Faith Ford’s Stories, Lessons & Insights

We’re looking forward to introducing you to Faith Ford. Check out our conversation below.

Faith, really appreciate you sharing your stories and insights with us. Let’s jump in with a fun one: What do you think is misunderstood about your business

I design kitchen gardens as living systems.

Not just places to grow food—but spaces where soil, plants, seasons, and people are all in relationship with one another.

A lot of people approach gardening as a set of instructions: what fertilizer to buy, what to plant, what to spray. I approach it differently. I think about how the entire system functions together.

Because once the system starts working, everything else becomes easier.

To me, a healthy garden isn’t perfection. It’s curiosity. It’s observation. It’s walking outside with your coffee in the morning to see what changed overnight.

It’s the feeling of wanting to check on the garden the moment you get home.

That shift—from control to stewardship—is really the foundation of my work.

Can you briefly introduce yourself and share what makes you or your brand unique?

I’m Faith Ford, founder of Floracotta®, a regenerative kitchen garden and educational consultancy based in Los Angeles.

I design and build raised-bed kitchen gardens rooted in soil biology—spaces designed not just to look beautiful, but to produce food reliably and help people reconnect with the process of growing it.

I also grow open-pollinated seedlings using soil-block methods, so clients begin with plants already adapted to a living soil system.

What makes my work different is simple:

I don’t start with plants.
I start with soil.

Because when the soil is alive, everything else becomes more resilient, productive, and intuitive to manage.

But beyond that, I think gardening is really about attention.

You don’t truly learn plants from a chart—you learn them through observation. Some plants climb, some sprawl, some need support, some reseed themselves. Even within one variety, every season teaches you something new.

I help people slow down enough to start noticing those relationships.

Great, so let’s dive into your journey a bit more. What’s a moment that really shaped how you see the world?

In 2019, I planted a large garden for the first time since childhood.

I thought if I followed all the right steps, everything would work. Instead, I ended up overwhelmed and harvesting very little for the amount of space I planted.

I still remember pulling up a radish that had become woody and split open from waiting too long to harvest it. It was almost inedible—and I was absurdly proud of it anyway.

That experience didn’t discourage me. It made me curious.

Around that same time, I started paying closer attention to how our agricultural systems actually function. That led me to study soil biology, and that’s when something clicked for me: nutrient cycling.

The idea that plants aren’t passive—they’re active participants.

Through photosynthesis, plants feed microbes in the soil, and in return, those microbes unlock and cycle nutrients back to the plant. That exchange is what makes healthy soil function.

The issue isn’t that soil lacks nutrients.
It’s that those nutrients are often locked away.

Learning about nutrient cycling completely changed how I thought about gardening.

Soil stopped feeling like “dirt” to me.
It became a living system.

Once I understood that, I stopped looking at gardening as a battle to control nature—and started seeing it as a relationship to participate in.

What did suffering teach you that success never could?

Failure taught me to pay attention.

When things work, you tend to repeat what you did.

When they don’t, you’re forced to slow down and ask better questions.

Looking back, those early gardening “failures” don’t really feel like failures anymore. They feel like the beginning of understanding.

That lesson shows up in my client work too.

A lot of people come to me after something hasn’t worked—plants struggling, irrigation issues, poor soil, beds that were set up incorrectly. And while it’s easier to build a system properly from the beginning, those moments also create openness.

People stop looking for quick fixes.
They become more willing to learn how the system actually functions.

Gardening humbles you in a good way.

It teaches patience, observation, and the reality that growth rarely happens overnight.

Next, maybe we can discuss some of your foundational philosophies and views? What are the biggest lies your industry tells itself?

I think one of the biggest misconceptions is that more inputs automatically create healthier systems.

More fertilizer.
More intervention.
More control.

Luckily, that’s starting to change—but we still have a long way to go.

Nature has sustained itself for millions of years through relationship and nutrient cycling.

What’s often missing isn’t chemistry.
It’s biology.

When soil life is functioning well, nutrients cycle more effectively, water is retained longer, and plants become more resilient over time.

We’ve become very focused on forcing outcomes instead of understanding how systems actually work.

That doesn’t mean doing nothing. It means observing more closely and working with natural processes instead of constantly fighting against them.

Some of the most important lessons gardening teaches are about time and participation.

You do one day of hard work, and months later you’re rewarded with abundance.

That rhythm changes how you think about food, waste, and even patience.

In the garden, there’s no real waste. Even plants you don’t harvest can return to the soil and continue feeding the system.

Nature is constantly recycling.
We’re the ones still learning how to participate in it again.

Before we go, we’d love to hear your thoughts on some longer-run, legacy type questions. Are you doing what you were born to do—or what you were told to do?

I’m doing what I was born to do. It just took me much longer to recognize it.

As a child growing up in Kansas, I was always outside. I spent hours lying in the grass searching for four-leaf clovers because it felt magical that one might be hiding there somewhere.

I had a little triangle garden lined with marigolds where I grew tomatoes and peppers. One summer, we grew peppers so hot I remember eating one and running laps around the house trying to cool my mouth down.

I climbed cottonwood trees and journaled in the branches. I picked blackberries with my dad. My grandmother had this beautiful Gothic-style greenhouse that my grandfather built by hand in Colorado.

Those memories stayed with me long before I understood why they mattered.

But after moving to Los Angeles, gardening became out of sight, out of mind. Like a lot of people living in cities, I lost regular access to land and didn’t fully realize what was missing.

Then in 2019, I had access to soil again—and something clicked.

Looking back, it feels obvious now.

The interest was always there.

I just needed the right conditions for it to grow.

And honestly, some of my strongest memories still revolve around food fresh from the garden.

I remember the first warm tomato I ate straight off the vine at a friend’s house when I was younger. We picked it and ate it like an apple.

You spend the rest of your gardening life chasing that moment.

And somehow, it never stops feeling magical.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.floracotta.com
• Instagram: floracotta
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/faithford/
• Twitter: floracotta
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/floracotta

 

 

 

Image Credits
Photo by Daniel Moody (headshot).
All other images by Faith Ford.