About Me

“Tell your story: Yes, tell your story. Show your example. Tell everyone it’s possible, and others shall feel the courage, to climb their own mountains.” (Paulo Coelho)

As a very little girl in the 1950’s, living in the endless corn and soybean fields of the Midwest, I often wondered about all those “starving children in China” my mother referred to each meal. This was somehow supposed to encourage me or my brother to eat something on our plates that would otherwise be wasted. I often questioned this reasoning, trying to imagine someone trying to pick up Brussels sprouts with chopsticks but the greater question was: how could a parent allow their child to be hungry?

What I didn’t know until later in life was that at the very moment I was worrying over the hungry children on a distant continent, my own parents were both unemployed, my mother was wracking up tens of thousands of dollars in medical bills for a long-standing heart condition and our car had recently been repossessed. We had virtually no income yet we had food. We never went hungry.

I’ve often re-visited in my mind how it was that I don’t remember ever going to bed hungry when my parents struggled for years to keep a roof over our heads. The only answer I can find is in our gardens. Between my grandparents’ and our own, my family was always blessed with good food. Never too much, but always enough and it is that memory of our gardens that I have carried through my own life as the manifestation of abundance that came to us from the back of a few narrow small town lots.

Scott lives and works in Albuquerque, NM, enjoying her granddaughters, mountains, year around motorcycle roadways.  She segued from a successful business as a landscape consultant to teaching sustainable gardening and supporting developing community gardens. As a member of the Albuquerque Backyard Farms collaborative, (www.abqbackyardfarms.com) she provides workshops on garden planning, raised bed gardening and composting. Scott is also a coordinator for a local initiative of the Plant A Row for the Hungry** national campaign called Giving Gardens.

As an experienced freelance writer of more than 10 years, she has written on everything from gardening and Mongolian embroidery to women who ride motorcycles as well as her other passion: solo travel on the cheap.

CONTACT INFORMATION:
outrageousgardener [at] yahoo.com
environmentalenhancers [at] hotmail.com
Business phone: 505-907-9070

**Are you a local food banks interested in developing on-site gardens and helping your clients learn to garden? Yvonne donates time to mentor clients in small garden systems.