Living Ground Suelo Vivo

30/09/2026

ART INSPIRING ART
QUITE FRANKLY — GRATITUDE GARDEN SESSION

Sometimes you meet someone who has the same thirst and hunger for life and living, and when you create together, it is special. That’s how I feel about collaborating with my friend Nic, Quite Frankly, this Saturday.

We are in art mode at Living Ground! The spa is taking shape, art is finding its way onto our sidewalks, and a new entry bridge of gratitude is welcoming you into the garden. There is creating happening everywhere, and Nic is coming to share this art phase with his music.

Saturday, October 3 | 2–6 PM
Living Ground, Masanamaca | $13
All-you-can-eat buffet + live DJ set

Our contribution from the kitchen will be a buffet to remember, I promise! A generous feast of shrimp, eggs, cheeses, vegetables, roots, nourishing carb sides, gourmet greens, garden herbs, sprouts, microgreens, nuts and seeds. Little side dishes, salsas, dressings and sauces bursting with colours and flavours. We’re BBQing watermelon and pineapple (gotta try it!), making medicinal chocolates with brain herbs and vitamin C, and serving gelatin shot tonics, some with alcohol and some without.

Your plate is your canvas. Let Nic’s music, the garden and the art around you inspire what you create. Build a plate that is colourful, strange, beautiful, wild, delicate, abundant or completely your own. Take a photo, eat your artwork and come back to create another!

The hands building the spa, painting the sidewalks and creating the bridge. Nic creating through music. Us creating in the kitchen. You creating on your plate. A circle of art and collaboration, with each person bringing something to the table.

Come hungry, bring your friends and play with your food again. Garden buffet gone crazy amazing. Inspire me with your plate!

29/09/2026

COME TO SOUTHERN ECUADOR FOR A LEARNING HOLIDAY

Living Ground is an education center in southern Ecuador focused on practical self-reliance, health and healing, living soil, herbal and food medicine, microbes, and regenerative practices for people and the land.

We currently offer four hands-on workshops:
Live Blood Analysis
Dried Blood Analysis
The Soil Food Web + Homestead Gardening
Plant & Kitchen Alchemy

These are small, immersive workshops where you come to learn by doing. Stay at the Living Ground Project, eat beautiful food through our Gratitude Cafe with ingredients from our gardens whenever possible, spend time in the apothecary and gardens, enjoy the herbal spa, yoga and meditation spaces, and experience the living systems behind what we teach.

Our workshops are supported by my self-reliance books, which form the foundation and workshop manuals for much of the teaching.

Dates are open through 2028, giving international participants time to plan flights, travel and a longer stay in Ecuador.

Come for a workshop. Stay for the experience. Leave with practical skills you can carry home and use.

Living Ground Project, Southern Ecuador, near Vilcabamba
Explore the workshops, dates and registration here:
https://livingground.art/workshops-in-ecuador-soil-microbiome-self-reliance-living-ground/
Learn to see what others miss.

22/09/2026

A passion of mine..the connection between humans (you) and the soil. How it is connected! And, how we are screwing it up.

I am finishing Plant & Kitchen Alchemy, a book that has grown to more than 550 pages of personal experience, practical knowledge and over 80 kitchen alchemy recipes centered on food as medicine. As I moved through the final edits, I realized I had spent a great deal of time …

20/09/2026

The Project keeps showing me that nothing really sits in isolation. Soil affects plants, plants affect food, food affects the microbiome, people affect the Project, relationships affect energy, money affects decisions, and one change somewhere almost always moves something somewhere else.

https://www.livinground.org/2026/09/20/growing-in-spaces-between-things/

19/09/2026

Our weekend gratitude, meal of fish tacos is ready all weekend at living ground

19/09/2026

Fish Tacos with a Tartar Twist this weekend at Living Ground. 🌮

A little British, a little Mexican, and made our way.

We are serving crispy fish tacos with guacamole, mole verde and our cultured herbed tartar cream, made with our microbiome-inoculated Greek yoghurt, lime, chives and herbs from the garden.

The full Gratitude Meal is crispy fish tacos, guacamole, mole verde, cultured herbed tartar cream, baked camote with herbed butter, coconut turmeric rice, fresh garden salad with chimichurri, coconut-lime dessert and chilled cleavers & tulsi tea.

$12
Saturday & Sunday
12–6 pm
Living Ground, Masanamaca

Come have lunch with us, sit in the garden, enjoy the food and spend a little time at Living Ground. We would love to see you. 🌿

09/09/2026

Preparing for our next workshop... Plant & Kitchen Alchemy
Nov 8-13

This November, from November 8–13, 2026, I will be teaching a new six-day workshop here at Living Ground Project in southern Ecuador called Plant & Kitchen Alchemy: Food, Medicine & Microbes. It brings together many of the threads that have been part of my work for years: soil, compost, plants, .....

31/08/2026

We have two special Gratitude weekends coming up at Living Ground, Masanamaca. 🌿

NEXT WEEKEND: LG KFC + KFCM

We are having a little fun with this one:
Living Ground Kentucky Fried Chicken
&
Living Ground Kentucky Fried Cauliflower & Mushrooms.

For all the Kentucky Fried Chicken lovers out there, we invited the Colonel over and had a word with him....and decided to create our own Living Ground healthy version.

Crispy herb-and-spice coated chicken, or crispy cauliflower and mushrooms for our vegetarian option, served with creamy garden coleslaw, your choice of buttery mashed potatoes or French fries, homemade onion and herb gravy, a little living ferment from our kitchen on our greens and house sauce.

Drink: Bubbling Garden Hibiscus Lemonade
Dessert: Warm Sticky Toffee Cake with our Innoculated Greek Yoghurt.

Comfort food,
Living Ground style.
The Colonel came to the garden and, yes, things changed. 😂

This weekend from 12–6 at Living Ground
Cost: $13 for everything.

THEN, SUNDAY SEPTEMBER 13 🌿🎂
Something very special is happening at Living Ground. Well, it is my birthday, and I decided I would really like to celebrate it in one sitting, with good food, good people and community, so for the first time we are going to offer a special sit-down Gratitude Meal. This will be different from our usual weekend meals. It will be a timed, seated meal prepared especially for the occasion, and reservations will be required.

The menu will stay a surprise for now. ❤️ There will be limited seating, so if you would like to join us at the table for my birthday, please reserve your place in advance....or you can wait until I announce the actual menu.

Sunday, September 13
Living Ground
Reservations only

More details coming next week. (I have already figured out the menu)

AND WHILE THINGS ARE GROWING AT LIVING GROUND... 🌿
Another part of the Project is beginning to come to life: our Living Ground Spa.

This has been developing quietly alongside everything else we have been creating here. The spa will bring together the garden, herbs, clays, cultured preparations and the living ecology that is at the heart of Living Ground, with experiences including our compost mud bath, herbal facials, body treatments, sauna and more.

There is a much bigger story behind why we are creating it and how it connects the soil biome, the skin microbiome and our relationship with the living world.
I have written a little more about what we are creating here:
READ ABOUT THE LIVING GROUND SPA:
https://www.livinground.org/2026/08/31/from-snake-room-to-spa/

See you at Living Ground. 🌿
Leisha Naja

There is another project quietly taking shape here at Living Ground, and this one has actually been circling around us for about a year. We are creating a small spa area with a sauna, hydrotherapy baths, herbal baths, Epsom salt baths, oils, herbal body treatments, Ayurvedic-inspired treatments, fac...

26/08/2026

https://www.livinground.org/2026/08/26/why-i-am-saying-no-to-treated-seed/

Living Ground has already been sprouting alfalfa, mung bean and sunflower at the café, and we have also been freeze-drying the sprouts into these ridiculously good little crunchy packets of nutrition. Now we are ready to expand and we are in investigative and research mode. We are testing broccoli,...

23/08/2026

have been wondering for a long time how to get what is in my brain out there and into the hands of others so they can benefit from it, learn from it, and become more self-reliant.
I have figured it out...well, a first step. Everything can always be improved and I hope it always is improved. Now that the prototype is ready, I can do the same for the Dried Blood Analysis and even the Ecuadorian Plant book. Portal door is opened now.....

I have been working with Live Blood Analysis for a long time, and every person who sits in front of me adds another piece to what I understand. I do not just look at a marker, name it and move on. I look at the person who is presenting, their …