About Dirt Rich Gardens

Dirt Rich Gardens is a food garden design studio rooted in the Pacific Northwest, creating productive, beautiful kitchen gardens for Portland-area homeowners who are ready to grow something meaningful.

A well-designed food garden is more than a plot of soil — it's a seamless extension of your home, your table, and your daily rhythm. Every garden I design is personal — shaped around your space, your style, and the life you want to live outside. We’ll work together to translate your vision into a garden that feels like it was always meant to be there.

From intimate raised bed layouts to expansive edible landscapes, I craft kitchen gardens that are as intentional as they are abundant — woven with native plants, guided by the seasons, and designed to thrive in the Pacific Northwest's unique growing climate.

Your dream garden starts with great design.

Growing More From Less —

The Dirt Rich Approach

At Dirt Rich Gardens, everything I teach is rooted in intensive gardening — a hands-on approach to getting the most food possible out of a small space. That means carefully prepared raised beds, rich living soil, and planting densities that keep your garden producing from the first thaw to the last frost, right here in the Pacific Northwest.

If you've spent any time in the gardening world, you've probably come across terms like permaculture or biodynamic growing and wondered how they all fit together. Here's the honest answer: they're more similar than different. All three approaches share a deep commitment to working with nature — growing food while nurturing the soil and ecosystems that make it possible. Here's how they differ:

Intensive gardening brings serious intention to a small space — raised beds, deep soil preparation, dense plantings, and succession planting so something is always growing and always ready to harvest. It takes more planning, but rewards you with abundance. It's the method at the heart of everything I do at Dirt Rich Gardens.

Permaculture is about designing a garden that largely takes care of itself over time — perennial food forests, minimal inputs, and mimicking natural ecosystems. It's beautiful, low-maintenance in the long run, but typically requires more space and produces less food per square foot.

Biodynamic gardening works with natural energies and rhythms — planting by lunar cycles, using fermented preparations, and treating the farm as a living organism. It's deeply connected to the land and has produced some extraordinary food.

I'm a fan of all three because of their shared respect for living soil and healthy ecosystems. But I teach intensive gardening because it feeds my passion for making the most of small spaces — and because it's the most reliable way to create a garden that delivers bountiful harvests season after season. Whether you're a first-time grower or a seasoned gardener ready to level up, this method works.

Let's design something worth growing.

Start with a free 15-minute discovery call, where we’ll chat about your space, your goals, and what you want your garden to become.