When it comes to starting to grow your own Nutrient Dense Food from home it can be quite overwhelming with the amount of information there is out there. So we have pulled together our top tips for starting out based on our experience and thorough learning and research done over the past few years.

The biggest piece of advice we can give you it to empower yourself and others with the best information and knowledge. Making informed decisions helps to change your patterns and strengthens your life. Learn, talk and teach everyone in order to change lives.

“Everything is connected, so growing great soil and microbes will have positive effects for plants, animals and humans. All this is shown in nutrient dense food which in turn is reflected in our health and wellbeing (body, mind and soul).” – Shannon Wright

Our top books/resources to get your hands on before starting out:

- Change of Heart: This is a recipe book with an excellent understanding about traditional eating based in New Zealand

- Koanga Garden Guide: This is the complete guide to starting out with you learning. It covers everything from bed preparing, which seeds and trees to choose and understanding the foundations around regenerative gardening. This guide can be found at the Koanga Institute.

- Garden Planner: This planner covers a wide variety of information from helping design the bio-intesive crop rotation, the best planning and spacings for a small area, timings and potential yields etc, but most importantly how to grow your compost heap also.

- Growing Nutrient Dense Food booklet: This is the booklet we recommend to people who are not able to afford to buy the Koanga Garden Guide but will give you a great base for starting to grow and understand nutrient dense food. Also available from the Koanga Institute.

For those eager to get started and are after some additional resources to review these resources have also been a great help to us starting out:

- The Wholefood Pantry by Amber Rose

- Love Bake Nourish by Amber Rose

- Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon

- The Nourishing Traditions Book of Baby & Child Care by Sally Fallon Morell and Thomas S Cowan MD

- The Truth About Cancer, A Global Quest (Documentary series, so worth the 13hours of watching, information and solutions about everything!!!)

- GMO's Revealed (Documentary series, so much more than GMO's, really eye opening, informative about what is being done to our food!!!)

- Prosperity Film (Well.org - Real solutions and changes happening and how you can play your role in a better world!!!)

Along with some background research to help you feel prepared when taking this step, or perhaps helping you to make the decision on whether this is the right fit for you and your family, we also would like to equip people with tools to help you learn and identify various things in your garden.

We outlined a lot of the key tools we use in our own backyard in our blog here.

All of these resources, tools and steps gets you heading down the right path to Bio-intensive gardening and nutrient dense food production. This helps you to sequester carbon, fight climate change from your backyard, create community and become more self-reliant with an aim of long-term sustainability and regeneration for the environment and people.

Isn’t it amazing what a garden can do!?

Never forget to; Learn, Learn, Learn, Teach, Teach, Teach!!!