From Kitchen Scraps to Culinary Harvests: Welcome to The Element Tree Company

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My landscape design philosophy is that your home landscape should be a functional outdoor lifestyle space that does more than just look beautiful—it should feed your family, regenerate your soil, sustain a healthy ecosystem, and connect you to the rhythm of Southern California living. At The Element Tree Company, I transform residential landscapes into vibrant, elegant, and fully edible organic foodscapes.

 

My Story: Closing the Loop from Food Scraps to Fertile Soil to Fresh Supergreens 

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The idea for The Element Tree Company started right at my own kitchen counter and preparing weeknight healthy meals for my family.

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As someone who loves cooking healthy and organic meals from scratch, I have always been passionate about sustainability and regenerative agriculture. To me, the ultimate luxury is stepping outside to harvest fresh ingredients for dinner or craft drinks with friends and family. I love the idea of harvesting fruits and veggies from my kitchen garden for holiday meals or snipping fresh herbs outside my backdoor instead of having to run to the store for a last minute forgotten ingredient. So I built my own culinary raised beds out of sustainably harvested California Redwood to supply my family with fresh herbs, edible flowers, and summer fruits.

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But as I cooked, I noticed a massive gap in how we manage our home kitchens. Every day, all home kitchens discard valuable, organic food scraps, while yards are treated with synthetic, chemical fertilizers, or sometimes no fertilizer and everyone wonders why that one tree in the corner doesn't ever have fruit or that one frontyard shrub doesn’t ever flower as it should. None of this made any sense or felt sustainable or regenerative in ways I wanted to live and be in my community. 

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My professional work and research all has led to my expertise and understanding that some of the best natural fertilizer used by commercial organic flower farmers in Santa Barbara, and biodynamic wineries in Napa, and regenerative veggie market gardens in Chico, and fruit tree orchards in Sacramento & San Joaquin & Salinas Valley comes from earthworm castings and compost produced from kitchen scraps and arborist wood chips.

 

My philosophy is if the best California commercial farmers and Farmer's Market gardeners use the secret sauce of worm castings and food scrap compost to produce award agricultural products then so can homeowners and their own landscape space.

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I recognized the opportunity that we could close the loop beautifully at our homes managing our kitchen scrap waste if we tapped into the power of earthworms and the soil food web of healthy microbes to break down kitchen food scraps into fertile soil that we could use to produce an amazing, flourishing landscape.

 

So I set up an in-ground earthworm composting system to upcycle my own kitchen waste into nutrient-rich worm castings . . . in-ground as not to attract urban pests and allows excess liquid to nourish and hydrate surrounding plants. Quarterly every season, I fed that living compost back into my garden beds and fruit trees, creating a flawless, zero-waste ecosystem. And everything grew so vibrant, so healthy, so easy, and this made everything so much fun!

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The results were so spectacular that I knew I had to share this experience with family and friends and my local community. I founded The Element Tree Company to bring this full-circle, upcycle sustainable lifestyle directly to your backyard. The only organic edible gardening company in Southern California that does what we do and we are proud to serve your family.