Meet Nicky Schauder | Co-Founder of Permaculture Gardens

We had the good fortune of connecting with Nicky Schauder and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Nicky, can you share a quote or affirmation with us?
One of my favorite quotes is from permaculturist Geoff Lawton: “All the world’s problems can be solved in a garden.”

Many permaculture practitioners will smile at this quote but often don’t genuinely believe that all the world’s problems CAN be solved in a garden.

We do.

We think that if you think about the ills of the present-day world, they include problems such as war, famine, hunger, disease, climate change, and corruption.

There are also internal personal ills, such as stress, scarcity, anxiety, depression, and anger.

Going out into nature, even if that means your small backyard plot, can heal these problems. Maybe not at once, but little by little. Just like the little-by-little way you see a plant grow.

And the healing is very holistic. Ecological gardening nourishes both your body and soul. Likewise, the remedy – gardening- is not something that heals you in a segregated way. On the contrary, the benefits of gardening seep into the entire human being’s life and lifestyle!

Gardening goes so much deeper than just growing your food. It feeds you. It heals you and the world around you. Gardening teaches you new things every day. Its possibilities are limitless.

I once heard an architect say, “When I build a building or a home, once it’s done. It just goes downhill from there. It deteriorates, it rots, and you have to fix it again. But when I grow a garden. It just gets better and better.”

What should our readers know about your business?
Please tell us more about your business. We’d love to hear what sets you apart from others, what you are most proud of or excited about. How did you get to where you are today business-wise. Was it easy? If not, how did you overcome the challenges? What are the lessons you’ve learned along the way. What do you want the world to know about you or your brand and story?

We help families grow their own food, and medicine and find God through ecological gardening!

We are most excited when we see our gardeners’ progress through our Grow-It-Yourself Membership Program. Even if they are struggling, this gets us curious and eager to get to the root cause of troubleshooting their garden together.

Kids who start growing a garden always get us excited because we know the seed of a love for Nature has taken root in those impressionable and pure hearts.

Finally, we are excited to bring the love of growing a sustainable, regenerative garden to as many families as possible. Since Dave is a software architect, he is developing an app called SAGE (coming soon on Kickstarter) that our membership currently uses to plan their crop timings and design their gardens. Innovation has always been a core value for us. In 2017, we won the most Innovative Brand award at the Green Festivals in Washington, DC. But our innovation has always been for a greater purpose: making it easier and simpler for anyone to grow! We’ve lost the art of knowing how to grow food. We felt this first-hand when we started to grow as new parents. We want food growing, permaculture, and organic gardening to be ordinary skills for people.

Challenge

The main challenge we have always faced is getting the word out about what we are doing and the help we offer. We continue to face this challenge amidst raising six children and homesteading. So we try to:
Be very intentional about how we use our time.
Create a balance of intense work, restorative rest, silence, and communication that feeds into our family and community goals.
Pray and Meditate
Always be a student and never stop learning from our own students.
Create and Produce (whether that’s blogs or vegetables) instead of merely consume
Keep on teaching everything we know to those who want to learn
Lesson

The lesson we’ve learned are manifold!
The visible world (all Creation, humans, plants, animals) is a window into the invisible world.
Diversity is the key to stability.
Integrate rather than segregate
God does not repeat Himself (refer to Creation)
Ecological gardening leads to true freedom and abundance.
God’s fingerprint lies in Creation.
Your seemingly small effort (i.e. planting a seed) results in a disproportionate harvest! Nature just needs a little nudge, and it will bring you a cornucopia of gifts!
It’s easier when you work with Nature.
Ancient European farms used to enlist the help of a donkey to irrigate crop fields. This donkey would be made to walk around a well, pumping water to the fields. Be the donkey at the waterwheel that goes around the same well day in and day out and does not see the abundance of crops in the field that it is watering. I like how this image from St. Josemaria Escriva reveals how we should be detached from the outcome of our work.
You will learn so much more than the above when you grow food!

Our Brand Story

We want folks to learn that growing food is not just for the farmer or the green thumb. If black thumb means someone who kills plants, I’m still one, except now, more plants survive than ever before. Gardening is easy. We’ve made it our mission to make it easy for the average family to eat the healthiest, most nutritious, more delicious, and most local and organic food by growing it themselves!

Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
Washington DC – The National Mall and its free museums
The White House (no matter who lives there)
Zaytinya
Mitchell Park, to play ball in DC in a non-touristy location
The Kennedy Center – to watch a play

VA
Waterford, VA for a hike in this gem of a village whose history its residents try to preserve
Dolce & Ciabatta – a local bakery in Leesburg where the croissants are the fluffiest and the deserts to die for!
Wheatland Springs Farm – to drink beer, eat ice cream and learn about regenerative practices in growing grains!
Shoes Cup & Cork – speak-easy-like atmosphere with a great brunch menu!
Dodona Manor – home of Col George C Marshall, a great ethical leader

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
Our journey started when our eldest children were tiny and started developing severe allergies. My husband Dave and I wanted to get to the root of these allergies. We wanted to have something practical and effective that we could do aside from trying to implement the medical advice we were given.

So we turned to the garden. We soon realized that we didn’t know what we were doing. We planted things only to see them die or yield very poorly for all our efforts. And that’s when on a bookstore date, Dave and I stumbled upon a book on “Practical Self-Sufficiency” by a family in England who used permaculture to create a farm homestead.

From there, we went deeper and deeper into the rabbit hole that is permaculture. We became fascinated by the integral and miraculous way we humans can work with nature and produce abundance.

So we’re indebted to our children, this book, and our permaculture teachers, Geoff Lawton and Wayne Weiseman, for the initial push to learn the best ways to grow food to care for our family and the planet.

Website: https://growmyownfood.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/permaculture_garden/

Twitter: permacultureG

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/PermacultureGardens1

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/PermacultureGardens

Image Credits
Devon Roe Photography (for first image of family) Danielle Lussier Photography (for second image of client)