bulk of our meals.

Our backgrounds and values braid together modern reductionist science (we’re kinda nerdy), folk and traditional knowledges (land-based people and cultures know what’s up), a sense of practicality (does it actually work?), and playful magic (gardens are full of miracles).

Natalie’s been gardening since she was a kid, and Chloe wishes she had (she grew up in the suburbs and her parents don’t garden). Natalie majored in Ecological Agriculture at Evergreen State College and Chloe majored in Agroecology at UC Santa Cruz. We’re lucky to have many mentors who’ve guided us and shared their wisdom freely.

We’ve both grown food all over the world, in diverse climates and growing conditions, including remote places with little to no modern infrastructure like hoses and purchased inputs. These days we garden in Western North Carolina and appreciate the tools and supplies of the industrialized world, though we’re happy to keep it simple and glad to know we don’t need all the gadgets and gizmos.

We’ve worked together for over a decade, sometimes finish each others’ sentences, often care for each others’ kids (they’re best friends), and regularly enjoy delicious homegrown feasts together, along with other friends and neighbors.

Each of us has been drawn to gardening as a way to connect with our food and the earth, and also as an act of resistance and empowerment in the midst of harmful and unjust globalized industrial food systems.

Sharing what we’ve learned (and are still learning!) brings us so much joy.

We believe that all humans can benefit from a direct relationship with the Earth and with what nourishes us. We love teaching in a way that helps you harvest food and fulfillment as you garden.

A Shared Dream of Self Sufficiency

Both of us have broken ground in many grassy backyards of community rental houses over the years, challenging our strong backs while double-digging (a labor-intensive and very effective way to start gardens quickly), and experimenting with biointensive farming, biodynamics, and more.

We’ve each followed “the dream” of buying land and becoming, to a greater or lesser degree, self-sufficient.

That included learning how to do carpentry, raise and slaughter livestock, harvest and concoct herbal medicine, and more, along with growing lots of food. When we each finally ended up owning our own land, we really went for it. At the peak of their homestead-farm’s productivity, for example, Chloe and her then-partner, Cailen, grew and produced about 80 percent of their own food, including staple crops like field corn and dry beans, along with meat, eggs, dairy products, fruits, mushrooms, and, of course, tons of vegetables.

From 2009 through 2025, Natalie shared her knowledge and experience mostly through her hands-on school, Wild Abundance, where she also hosted classes in tiny house construction, women’s carpentry, and more.

A Shift Toward Interdependence

Now in the arc of our midlives, we have chosen to turn down the ambition dial and let go of the notion of growing all of our own food.

We’ve learned that this all-or-nothing approach—with its associated never-ending to-do lists—can be counterproductive to tending relationships within and around ourselves, and it can actually get in the way of offering our gifts to the wider world.

As a result, we’ve shifted away from the goal of almost total self-sufficiency and instead oriented toward cultivating a sense of community interdependence.

Through all of our studies, exploration, and teaching, we’ve learned that the gardener is as important as the garden.

People are an important element in the planning, planting, and care of any garden. With a great collection of tools (physical, practical, and conceptual), most human beings with access to a patch of earth (or containers full of soil) can nourish and be nourished by growing their own food.

In this vein, the principles and practice of permaculture have informed us in life and in gardening.

Contrary to what many believe, permaculture isn’t a gardening technique but rather a collection of principles and approaches for engaging with whole systems—the interconnected webs of life that all people and gardens are a part of. It gives a contemporary framework for an approach to making connections with life, gardening, and land that Indigenous peoples all over the world (including your own ancestors, if you trace your lineage back far enough) have been doing for millennia. This is the holistic lens through which we look at our own gardens—Growing Wise is our invitation for you to do the same.

More About Natalie

Natalie’s happy place is in her garden. She has accomplished some pretty big things in her life: starting what was the largest earthskills gathering in the US from scratch and running it for 10 years; building her own log cabin from logs on her land (with a lot of help from friends and students); founding Wild Abundance, a school that has taught thousands of people building and other skills for self-sufficiency; giving birth; mothering a strong-willed woodland-creature daughter… Gardening has grounded her through it all.

Other fun facts about Natalie:

She’s a bit of a building nerd, and specifically travels to places where vernacular (place-based) architecture is showcased.
She loves fantasy novels and can often be found listening to an audiobook while cooking dinner.
She’s gotten way more into growing flowers and ornamentals in her middle-age.
She’s helped lots of friends start and grow their own small businesses.

An important chapter in Natalie’s gardening journey

Natalie started out her college career studying genetic engineering, then had a life-changing bicycle accident that prompted her to do some deep reflection and soul searching. This, and some subsequent travels, led her to return to university, this time focusing on Ecological Agriculture at Evergreen State College.

After graduating, Natalie collaboratively started and operated a local, organic co-operative catering company; lived and grew food in communes; and cooked at an organic retreat center. Still in her early 20s, she then went to Spain with the intention of biking throughout Europe while studying European farming techniques. She ended up staying mostly near Barcelona, where she helped establish vast gardens at Can Masdeu (Catalán for “house of many springs”), a unique community housed in a thousand-year-old former leper colony, designed to be self-sufficient.

Gardening in an ancient leper colony turned utopian squat

When Natalie arrived, the building and grounds, abandoned approximately 50 years before, were 6 months into being “squatted,” or occupied, by a motley crew of big-hearted misfits and activists from all over the world. There to create a community space for self-sustenance, they lived a utopian existence, happily engaged with the local community. They “skipped” (European term for dumpster diving), cooked for each other, constructed props for protests, fixed bicycles, trained for circus school, created art, and grew a lot of food.

At Can Masdeu, Natalie experienced growing food in a Mediterranean climate with very few purchased inputs. She was without a vehicle for transporting materials, but had the guidance of a group of sweet, retired men who had been forcefully relocated in the 1960s and ‘70s by Spanish dictator Francisco Franco. They lived in nearby highrises and were happy to “talk shop” about gardening.

Learning about place-based gardening from displaced people

These neighbors offered plentiful advice built on hundreds of years of ancestral wisdom from their various home-regions across the Spanish countryside. Their gardening beliefs and knowledge were deeply rooted in the different biocultural landscapes they came from, which meant they often disagreed!

Learning from them opened Natalie’s mind to the idea that specific gardening styles could emerge from different landscapes, and there wasn’t one right way to do anything.

At Can Masdeu, Natalie gleaned indispensable knowledge. She learned:

When her chickpeas matured, she would harvest only one seed per pod (how disappointing!).
Growing crops too close together can cause major pest problems.
Green wild plants, not just straw, can be laid down as mulch to prevent weeds and preserve water (and give a bonus shot of nitrogen).
Many wild plants are just as delicious as anything grown in the garden (her beloved old-men neighbors showed her this in the heaping baskets they carried out of the woodlands every day).
Irrigation systems can be gravity-powered, with a series of ditches and carefully graded garden beds on wide terraces, in this case, that had been built by hand hundreds of years before.

More About Chloe

Chloe loves feeding people, especially children; the sounds of many little mouths munching fresh cucumbers brings her great joy. She’s got a knack for remembering the names of vegetable varieties (and sharing good ones with anyone who’s interested), and she enjoys singing to sprouting seeds.

Other fun facts about Chloe…

She’s a mediator and holds space for people to move through conflict in productive ways
She speaks Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese (and has a slightly different personality in each language)
She grew up in Northern California, but her mother’s father (and five generations before him) lived just an hour and a half from where she lives now
She dreams of writing a book of odes to garden vegetables, inspired by Chilean poet Pablo Neruda

An important chapter in Chloe’s gardening journey

Chloe studied abroad during her junior year of university. She served as an intern with Coopabuena, a coffee farmers’ cooperative in southeastern Costa Rica, through an international organization called the Community Agroecology Network. During this journey, she became proficient in Spanish and began her lifelong love of Latin American landscapes, cultures, and social movements.

At Coopabuena, Chloe worked with a small group of farmers who were committed to transitioning away from agrochemicals and toward organic practices.

These farmers brewed their own plant-based fungicides, experimented with different methods of composting coffee berries for fertilizer instead of letting them end up as a waste product, and conversed about what was working and what wasn’t on each of their plots of land.

One of the members had been blinded by toxic chemicals that he’d overapplied on his crops, in part because he wasn’t able to read the instructions on the bottle. Despite there being challenging interpersonal relationships among some of the farmers, the members still came together in support of their shared mission to grow high-quality, high-value coffee without putting themselves and their land in danger of agrochemical poisoning.

Coming in with a fairly naive idea of what community meant, Chloe learned a great deal from these adept farmers, not only about growing coffee but also about how to work together for a higher good beyond individual interests.

These lessons took root as Chloe “learned by doing” while visiting rural communities in Mexico, Brazil, Peru, India, and Thailand over the next several years.

Chloe had an epiphany while weeding okra at Comunidade Campina, a very rural intentional community in the middle of the Brazilian state of Bahia. She realized that joy and work did not need to be at odds in her life. Growing up in the highly capitalist culture of white, middle-class America, she had come to believe that work was inherently a bummer, and something to “get through” so one could enjoy the beautiful and rewarding parts of life.

Though her family of origin didn’t perpetuate this narrative, it was so culturally strong and accepted that it had seeped deeply into her consciousness (like it has for so many of us).

As she tended the garden in the sunshine at Campina, anticipating a cool swim in the river and a cheerful group meal at day’s end, she realized that this work was a joy, and its delight had a particular quality of connection with the other-than-human world that she loved.