About Deep Roots Good Fruit

My story

First and most importantly, I love Jesus. He shapes the way I think about home, family, stewardship, and the life I’m building.

Gardening has been part of my life for as long as I can remember.

Over 20 years ago, I took a composting class, planted a bunch of fruit trees, and started building a garden alongside the grass in our suburban Southern California backyard.

Then the garden kept growing.

We added backyard hens for fresh eggs. I started experimenting with edible landscaping.

My daughter grew up in the garden. As she grew, she took more ownership. When she chose botany for her fourth-grade homeschool science curriculum, she inspired an even more radical garden transformation.

Eventually, we had no more grass. It was all food.

Growing food and scratch cooking had become our way of life. Right there in the suburbs.

Gardening is one skill. Figuring out what to do with the food once it comes inside is another.

Keeping fresh ingredients from being forgotten and cooking from scratch without spending my entire life in the kitchen became another beloved organizing project for me.

Organizing the refrigerator, freezer, pantry, and kitchen to make preparing good food simple was a fun puzzle to solve.

But it was also practical. I was juggling marriage, motherhood, a job, and church. And a number of very challenging seasons.

As my mother always said, I had a way of making lemonade out of the lemons life handed me.

And I’m still determined to find ways to turn hard seasons into something meaningful, even fruitful.

That is the place I share from.

My background

I earned a Bachelor of Science in Biology from a university with a strong botany program, where I fell in love with the structure and function of plants.

I wasn’t a Christian at the time, but I think I was completely in awe of God’s creation before I truly knew the Creator.

The design and complexity of living things are remarkable when you study them at a microscopic level!

I later earned a Teaching Credential in Biology and General Science and a Master’s degree in Online Teaching and Learning.

Over the years, I taught science from middle school through community college and spent years creating health and science education as an instructional designer before stepping away from that work to homestead, homemake, and eventually create Deep Roots Good Fruit.

These days, my schedule also revolves quite a bit around a beloved special-needs dog. So even as an empty nester, my systems are carrying me.

Why Deep Roots Good Fruit?

For over 20 years, I’ve been learning how to grow food in suburban spaces (and now two very different climates), cook wholesome meals from real ingredients, and create home systems that make everyday life more manageable.

I’m a big believer in wholesome food, clean water, useful skills, making do with what you have, and living a little more simply.

The Lord has done a lot of transforming work in my life, and He is still at work.

I’ve come to appreciate something important:

Sometimes you just have to bloom where you are planted.

Why I share all of this

I am still a teacher at heart.

I want more families to discover how much they can do with an ordinary home and an ordinary yard.

Maybe you can:

These are skills you can build gradually, without turning your life upside down.

That is what I want Deep Roots Good Fruit to be about.

Helping you make home fruitful.

You can start small, learn useful skills, and use the practical tools and systems I share here to make home life easier and more fruitful, one step at a time. Even in a hard season.

If that sounds like the kind of life you’re working toward too, I’d love to have you here.

I love to see families working side by side to grow food, cook from scratch, and enjoy wholesome meals together, just as my family has over the years.

Join the Deep Roots Good Fruit newsletter, and I will send you ideas, practical tools, challenges, and encouragement to make everyday life a little more fruitful.

I hope you’ll grow along with me.