Online Gardening School

This Online Gardening School will show you how to grow bountiful food, whether you’re gardening on your apartment balcony or you’ve got a quarter acre of sunny ground to work with, or if you’re somewhere in between. In this age of global disaster and disconnect, growing a garden is a powerful act of positive change, both for yourself and for the larger community.

Take your food security into your own hands.

“The time has come to reclaim the stolen harvest and celebrate the growing and giving of good food as the highest gift and the most revolutionary act” – Dr. Vandana Shiva

Our online gardening courses offer masterful guidance for a range of experience levels.

Our content is accessible to the total newbie and will set a solid foundation to get started in the garden. It’s also useful and practical for folks who have already grown a garden or helped out on a farm, but want to learn more. And, it will provide details, new techniques, and inspiration for the avid gardener who wants to dig deeper.

This program covers all things gardening, from a holistic, permaculture-inspired perspective.

Indeed, it will not only give you the foundations you need to get started, but also serve as your companion as you tend your own plot. We offer step-by-step instructions for each month and each vegetable, plus we hold regular live Q&A sessions to provide mentorship and personalized guidance. There are also a bunch of bonus classes to deepen your gardening prowess and your big-picture understanding of food systems. It’s up to you which classes you access, and when.

This gardening program is for anyone in the continental US (or similar climates).

We currently live in the mountains of Southern Appalachia, but we’ve both gardened all over the country and the world: from the Pacific Northwest, to Arizona, New York State, Northern California, Florida, Northeastern Brazil, and Spain. We’ve had students from all over the world participate in this class and get a lot out of it. Please note, if you live in the tropics or the desert, your conditions will be pretty different than ours. Feel free to reach out to us at gardening@wildabundance.net to help determine if this program is a good fit.

There has never been a better time to start a garden than right now!

Knowing how to grow food is your birthright.

We live in a strange new world, where many people live in cities and where the vast majority of our food is grown in monocultures on large, industrial farms. Even big organic farms can take the shape of factories, with little holistic engagement in the agroecological and social systems that they’re a part of. Most of us grew up with barely any understanding of where our food came from, let alone the magical knowledge of how to grow it ourselves.

But no matter who you are, your ancestors had deeply rich relationships with their food, whether they tended gardens or tended the garden of wild nature. Now is the time to reclaim your birthright and replenish the knowledge that is at the core of living in harmony on planet earth.

Get gardening mentorship while learning through your own experience.

It may sound strange, but we’ve had many students who have helped out on farms, yet don’t have the confidence to plant gardens on their own. In fact, there’s something very different about actually planning and planting a garden from scratch, rather than being told exactly what to do and where.

The gardening classes online offered here give you the skills and tools you need to be able to grow a garden for yourself, from the ground up, whether it’s 6’x6’ or 60’x60’. In other words, we give you guidance and support, but you’re in charge of making decisions and customizing your garden to fit your personal needs. We’ve learned about soils, seeds, weeds, and gardening techniques all over the world, but you’re the world’s leading expert on your garden. Together, we’ll create a synergy that leads to success. You’ll also grow a sense of empowerment and ownership over your work and accomplishments as you develop a reciprocal relationship with your own garden.

And don’t worry, we’ll be here to answer your questions and work through challenges. You get 24/7 access to instructors via the online classroom, plus regular live Q&A sessions.

It is time to taste the fruits — and vegetables — of your labor.

Wherever you are, on any device, you can watch the videos, ask questions, and access written material.

The core of the program is a series of foundational online gardening classes, along with monthly lessons on the garden as a whole, plus in-depth guides to growing a whole lot of vegetables.

These videos and written materials will teach you what you need to know to break ground and start growing some serious food. You don’t have to complete all of the foundations before you get started; instead, we encourage you to choose what feels most relevant to you and then explore the lessons further as your garden grows. Foundational classes include: 

Seasonal Online Gardening Classes Every Month

Monthly video classes

In addition to the foundational classes, these gardening classes online include a set of video lessons and written content specifically tailored for each month. These include an overview of the garden at that time of year, tours of our own gardens, along with detailed guidance on the vegetables that are being planted, tended, or harvested that month. Within this monthly content for each vegetable we include tips on infrastructure, troubleshooting, managing fertility, weeding, pest control, cooking from the garden, and more. Additionally, we discuss edible weeds and cover crops in their own lessons.

You could grow a tomato like THIS!

We’ll show you how to grow well over 25 kinds of vegetables, herbs, and berries in the Online Gardening School.

You can pick and choose which ones you want to grow and just follow those lessons, or completely nerd out on all of them.

Please don’t pressure yourself to grow them all (especially if you don’t like them or don’t have enough room)! The program is so ample because we want your palette of vegetables to feel abundant, whatever your particular taste and conditions. Some of our favorites that you will be able to grow with the help of this course (depending on your climate) are: tomatoes, broccoli, kale, cilantro, potatoes, sweet potatoes, beans, basil, garlic, cucumbers, squash — plus so many more. For a more complete list, check out the FAQ below.

Receive personalized mentorship from experienced gardeners.

Along with the monthly video and written lessons, you’ll be invited to our monthly live online Q&A sessions, where you can ask questions and we can dig deeper into gardening together.

Another way to personalize the program and receive individual mentorship is to pose questions, comments, and share ideas in the comments box below each video lesson. If you ask a question in this space, an instructor will respond quickly, and other students can too. We love this “public message board” style of discussion, because every student can learn from everyone else’s questions and ideas.

Along with the foundational classes and monthly resources, the Online Gardening School includes a rich library of references and bonuses.

We’ve been passionate about growing food and supporting local, sustainable food systems for a long time…and we never get tired of studying these subjects and expanding our understandings. While we’re committed to offering practical, accessible instruction on the nitty-gritty of growing a garden, there’s also so much more to explore. Plus, there are lots of amazing resources out there that we just love, and we think you might too. That’s where the appendix and bonus material for the Online Gardening School come in.

Deepen and broaden your relationship with your garden, and the larger food system, with our bonus classes

Gardens and food systems are a point of intersection for so much of our lives. And, there are so many different ways to do things! In the library of bonus material, we share original and guest lessons on subjects that go way beyond the basics. This includes:

Appendix – Written Gardening Resources

There is a lot of gardening information that’s best communicated through the written word, charts, and lists. We provide a bunch of this good stuff in PDF form, as an Online Gardening School Appendix. These can be viewed on your phone, tablet, or computer, or downloaded and printed out. Some of these resources are original (like our favorite varieties and books), and some come from our mentors and allies. 

We hope you feel excited, not overwhelmed, by all of this material! You’ll have plenty of time to look it over, digest it, and apply it as your gardening journey unfolds. You’ll have access to the course for life, so you can take your time checking out the material now and revisit it for years to come. And if you don’t like eating eggplants, peppers, or some other vegetable, you don’t have to grow them!

We encourage newbies to start small, with just a handful of veggies and the foundational videos. After that, these gardening classes online will continue to feed your hunger to grow your gardening know-how for years after your first killer tomato. In fact, there’s a lot of material in the online gardening school that is appropriate for folks that have many, many years of experience.

In these times of uncertainty, doing peaceful, productive work with the living world is truly a potent medicine. When this work also increases you and your community’s food security, it’s revolutionary.

“Each day, my peace of mind is directly correlated with the time I spend in my garden.” – Natalie Bogwalker

100% Satisfaction Guaranteed

If you aren’t fully satisfied, we’ll give you a full refund for up to 2 weeks after you are granted access to the class.

Go at your own pace

With the Online Gardening School, you can move at your own pace, taking advantage of any available time you’ve got to work in the garden. This flexibility means you can tailor your learning experience to your unique lifestyle and schedule.

Lifetime access

When you sign up for the Online Gardening School, you get lifetime access to the course materials. This means you’ll be able to revisit lessons over and over, year after year. Also, as we add new content to the program, it will be yours, free of charge.

Enter the journey of gardening with seasoned mentors.

Your guides into the journey of organic gardening bring enthusiasm and decades of experience to the table. Their own paths have been deeply influenced by their experiences in the garden — nurturing small seeds, excitedly watching them germinate, celebrating their strong green growth, marveling at the flowers and pollinators, and graciously harvesting delicious fruits and roots to prepare with love in the kitchen and share with friends, family, and neighbors. Both instructors have shaped their lives around growing food and celebrating the rhythms of the seasons through gardening, farming, raising animals, and practicing permaculture.

Natalie started her first garden in the backyard and on the roof of a carport at a rental house in college.

She had begrudgingly helped her mother in the garden as a child, but at 19, when she began to understand the cultural and political importance of food autonomy, that’s when she really dove in. Once she took the plunge herself, with all of her early-adulthood political passion and intensity, she fell deeply in love with the process. Natalie found that gardening gave her a sense of peace, gave her body the physical challenges that it needed, and gave her mind a healthy outlet for analysis and improvement. She changed her studies to ecological agriculture and graduated from The Evergreen State College with a degree in the subject. She taught her first gardening class over 20 years ago at a free school in Olympia, Washington. Since then, Natalie has dedicated her life to learning, sharing, teaching, and organizing the teaching of earthskills, including organic gardening, permaculture, natural building, and carpentry. Natalie currently directs Wild Abundance, a school she founded in 2008 that teaches skills for self-sufficiency. 

Chloe has wanted to be a farmer since she was a wee child in the suburbs of Northern California.

She didn’t grow up with any kind of garden at home, but two of her best friends lived more rurally and their families raised vegetables, flowers and fruits, milked goats, made cheese, and rode horses. Needless to say, Chloe spent as much time with them as possible. From the age of about 7, when Chloe took a stance against the cruelty of factory farms and became a vegetarian, activism has been a part of her passion for food and the earth. Throughout her life, she’s explored and engaged the intersections of food, environment, social justice, and community. She has long yearned to understand how and why we humans have gotten into such a dysfunctional relationship with the sources of our sustenance, and how we can shift that. In order to explore these powerful questions she’s pursued formal and informal education, including: a degree in Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems from the University of California, Santa Cruz; work with direct-trade models and collaborative projects with farmer cooperatives; traveling and volunteering on farms all over the world; working on commercial farms; and lots of experimentation. Since 2013 she’s been co-managing a 23 acre homestead with her partner. They’re both passionate about receiving sustenance straight from the living earth, honoring the plants and animals that feed them, learning by doing, sharing with the collective, and delicious, nourishing food.

The bounty of the Earth is waiting for YOU!

Frequently Asked Questions about the Online Gardening School