About · The GreenLife Project
Fifteen Years and Four Generations Deep
The GreenLife Project is the public record of what one family is learning about living regeneratively — at a homestead called Butterthief Gardens, in the forest outside Olympia, Washington.
We call ourselves regenerists. Not because we've arrived anywhere, but because regeneration is the direction we've chosen — in the garden, in the kitchen, in the way we think about food and community and the land beneath our feet. Butterthief Gardens has been our home and our laboratory for fifteen years, and in that time four generations of our family have lived, worked, argued, cooked, built, and grown here together.
The GreenLife Project is our attempt to share what we're learning, openly and honestly, so that others who are asking the same questions don't have to start from scratch.
"We didn't set out to be an experiment. We set out to live well. The experiment happened naturally."
What Butterthief Gardens is
Butterthief Gardens is a working family homestead on the west side of Olympia, surrounded by the kind of Pacific Northwest forest that makes everything feel possible — Douglas fir and red cedar, sword ferns that come back year after year, turkey tail mushrooms appearing in the leaf litter like small gifts, moss on every surface. We have raised beds and a growing food forest, a water catchment system still under construction, beehives in the making, and a kitchen that smells like whatever is simmering on the stove.
Four generations means four sets of hands, four sets of opinions, and a depth of memory that no single person could carry alone. The oldest generation remembers how things were done before they were modernized away. The youngest is growing up knowing where food comes from. Everyone in between is figuring it out.
Broccoli heading up in the raised beds at Butterthief Gardens — December 2024. Growing year-round in the Pacific Northwest is possible with the right varieties and a little stubbornness.
What regenerative means to us
Sustainable means not making things worse. Regenerative means actively making things better — the soil, the water, the food, the community, the knowledge that gets passed down. We ask one question about almost every decision: does this leave things more alive than we found them?
It's a surprisingly useful compass. Applied to the garden, it means building soil instead of depleting it. Applied to the kitchen, it means cooking from what's here, wasting as little as possible, fermenting what would otherwise go. Applied to community, it means sharing freely — the seeds, the skills, the hard-won lessons.
We believe that how we tend the land, feed our families, and share what we know is one of the most powerful things any of us can do. Not perfect. Not all at once. But honestly, and together.
Why we're doing this publicly
We could keep a family journal. We started publishing because we believe the learning is more useful shared. When something works — a no-dig bed technique, a fermentation that actually turned out — you should know. When something fails, that's worth knowing too. There are no curated highlight reels here. Just the homestead, season by season, as it actually is.
The GreenLife Project is also a community project. The Community Corner, the beekeeping connections, the partnerships with organizations like United Plant Savers — this isn't one family's story in isolation. It's one family's invitation to a much larger conversation about how to live differently, and better, on the land we share. If any of this resonates, you're welcome here.
