Amy Stross
Tenth Acre Farm: Permaculture for the Suburbs

Amy Stross is an avid permaculture gardener, writer, educator, and author of The Suburban Micro-Farm, with a varied background in home-scale food production.

At age 33, Amy fell ill with an autoimmune disease, which made working difficult. She quit her job as a high school teacher and began exploring healthy lifestyle choices as a way to cope.

The first step in her journey was to join a local organic farm’s Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program where she collected a weekly share of fresh produce. She thought the program was so cool that she joined the administrative team, and helped to run the program that feeds over 100 families per year.

Amy Stross @72

In 2009 she received her permaculture design certificate, and discovered that having her hands in the dirt was good therapy. She went on to work as a professional landscape gardener and permaculture designer specializing in ecologically regenerative and productive landscapes. Her own (former) 0.10-acre, home scale micro-farm became a thriving example of a productive yet aesthetically pleasing landscape, including earthworks to take advantage of water from the roof, berry bushes, cherry trees, herbs, and flowers; all in the front yard.

Amy also led the development of a community garden at her local university, where, with the help of community residents, she transformed a forgotten hillside into a food-producing forest. She employed many permaculture strategies for regenerating degraded soil, managing water, and improving biodiversity. For this work she was awarded the Urban Bounty Award by the Civic Garden Center of Greater Cincinnati for ‘building community and changing lives through the harvest of community gardening’.

She holds a Master’s Degree in education and is excited to participate in this course as a teacher. She always seeks to continue to learn and improve her own knowledge of permaculture practices. Amy aims to find more ways to apply permaculture design to today’s world for a more interconnected and respectful relationship with earth.

Her current adventure includes transforming a new 3-acre property into a biodiverse micro-farm with her husband and mischievous farm cat. A food forest, water management projects, and foraging strips in the woods are already underway.

She reaches hundreds of thousands of people with her adventures and expertise in small-scale permaculture gardening on her popular website, TenthAcreFarm.com. She shares her discoveries and ideas for bringing permaculture to suburban and residential areas, useful for both residents of these areas and designer-consultants who serve them.

​Learn more about her book, The Suburban Micro-Farm, at TheSuburbanMicroFarm.com.

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