Circle Ridge Farms is a small permaculture garden located on my family farm in Albemarle, North Carolina. We are the third generation in the family that gets the honor of stewarding this land, and we tend to it with the intention of passing it on to our children. 

Since the property was purchased in the 1940s, it has been continuously farmed in a variety of ways since then. Today, most of the farm is dedicated to raising grass-fed beef and hay in addition to our permaculture garden.

Our grandparents were a product of the Great Depression, and their homestead and gardens played a critical role in feeding their family. They didn’t have a choice other than to utilize what we would now call “permaculture” or “closed-loop” growing methods- recycling every single resource on the farm (cow manure, saving seeds, collecting rainwater, etc.) and using very little outside inputs. 

Today, we are bringing the farm full circle and returning to some of the ethos that they followed, keeping the farm in the family, and tending to it in a way that will make it an even better farm to pass on to our fourth generation. 

In 2024, we worked with Jenny Kimmel of Sow Permaculture and Ross Lackey of Holly Hill Farm to restore an area of the farm that was once our grandparents’ kitchen garden back into the haven of food and flowers that we remember it being as a child.