Plant & Kitchen Alchemy: Food, Medicine & Microbes

I have spent a good part of my life working with plants, making herbal medicines, fermenting foods, growing food and learning how much we can actually do for ourselves when we have some basic knowledge and are willing to get our hands into it. This workshop brings all of those things together.

We are going to spend time in the gardens, in the wild and in the kitchen. You will learn how to recognize useful plants, grow your own food and medicines, sprout living foods, ferment, make herbal preparations and begin building a home kitchen that supports both self-reliance and your microbiome.

Every participant will receive a copy of my book Wild Plants, which focuses on useful plants and weeds that grow throughout much of the world, along with my Fermentation book and a student manual.   I want these to become working books for you, not something that sits on a shelf when you leave.

Growing Your Own Food and Medicine

You don’t need acres of land to begin growing some of your own food and medicine. We will look at plants that are easy to grow, plants that return year after year, useful weeds, culinary herbs and medicinal plants, and how you can begin creating a garden that actually provides something for you.

We will also explore foods as medicine. Many of the plants we think of simply as food have wonderful properties, and many plants we call medicine belong in the kitchen. I want to blur that line a little because I don’t think the two were ever meant to be so separate.

Wild Plants and Personalized Medicine

Part of our time will be spent learning to recognize the plants growing around us. I love the ordinary plants people walk past every day, especially the weeds. Many grow throughout the world and have followed humans almost everywhere we have gone.

You will learn how to identify useful plants, which parts we use, how to harvest them and how to turn them into practical preparations. We will make teas, tinctures, infused preparations and other herbal medicines, but I also want to take this further and help you begin discovering the plants that make sense for you.

By the end of the workshop, you will create some of your own personalized medicines based on your terrain, your needs and the plants you have learned to work with.

Fermentation and the Art of the Microbiome

Fermentation will be a big part of our kitchen work because this is where plants, food and microbes come beautifully together. We will make different ferments and learn how to create an environment where microbial communities can grow and transform food for us.

But I don’t want to teach fermentation simply as a collection of recipes. We are going to talk about the microbiome, what these microbial communities are doing, what feeds them and how the foods we eat help create the internal terrain in which they live.

We spend so much time thinking about feeding ourselves. I want you to start thinking about feeding your microbes too.

Sprouting and Food Self-Reliance

Sprouting is probably one of the simplest forms of food self-reliance. A jar, water and a handful of seeds can give you fresh living food almost anywhere, without a garden or even much space.

We will sprout seeds, grains and legumes and look at how to incorporate them into everyday food. We will also explore other simple ways of preserving harvests, extending abundance and building a kitchen where there is always something growing, fermenting, sprouting, drying or being transformed into food and medicine.

What You Will Learn

• How to begin growing your own medicinal and food plants
• How to recognize useful wild plants and common edible and medicinal weeds
• How to harvest and use different parts of a plant
• How to bring foods as medicine into everyday life
• How to make practical herbal preparations and personalized medicines
• How to make tinctures, teas and infused herbal preparations
• How to sprout seeds, grains and legumes at home
• How sprouting can become a simple tool for food self-reliance
• How to make and maintain fermented foods
• How fermentation works as a microbial process
• How to feed and support the human microbiome through diverse plant foods and living ferments
• How plants, microbes, soil and our own terrain are connected
• How to preserve and transform what you grow
• How to build a practical home apothecary
• How to become less dependent on buying everything you eat and use

Taking It Home

I want you to leave this workshop with things in your hands. You will have your books, your own preparations, ferments, plants and medicines you have made yourself, but more importantly, you will understand how to make them again.

That is really the point of this workshop for me. I want to give you skills that increase your independence. You don’t need to become an herbalist, farmer or fermentation expert. You need to know enough to grow some things, recognize some things, preserve some things and make useful preparations for yourself and your family.

There is something incredibly satisfying about walking into your garden or even looking at what is growing wild around you and realizing that you know what to do with it.

Learning at Living Ground

The workshop is held here at the Living Ground Project in southern Ecuador, where the gardens, wild plants, apothecary, kitchen and Gratitude Café become part of the classroom. We can harvest something from the garden, bring it into the kitchen and turn it into food, a ferment or a herbal preparation.

You will also have access to our spa area, sauna and yoga room, with time to enjoy the property, rest and absorb what you are learning.