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This is us

The name Natural Abundance comes from the belief that abundance and prosperity is in a constant state of pouring over from Source, through the natural unfoldment of living systems. The plants are so generous in their giving! Our rightful place in the ecosystems as humans is to facilitate and encourage that proliferation. Our guiding star always comes back to the knowledge and wisdom given to us by the plants. As best we can, we strive to act as a voice for the plant kingdom.

Erik DeGunther

Founder

Erik has always made a habit of following his authentic curiosity. This led him to pursue a B.S. in Zoology from UCSB, and then earn his massage and Yoga certifications. Then after working at a luxury spa in Santa Barbara during covid, he transformed his life to be entirely centered around the inspiration of Natural Abundance by moving onto a farm on the Hamakua Coast.

Ever since discovering his love of plants in college, Erik's life has been dedicated to making the world a more beautiful place through caretaking nature in its many forms. After grappling with the existential uncertainty that is so common in our modern times, he has become perfectly clear that his purpose in this life is to facilitate the proliferation of abundance from the natural world. Whether that is done at the farm he currently care-takes in Papaikou, at local community events, or your home garden, Erik will always do his best to stay present in listening to the guidance from nature.

The mission: We want to offer everyone the opportunity to grow their own food at home.

Growing a forest garden at home is one of the most powerfully beneficial things someone can do for their family, community and the world. Despite all the uncertainty we face in a modern society, building a sustainable, holistic, and abundant landscape is an obvious step towards a brighter future.

Natural Abundance provides a range of individualized services to meet the specific needs of each customer. You don’t need to be a skilled gardener to reap the enormous benefits of a food forest. Our goal is for people on the Big Island to grow their own food, so we offer our holistic design approach to ensure that the dream of a sustainable and abundant future becomes a reality. Wether it's an afternoon workshop or a complete food forest installation, our offerings are for anyone wishing to improve their relationship to plants.

The time for empty talk is through. Now we must take decisive action to build a better future for our children.

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Method

Holistic approach to helping homeowners by offering a wide range of services, depending on individual need

Audience

Homeowners on Big Island that want to grow their own food at home.

Goal

To provide the knowledge and expertise necessary to allow any homeowner to grow their own forest garden.

Goal

To provide the knowledge and expertise necessary to allow any homeowner to grow their own forest garden.

Audience

Homeowners on Big Island that want to grow their own food at home.

Method

Holistic approach to helping homeowners by offering a wide range of services, depending on individual need

How we do it

Weed Suppression

Stop pulling weeds! We are all divine creators on this magical plane of incarnation, with endless knowledge and creativity at our disposal. You have better things to do than pull tiny little plants out of the ground all day. Luckily you don’t have to. Instead of pulling the weeds out by hand, you can just burry them in mulch! This provides the added benefit of nourishing the soil for a healthy soil microbiome at the same time. Consistent mulch cover will also cause a shift in the composition of soil microorganisms from a bacterial dominant to fungal dominant ecosystem. Where weeds thrive in a bacterial dominant soil, trees and other long-lived species will thrive in a fungal dominant system. It’s a no brainer. Especially when you can also grow your own mulch on site with plants like Pigeon Pea and Comfrey that also enhance their soil with their root system. Bare soil is a wound to the earth, and weeds are nature’s scab. The weeds, or “pioneer species” are Mother Nature’s way of healing depleted soil. With this understanding we can work with nature, and stop fighting against it. As humans our role is to facilitate and enhance the natural world around us because we a uniquely gifted as animals who possess deep and powerful foresight. We begin this co-creation with a deep sheet mulch to jumpstart the soil composition towards fungal dominance that favors trees over weeds. In time we work towards a system where all the ground is covered by productive plants, and shaded by other layers of canopy trees.

Dense Planting

When you imagine a modern farm, most people see long straight lines of a single crop with even spacing. Farmer’s plant in this way not because it benefits the plants, but to facilitate an easier harvest and maintenance with tractors. A large farm’s main constraint is not space, but cost of labor. In your own backyard you have a completely different set of constraints, so we can design a system that is more beautiful, holistic, and creates huge yields in a small space. Each individual plant species requires a different set of growing conditions. For instance, cacao likes to live in the shade of larger trees, while mango thrives in full sun. Keeping this in mind, we can design a planting layout that gives each plant its ideal conditions by utilizing the many different microclimates in each location. Weed suppression Dense planting of desirable species also helps to croud out the less desirable species (AKA weeds). Any area of soil not occupied by a plant is begging for weeds to invade. In the lush sub-tropical climate of Hawaii bare soil is a near impossibility because some aggressive species of plant will find its home there. We can greatly help mitigate the weeds by making sure that every of soil is filled in by a plant of our choice. This concept is termed “competitive exclusion”. Aside from all the functional reasons to plant densely, it is also just more beautiful! Who doesn’t want their home garden to represent the lush abundance of Hawaii? A space with many different species of different colors and growing patterns more closely resembles a natural system and is more appealing to our innate human desire for a balanced living environment.

Natural Soil Building

A long-lived system that has been planned carefully will improve and mature constantly. As the plants grow, produce a yield, and die back, they leave organic matter to be assimilated into the soil. Anything that has lived can live again through the earth. Soil is a living, breathing ecosystem that is the essential foundation of life on Earth, and growing a perennial system at home is a great way to honor that relationship. When a tree uses photosynthesis to build sugar out of sunlight, it sequesters Carbon Dioxide out of the air and into the chemical structure of its wood. When those plant materials die they can transform that Carbon into soil substrate. This is how plants can transmute greenhouse gasses into rich growing material and even into food. If even a fraction of all the lawns in the world were turned into food forests, we would actually reverse climate change. This is power of trees! We have the solution right here at our finger tips. We can make a huge positive step towards sustainability by growing your own food at home.

High Diversity

High diversity of plant composition is a clear indicator as to the health of any ecosystem. A big reason for this is that each species brings a different profile of benefits and requirements. One plant can fix Nitrogen into the soil for another tree that needs it, while attracting native beneficial insects to eat pests. While another species might help protect a more fragile plant from the harsh wind and sun. Every plant can naturally benefit the ones around it, and when 50 or 100 species come together the web of interactions becomes exponentially beneficial. This phenomenon is also of benefit to us humans in that we can create a variety of different yields for ourselves. You can have a large variety of different foods grown at home. Any part of nature thrives on diversity. Whether that’s the native ecosystem, the home garden, or your internal microbiome, greater diversity is key to balanced health.

All the love we give to plants will be amplified and returned.

No matter your lifestyle, plants form the foundation of our world through their effortless unfolding of abundance.