The Roots of the Story

Long before The Ecology of You™, South Shore Permaculture, or Our Grateful Garden, there was a garden.

Actually, there was almost always a garden.

Todd grew up with a father who gardened wherever the family happened to live.

Each move meant another garden to build, reclaim, or tend.

Some of Todd's earliest memories are of gardens. Others are simply of paying attention.

Before he was ten, Todd remembers lying in a cemetery watching clouds pass overhead, overwhelmed by the beauty of the world and wondering how something this extraordinary could not be part of something larger.

He didn't have language for it. He just knew...

A Lifetime of Looking Closer

Todd wanted a GT Mach One BMX bike badly enough to start earning the money himself.

He trimmed neighbors' sidewalk edges by hand and mowed lawns using their equipment. By the end of high school, he and a friend were caring for nearly thirty lawns a week.

He still has the bike.

Todd later studied Environmental Policy and Ecological Restoration, worked in parks and turf management, volunteered in conservation and forestry, and continued learning how landscapes function.

Formal education was only part of it.

Mud. Birds. Bugs. Trees. Water. Soil. A plant turning toward the light. A log turned over simply to see what was underneath and smell the Earth.

Todd was learning to see landscapes as relationships.

The Grateful Garden

While living in Scituate, Todd began growing an extraordinary amount of food in a small yard, removing lawn and becoming increasingly interested in food systems and sustainability.

Conversations with farmers led him toward the idea of local food hubs.

Then he saw a sign at South Shore Organics in Hanover:

LOCAL MARKET COMING SOON.

Todd stopped, met Pam Denholm, discovered an unused greenhouse, repaired it, built a garden, grew food, and made deliveries.

When South Shore Organics closed, Pam suggested: Why not start a garden center?

Todd thought:

Yeah. Why don't I start a garden center?

We Grow Vegetable Gardeners

The Grateful Garden opened in Hanover in 2015 on the site of the old Red Cider Mill.

The greenhouse had holes. The building was part barn, part storefront, part greenhouse. A resident Spider Todd named Jumpy occasionally dropped from the ceiling onto the enormous checkout counter.

There was music. There were plants everywhere. And somehow, it felt good.

On May 7, 2015, The Grateful Garden made its first sale.

It wasn't a plant. It was Carrots Love Tomatoes, a book about companion planting and relationships between plants.

The customer paid in cash so Todd would have a dollar from his first sale to keep.

Todd still has it.

The sign outside carried the words:

We Grow Vegetable Gardeners.

Sustainability, Built In

Todd had spent years frustrated by the environmental choices around him before arriving at a more useful question:

What if people didn't have to choose the sustainable option?

What if better choices could simply be part of the design?

Customers wanted healthy plants.

Todd gave them healthy plants—while working with post-consumer pots, certified organic sources, custom growing media, compost, biochar, compost teas, companion planting, soil biology, and lower-input growing practices.

People didn't need to arrive as environmentalists. They could arrive wanting a good Tomato.

The ecology came built in.

The Gardener Becomes a Teacher

Behind the store, Todd built a teaching garden.

In 2014, about thirty people gathered there for a Sustainable South Shore meeting and Todd's first public talk: Sustainable Gardening.

He remembers being nervous. He also remembers being a little opinionated.

For years Todd had been observing, questioning, experimenting, and sometimes judging what people were doing environmentally.

Now people actually wanted to hear what he had learned.

Something shifted.

It felt like freedom.

When a Garden Is Transplanted

Todd planned to expand The Grateful Garden. Five acres had been cleared with Goats, and plans existed for a larger farm and event space.

Instead, in 2020, circumstances meant the garden center would close.

Todd wondered what would happen to the garden.

Two days later, Pam called.

A community garden project inspired by Todd's work had received funding. The Weymouth Food Pantry wanted to grow fresh food for people experiencing food insecurity.

The proposed site was Old South Union Church in Weymouth.

Todd visited at sunset. The white New England steeple was illuminated in extraordinary golden light.

A church. A food pantry. A visible garden. Fresh food grown where people could see it growing and shared with people who needed it.

Then Pam offered a solution to Todd's existing garden:

We'll buy it.

The Garden Found New Soil

That fall, members of Old South Union Church came to Hanover.

They brought a Bobcat.

They picked up the garden Todd had built and moved it to Weymouth.

Not metaphorically.

The garden itself was transplanted.

The business ended.

The garden didn't.

It had found new soil.

Todd followed it.

An Open Table

Todd hadn't been looking for a church.

But someone he loved wanted to attend, and the people who welcomed his garden seemed worth knowing.

Their first visit happened to be Communion Sunday.

Todd had grown up understanding Communion as something surrounded by rules about who could receive it.

At Old South Union, he encountered something different.

The table was open.

You didn't have to belong to that church. You were welcome.

Todd kept coming back. So did the garden.

The Garden Keeps Growing

During the years that followed, Todd's own life entered a period of profound disturbance.

One Sunday at Old South Union, Todd had an experience he understands as unmistakably spiritual: an instruction to turn The Grateful Garden into a nonprofit and use gardens to serve people in recovery.

Todd was still struggling himself.

Nevertheless, he began.

His original idea of installing gardens at recovery houses didn't ultimately become the model.

But pursuing it brought Todd into contact with Alcoholics Anonymous.

The person trying to create gardens to help other people recover was slowly being led toward his own recovery.

The plan hadn't worked. Something else had.

One Garden

Eventually, the idea became smaller.

Pea shoots grown without light emerge yellow and somewhat bitter. Bring them into sunlight and photosynthesis begins. Their color changes. So does their taste.

Todd saw an invitation.

Taste them. Put the pot in the light. Taste them again.

For one day, someone tends something living.

For one day:

they are a gardener.

The metaphor resonated with recovery: emerging from darkness toward what AA calls the sunlight of the spirit.

No five-acre farm required. One pot. One person. One experience of tending life.

That became part of the story of Our Grateful Garden.

OUR GRATEFUL GARDEN

The Garden Led Inward

Eventually Todd began asking:

If these principles help living landscapes recover, what might they teach us about ourselves?

Diversity creates resilience. Disturbance changes systems. Relationships matter. Depletion is information. Living systems need growth and rest. Nothing thrives alone.

Those observations eventually became The Ecology of You™.

Not because Todd stopped being a gardener.

Because he kept following the garden.

EXPLORE THE ECOLOGY OF YOU™

Still Learning

Today Todd Breitenstein is The Grateful Gardener: speaker, educator, ecological consultant, author, and creator of The Ecology of You™.

His education and training span Environmental Policy, Ecological Restoration, conservation, Permaculture Design, Organic Land Care, and health and wellness coaching.

But there is another education Todd values just as much:

A lifetime of paying attention.

He still takes photographs. Still turns over logs. Still puts his hands in the soil. Still asks enormous questions. Still gets things wrong. Still learns. Still wonders.

And remains grateful for every opportunity to teach because:

To teach is to learn.

Learning From Nature's Design

Todd doesn't claim to have found the path.

He has found a path shaped by gardens and forests, science and spirituality, mistakes and recovery, community and solitude, loss and restoration, and a lifetime spent paying attention.

His role is something closer to a trail guide.

He knows some terrain because he's walked it. He can point toward things worth noticing. He can tell you where he stumbled.

And sometimes he'll stop beside you, turn over a log, smell the Earth, and say: