Founded in 2009, Blue Ridge Backyard Harvest is dedicated to helping you and your family grow more food, while growing as gardeners, for years to come. We believe that the food you grow at home is the freshest, healthiest, and most delicious available, and that the pleasures of spending time together in a beautiful, productive garden, season by season, year by year, are second to none.
Originally from Martha’s Vineyard Island, Guinevere Higgins is a lifelong gardener passionate about helping people grow, cook and preserve food. Guinevere has a background in organic landscape design and installation, environmental education, small farm management, and environmental philanthropy. She serves on the Advisory Board for the City Schoolyard Garden Project at Buford Middle School and is the founding member of the Charlottesville League of Urban Chicken Keepers (CLUCK). She holds a Permaculture Design Certificate from the Blue Ridge Permaculture Institute, and a Bachelor’s degree from Wellesley College. She lives in Charlottesville where she enjoys walks by the river, cooking and eating homegrown meals, and spending time with friends and fellow gardeners.
Mike Parisi has worked at Roundabout Farm in Keswick, VA; Double H Farm in Nelson County, VA; Lynchburg Grows; and Tricycle Gardens in Richmond. While working on a BS in Architecture from the University of Virginia, he was able to use school trips as an excuse to visit farms in Peru and Italy. At D.I.R.T. Studio, a landscape architecture firm in Charlottesville, he focused on heavy metal remediation in the soil of New Orleans, with the goal of creating safe and healthy growing conditions for people and plants alike. A third generation Italian-American, Mike's as obsessed with growing the perfect tomato as he is with finding the perfect tomato sauce recipe.
