Mariel’s journey with farming and land-based living began in her teens with a backpack and the gnawing feeling that her own personal needs for meaningful connection were not being met in the city. A permaculture design course in Joshua Tree fortuitously led her to Quail Springs as a work-trader in 2019.

Mariel has a wide array of farming experience, including work at small-scale subsistence homesteads, large production farms, organic urban seed production, permaculture in the desert, and most recently, a diverse and bio-intensive perennial nursery in Northern California.
Mariel is fueled by the knowledge that human systems of oppression over one another mirror the oppression of the earth and its cycles, and that the liberation of one is inextricably linked to the liberation of the other. She believes in growing healthy food and community as a form of resistance to these systems of oppression. She is dedicated to food sovereignty for all and moving towards more just and ecologically sound ways of being.

Mariel comes from the Anishinaabe and Dakota lands of Minnesota and is a reverent student of the Chumash land she inhabits. When not in the garden, Mariel finds joy in backpacking, biking, botanizing, hacky-sacking, reading a good book, and exulting (loudly and unabashedly!) in the beauty and mystery of this life.

She is excited to tend the gardens at Quail Springs and feed her community the same way this community nourishes her.