Zev: I’m admiring this cover crop that Eli put down with veggie ladies. And Daikon’s flowering with all of their, so many insects, bumblebees and honeybees and little parasitic wasps and stuff, into their flowers.
Courtney Brooke: These are the daikon’s!
Zev: And these Austrian winter peas that are yummy. In fact I think I’ll have one right now. Mmmm.
Courtney Brooke: What’s it taste?
Zev: It tastes like nutty sweet freshness. And um and then rye in there. It’s a nice mix.
Courtney Brooke: This is the rye.
Zev: Daikons dig deep down and create channels of organic matter and air and water getting down into the soil and make a food source the daikon radishes.
Courtney Brooke: It’s probably hard to see but I can see just hundreds of pollinators on here right now.
Zev: Yeah it’s amazing. And the grass makes a bunch of biomass, that rye does. And the peas fix nitrogen and improve the soil that way. Yeah really nice.
Courtney Brooke (she/her) is an ancestor who was a Social Ecologist, Regenerative Designer, and educator whose work aims to reconnect people with a sense of belonging to place. Her work in the world aims to address the root cause of today’s overwhelming ecological challenges – that humans are starved of a sense of belonging to the places they live.
Courtney Brooke was raised on a small farm in North Georgia, and has been guided by a lifetime of living close to the land. Her greatest teachers have been the Appalachian Mountains, the land of Aotearoa, and Selu, the Corn Mother. She holds a degree in Ecology from the Odum School of Ecology, University of Georgia, and has 10 years of experience facilitating earth-based education, ecological landscape design, women’s rites of passage, and cultural healing.
Courtney Brooke has taught and facilitated environmental education curriculum, Deep Ecology, Permaculture Design Courses, hands-on craft and farming workshops, and Holistic Management to a wide range of audiences in nine countries from toddlers to adults and everyone in between.
Deeply committed to spreading the healing that comes from belonging to the places we live, Courtney Brooke is passionate about designing learning opportunities that celebrate life. She lives at Earthaven Ecovillage where she tends the land, raises food, participates in communal ritual agriculture, swims in wild water, enjoys the mysterious blessing of being alive, and tends her own wild Hearth. She loves cooking home-grown and wild foraged foods, playing her flute to the sunrise, running on mountain trails, making compost piles, crafting from natural materials, and bringing people together to create beauty that feeds the holy.
