Marc Boucher-Colbert

After leaving rural New Hampshire, where I did my first farm apprenticeship in 1992, I took to gardening in the city of Portland, OR and found a calling growing veggies in urban spaces. I helped get community supported farming to Portland when I ran Urban Bounty Farm in the 1990s; late in that decade I co-founded Zenger Farm, a still-thriving urban agricultural center; in the early 2000s, I did a volunteer stint with my family in Brazil, where I lost many a garden battle to mole crickets and leaf-cutter ants; upon returning to the United States I got a Maters of Education focusing on…..you guessed it, gardening! Since 2006 I’ve tended and still tend vegetables on the Noble Rot restaurant rooftop, and for the past couple years I’ve grown and sold microgreens to the rest of Portland’s top restaurants, which Covid has now mainly levelled, so I eat huge, complicated salads as a result; for 15 years I’ve also taught hundreds of children gardening, cooking, and landscaping at Franciscan Montessori Earth School, where I am Garden Specialist. I’ve written about gardening, consulted on gardening, experimented with gardening. I practically eat, sleep and breath the stuff (well, I guess I do actually eat it!). Now with the help of my talented collaborator Anne Parmeter, I am so excited to bring you my decades of experience and innovation in my first-ever online garden course. I also like to write, read poetry, collaborate with creatives, walk my dog, cook, dawdle over morning coffee, learn other languages, cold-water swim with my wife, and try to be helpful, useful, and loving to my two grown children.