Who Are We? 

Foxglove Grove was started by me, Monica Lundeen, a Montessori educator turned farmer, with a ton of help from my husband, Mike Smith. With 13 years of classroom experience teaching math and science, an undergraduate degree in both mathematics and visual arts and a Master's degree in forensic science, and a passion for creativity and a true love of learning, I "retired" on 9 acres of beautiful wooded hills in Caldwell.

When I was in the classroom every day, I relished seeing what my students were doing in their Occupations work (this is a fancy Montessori term for work with the hands that supports the school microeconomy). When I did my AMI/NAMTA adolescent training in Chihuahua, Mexico in 2015, I got to see an urban farm school in action, which brought out the deeper desire to dig into what Dr. Montessori meant when she wrote about adolescents living and working on a farm. So that's the vision, and that's the goal.

For now, I want to offer a taste of that farm life to anyone who wants to learn more. Primarily, that means urban schools who want to give experiences to students beyond the classroom. Or parents who are homeschooling. Or parents who just want their kids to be outside and away from screens for a day. Or people who want to know how their food gets to the grocery store, or how to build a garden in neglected soil, or why we need bees and goats and chickens, or heck, how to build a da Vinci bridge. That's a lot of OR, but I hope you get the idea.

So while we all wait to see what happens in the era of COVID-19, come visit. Here's a list of what we currently have going on around the farm:

• A kitchen garden in process with an outdoor dining and entertainment space
• A 1-acre field where we are growing a variety of produce and cut flowers
• Two secondary fields for rotational grazing and soil rehabilitation
• A greenhouse for starting seeds
• 70+ chickens and guineas
• 23 cats (goodness, how did that happen??)
• 5 goats
• 5 dogs
• 4 bunnies
• 2 beehives
• 1 miniature donkey