A Cultivated Life

I am a multimedia journalist, nature-based educator, amateur forager, gardener and biracial Chinese American woman. I write with the purpose of making sustainability accessible and spend my free time being in nature, crocheting, working with clay, and tending to my family’s garden.

A Cultivated Life is a resource on foraging, gardening, and other sustainable practices. It aims to break down the barriers that our marginalized communities face when looking for access to nutritious food, sustainability initiatives, and nature connectedness.

I started gardening with my family at our local community garden when I was in Elementary school. I remember picking zucchini as long as my forearm and searching for potatoes like they were Easter eggs under the earth.

Foraging became my release in the summer of 2020. I was aimlessly waiting to hear the result of my husband’s immigration petition to the US whilst living in a dingy, perpetually damp Airbnb in Northern England. I spent as much time as I could out of that apartment and picking crab apples off the unmaintained trees we found in empty lots.

As I look at my life in the present, growing food has taken over my day to day, just like our snap peas have overtaken their trellis. I love waking up every morning to take in the explosion of growth my husband and I have become a part of.

I foraged and gardened to heal my mind and tapped into lifelong practices that give our communities agency and control over destiny. Wild food is medicine and cultivated food is nourishment.

I hope anyone reading finds the magic that is waiting outside the confines of capitalism and colonization.