About US

Abundant joy always came with the tending and caring for plants in my gardens.  Interestingly, my health improved the more I engaged with gardens, farms, and the people they attract.

As a gardener, compost was always fascinating to me.  It seemed to work like magic in my soil, sometimes.  And there was an elusive quality in compost that captured my interest.

I’m the type of person that’s interested in fundamental causes and how things work.  More specifically, what causes my compost to be more or less potent than the last batch.  This is important because a good compost improves the soil, which leads to healthier plants, increased yields and more benefits.

However, compost seemed to take a lot of work to make, so I was always looking for a more efficient and effective way to make this magical substance.  Too often, I got intermittent results with my compost.

Yet I always felt a deep connection to the plants I grew and the compost I made.

I enjoyed the fact that I could see all of the ingredients that went into the making of my compost or most of them.  Now I know that I wasn’t seeing the most important qualities.  That came later when I got a microscope to assess and measure the active biology in soil, compost and extract or tea made from compost.

Because of an encounter with a farmer, it became abundantly clear one day how nutrient dense food and the interaction with healthy soil would become a passion as well an important purpose for my life.

During my last garage sale (2017), a curious patron asked to see my garden which he saw through the window.  I was delighted he asked since I was more excited to talk about plants, compost, and soil.

This person happened to be a successful farmer vacationing in the area and he immediately asked, “what do you like to grow?”.

Being this garden was one of many gardens I’ve established over my 24+ years of growing plants and making compost, what I resonated with the most was growing soil.

In that moment, I realized when I work with “THE LIFE OF SOIL” it meets a couple fundamental human needs which are very important to me – connection and harmony.  In some ways it’s beyond words.

We talked about how new gardens are difficult to establish due to the lack of fertility in the soil.  I shared some tricks that I learned to get gardens to grow quickly, but mentioned I always found it difficult to get consistent results.

I even told him about a product which worked great, but was very expensive and I didn’t like relying on buying this product.  I also conveyed how I wanted to just make it myself!

He listened patiently, then asked me if I would be interested in an article that could help me out.  I thought to myself, “what article could possibly help me grow soil or compost better?”.

When he said it was written by Dr. Elaine Ingham, my ears perked up because that name sounded very familiar.  A couple of people in the past had mentioned Elaine as some kind of compost tea guru/soil microbiologist.

I do have to say that after reading that article, my life changed because she was able to answer most of my soil and compost questions.

Eventually, I searched for more information about her techniques and found her soilfoodweb.com school.

Before finding her school, I had pretty much given up on most of my composting techniques and resorted (like many gardeners) to the standard static pile and just crossed my fingers.

Now it brings me great joy to be able to really contribute to the relationship of “compost to soil”, “soil to plants”, “plants to animals”, and “nutrient dense food to healthy people”.

Grow Greatness,

Christopher