This spring marks the beginning of my eight-month cooperative learning experience at Frog Top Farm & Gardens L.L.C., a land stewardship consultant. Located in the forest-lined limestone hills of Southcentral Indiana, Frog Top blends biodiverse garden cultivation with native plant stewardship, edible landscaping, pollinator habitats, and client-driven design work rooted in ecological restoration. As a student at the intersection of ethnography, ecology, and necropolitics, I came here not only to garden but to listen to the land, the frogs, the birds, and the people tending these shared spaces.
As a Frog Top steward, these shared spaces include the on-site farm, consisting of the “house garden”, meadows, bog, and vernal pool, as well as the various client gardens within the Bloomington area. My role so far has included a range of physical tasks: transplanting seedlings and sprouts into beds, propagating native and medicinal plants, and working with meadowscaping in urban/residential areas. This is the process of designing and stewarding spaces abundant in native plants that support local life and its diversity. I’ve also been involved in maintaining annual gardens for Frog Top’s clients, where desired aesthetics meet ecological function, and caretaking becomes an act of reciprocity.
Outside of hands-in-the-dirt work, I’ve been contributing to community science platforms like iNaturalist, Merlin Bird ID, and eBird—helping document local biodiversity and phenological changes across the region. These apps serve as living archives, where human and non-human presences are remembered and shared, often blurring the lines between data and storytelling. This digital fieldwork complements my senior capstone project, where I explore how ecological elements operate as actors, actively shaping the health and diversity of ecosystems through their own rhythms and relations.
Spring at Frog Top means watching the tree swallows return, listening for frog and bird song in the bog and vernal pool, and feeling the soil warm in the now hot sun. Over the next several months, I’ll continue documenting these exchanges through field notes, photos, and moments of quiet observation. This blog will occasionally help serve as a chronicle of that unfolding: a space to share what it means to steward an Ecological Commons, to move with the land’s rhythms, and to farm in a way that thinks with the forest, not against it.
