Frequently Asked Questions

Welcome!

Below you'll find answers to common questions about Growing Wise, our online gardening classes, our book, and what we’re up to behind the scenes. Don’t see what you’re looking for? Feel free to reach out.

About Growing Wise

  • Growing Wise is a gardening school rooted in ecological wisdom, folk traditions, and joyful hands-in-the-soil learning. We offer courses that help you grow food with confidence — whether you’re planting your first seed or tending a whole homestead. Our flagship program is the Online Gardening School, and we also offer shorter, focused courses for specific skills. Read more about us here.

  • We’re Chloe Lieberman and Natalie Bogwalker — longtime friends, gardeners, and educators with backgrounds in ecological agriculture, homesteading, and community resilience. We've taught thousands of students through the hands-on skills school that Natalie founded and owned for 15 years, Wild Abundance, and here through our classes. Growing Wise is the next evolution of our work. We’re also co-authors of The New Natural Food Garden.  Read more about us here. 

  • Growing Wise was born from the online gardening programs we created while at Wild Abundance. As our offerings grew, we decided to give them their own home — and Growing Wise was born. While we’re still connected to the Wild Abundance community, this new platform gives us space to focus more deeply on gardening education.

  • We teach gardening that’s organic, ecological, and aligned with the rhythms of nature…and that really works! You’ll find a blend of science-based methods, folk traditions, permaculture principles, and creative, joyful experimentation. It’s practical and spiritual, structured and playful — and always aimed at helping you grow food that nourishes your body, your spirit, your family, community, and the land.

About our Classes and Programs

  • We offer video-based gardening classes that teach foundational principles, along with step-by-step how-to’s and more advanced content. You’ll learn the why’s along with the how’s, and we encourage you to tailor things to your specific situation, resources, and needs. 

    Our flagship, full-season, comprehensive gardening program (the Online Gardening School) includes everything from planning to planting, soils to pests, and how-to-grow series for over 25 vegetables, herbs and berries. We also offer shorter courses that focus on specific skills like our Ultimate Vegetable Planting Guide, check out all of our offerings here!

    All our classes are pre-recorded and available online, so you can learn at your own pace from anywhere. You get access to live support through the online classroom and, for the longer program, Q&A calls. 

    Some years we offer an in-person Permaculture and Gardening Apprenticeship at Natalie’s home outside of Asheville, NC. This is a non-residential one-day-a-week program where students get a massive amount of hands-on experience with Natalie and other teachers.

  • Our students come from various walks of life, locations, and are of different ages and backgrounds. Anyone who is excited about growing food is a great fit. We’ve gotten to know some students through live Q&As, and also when people come up to us around town or even while we’re traveling to thank us for our program. 

    These folks have ranged from fancy southern white ladies in pantsuits and diamond earrings, to African American grandmas with beautiful handmade chicken coops, to Latinx young folks gardening for the first time, to middle aged professional men who garden on the weekends, to a French woman who helps run the farm at a famous retreat center. They garden in suburban backyards, apartment patios, urban front yards, community gardens, rural farmsteads, and friends’ lawns.

    Gardening has a way of connecting us across outward differences. Everyone eats, and everyone can be awe-inspired by the process of growing food. That’s part of why we like it!

  • Nope! Beginners are absolutely welcome. Our lessons are clear, encouraging, and designed to meet you where you are. We also offer plenty of value for folks who already have garden experience and want to deepen their skills and systems. We were told by someone who has been commercially farming for decades that she found a lot of gems in the Online Gardening School. There is truly something for everyone in our programs, no matter your level.

  • Yes! You can get a taste of what we have to offer, and get to know our teaching styles, by signing up for our free class: Top 10 Easiest Vegetables to Grow (That Will Really Feed You). It’s full of tips and tricks for growing, varieties we like, and a bit of humor, too. When you sign up for our newsletter, you’ll hear about other offerings and specials throughout the year, plus get monthly gardening tips straight to your inbox.

  • Yes — if you join the full Online Gardening School, you’ll get access to live calls and an online classroom where Chloe personally answers student questions. For shorter courses, you’ll be able to ask questions through the online classroom. 

  • You get lifetime access to any course you purchase. That means you can revisit the content as many times as you like, season after season.

  • Some years we offer a Permaculture and Gardening Apprenticeship at Natalie’s home near Asheville, NC. This is a non-residential one-day-a-week program where students get a massive amount of hands-on experience with Natalie and other teachers. Get on the waitlist to be the first to know when spots open up. 

  • Yes, during each enrollment period we offer a portion of our income in scholarships to folks with financial need, who are gardening as part of a community project, and/or those who identify as members of a marginalized group. To apply for a scholarship, please fill out this form.

About Our Book

  • We’re thrilled to be publishing our first gardening book in early 2026! It’s called The New Natural Food Garden: A Comprehensive Guide to Growing a Bountiful Harvest with Less Work, In Partnership with Nature. It’s our opus of love, science and beauty, and a fabulous complement to all of our courses. It covers planning, planting, weeding, watering, and more and includes growing guides for over 25 vegetables. 

  • Our book will come out in March of 2026 and will be available through all major booksellers. If you have a favorite local bookstore you’d love to see carry it, let us know! We’re excited to get it into small bookshops where folks will appreciate it, and Storey (our publisher) agrees! We’ll be offering some special gifts to folks who preorder the book a couple months before the release. Sign up here if you’d like to know when you can make your pre-order.

  • When you pre-order our book you’re doing more than just reserving your copy—you’re planting a seed of support for our work and helping it grow. Pre-orders help with visibility, give booksellers a sense of how many copies to order, and give the publisher an idea of how many copies to print…basically, pre-ordering helps create a buzz that supports the book throughout its life. 

    When you pre-order and let us know you did on this page, you’ll receive special gifts from us to dive into right away. Sign up here and we’ll let you know when and how to pre-order the book.

  • We’re lucky to be working with Storey Publishing, a major publisher with good distribution. You’ll be able to pre-order and purchase our book through all major booksellers, and smaller ones, too (especially if you ask them to carry it). If you already order things from Amazon or Goodreads, it can be great to go through them because it signals demand and makes sure our book shows up in searches there.

  • The book is a fabulous compliment to any and all of our courses, and the courses support and expand upon what’s shared in the book. They can also each stand alone.

    Our book and courses cover similar material, but in very different ways. Many gardening techniques are hard to explain with words, and much easier to see through video demos; that’s where the courses come in. The content of our flagship course, the Online Gardening School, goes way above and beyond what can be covered in the 384 page book.

    Sometimes you don’t want to open your device and would rather reach for a beautiful and well-organized book for reference and study; that’s where the book comes in. In both resources, you’ll get practical, applicable info that can lead to better harvests and less stress, plus you’ll get to know our warm, inviting teaching style and be encouraged into a more expansive, heartful approach to growing vegetables. 

We know you’re wondering…

  • Our worldviews are based on a belief that everything is alive and interconnected. You could call this animacy, quantum physics, spirituality, or ecology. We aren’t associated with any organized religion and have had students from lots of different backgrounds and belief systems. We’ve found that approaching the garden as a community of living beings all interacting with one another helps us to understand and engage with what’s going on there in a more effective and satisfying way. 

  • No. We’re very close friends, collaborators, business partners, bonus moms to each other’s kids, and we live in a tight-knit community, but we aren’t romantically involved. 

  • Yes! Gardening is unpredictable in many ways, and there is no way to do everything perfectly. Plus, just like you, we’ve got other things going on in our lives; sometimes our attention is pulled away from the garden at crucial moments. Add to this the changing climate and movement and evolution of pests and diseases, and some vegetable plants just don’t make it. It’s never fun when something we’ve been caring for dies, but we get to learn from these experiences and apply those lessons to future gardens. Luckily, a great thing about most vegetables is that you get another chance to try again the next year, or the next season. 

  • Only if you want to! We truly welcome all sorts of folks into our courses, and the only thing we encourage you to “turn into” is a more honest and fully-expressed version of yourself. You may have dirt underneath your fingernails more often, and your friends might overhear you talking to the bees, but how you choose to apply what you learn is entirely up to you. We appreciate that our students and readers come from a wide variety of professions, ages, ethnicities, races, locations, and gardening levels!