About the Porch Swing Collective
The Porch Swing Collective is a place for people to gather, learn, share knowledge, and build stronger connections—to one another, to our communities, to our food, and to the natural world around us.
We believe practical knowledge matters. Knowing how to grow food, preserve a harvest, understand an ecosystem, cook from what we have, care for the places we live, and participate in our local food systems gives us more than individual skills. It gives us opportunities to become more capable, more connected, and better able to care for ourselves, one another, and our communities.
Through workshops, classes, resources, and community-centered learning, The Porch Swing Collective brings together practical skills, traditional knowledge, science, creativity, and lived experience. We believe learning should be accessible, useful, welcoming, and shared generously—and that everyone has something to learn and something worth contributing.
This isn’t about doing everything perfectly or knowing everything already. It’s about staying curious, sharing what we know, learning what we don’t, and building something stronger together.
Why I Built The Porch Swing
For most of my life, I’ve been a learner and a maker. I’ve grown food, preserved harvests, studied sustainable food and farming, explored herbalism, sewn quilts, made cheese and yogurt, built gardens and greenhouses, and collected more practical skills than I could probably list. I genuinely love learning how things work—and then figuring out how to do them myself.
But somewhere along the way, I realized the skills themselves weren’t actually the part I cared about most.
What I love is what happens because of them.
A garden can feed a family, but it can also connect us to the seasons, the soil, our neighbors, and the food on our plates. Learning to preserve food can fill a pantry, but it can also preserve traditions, reduce waste, stretch a food budget, and give someone the confidence that comes from realizing, I can do this. Knowledge becomes even more valuable when we share it.
My own life has also taught me a great deal about resilience, rebuilding, and the importance of community. I’ve experienced seasons when life felt abundant and seasons when simply getting through it required everything I had. Through all of them, I kept coming back to many of the same things: learning, making, growing, feeding people, spending time in nature, sharing what I had, and finding ways to create connection and meaning in ordinary life.
The Porch Swing Collective grew from all of those pieces.
I wanted to build a place where practical knowledge and deeper understanding could live side by side. Where science, traditional skills, lived experience, and curiosity all have value. Where people can learn how to grow tomatoes or preserve peaches—and also understand soil ecosystems, food systems, community resilience, and why any of it matters.
Most of all, I wanted to create the kind of learning space I believe we need more of: one where knowledge is shared generously, curiosity is encouraged, people learn from one another, and what we learn helps us participate more fully in our own lives and communities.
That became The Porch Swing Collective.
Meet The Founder
Hi, I’m Amber—the founder, educator, and perpetually curious person behind The Porch Swing Collective.
I have a degree in Sustainable Food & Farming from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, but a lot of what I know has also been learned with my hands in the dirt, in my kitchen, through years of independent study, and by trying things just to see if I could figure them out.
I’m a gardener, food preserver, maker, systems thinker, and lifelong learner. I’m endlessly fascinated by the connections between food, people, plants, ecosystems, communities, and the everyday choices that shape how we live. If I learn something interesting, my natural next step is usually to ask why, learn everything I can about it, and then tell somebody else. The Porch Swing Collective gives me a place to do exactly that.
I live and grow in the Pacific Northwest, where my garden is usually slightly out of control, there’s almost always something fermenting or being preserved in my kitchen, and I’m probably in the middle of learning another skill I absolutely did not need to add to the list.
I’m glad you’re here. I can’t wait to see what we learn together.