Gardening Series
A workshop series to guide the home organic gardener’s season, from prep and planning all the way through harvest and soil maintenance.
We'll help you create the garden of your dreams.
This spring, set your growing dreams in motion with this Gardening Series led by Laura Ruby and hosted by West Asheville’s Peace Gardens & Market. Get expert guidance on planting dates, bed preparation, seed starting, transplanting, and more.
Stay tuned for 2025-2026 dates!
Meet the Instructor
Laura has a strong, inborn love of plants and animals. But it wasn’t until she earned her Permaculture Design Certificate in 2002 from Crystal Waters EcoVillage in Australia that she understood how to work with them sustainably through whole systems design. After this experience and graduating from the University of Colorado with an Environmental Science degree, Laura started working with the Growe Foundation, designing and implementing gardens at 14 elementary schools. Through an inspiring curriculum and seeing more and more children eating veggies that they grew at school, she started YummyYards to help families grow food where they live.
YummyYards supports those who want to create and expand their aesthetic and edible gardens. She believes these two types of gardens do not need to be separate. Instead, they can ebb and flow to create a more resilient, productive, and beautiful outdoor living space.
In 2013, she moved to Western North Carolina and immediately started working with other landscapers and nurseries in the Asheville area. From 2015 to 2018, she was the curriculum director at The Roots Foundation. Through the foundation, she worked with teachers in Asheville City Schools, developing multidisciplinary, real-world, project-based learning lessons for grades K-7. She also co-designed many outdoor learning classrooms at the Lucy Herring Elementary School of Ecology.
Laura is creating an educational and inspirational farm, the Ruby Ranch, in Candler, NC.