Green Heart Blog

Team Member Spotlight: Cait Etherton

Watch out Charleston, there’s a new farmer in town!

Cait Etherton never imagined she’d stumble upon a job that fused her interests in farming, child education, writing, food, and photography—and then she found the Green Heart Project! Cait is the newest addition to the Green Heart team and will be working as our Agricultural Director: overseeing crop schedules, heading the recently installed garden and blueberry field at Windwood Farm School for Boys, expanding the garden at Zucker Middle School, and developing a new program in which each of our school gardens will be partnered with a local restaurant.

Cait spent the past three years as a manager at Ambrose Family Farm on Wadmalaw Island, where she worked with the harvesting crew and managed and operated all farmers markets and restaurant sales. She graduated from Emory University in 2010 with a Bachelor’s Degree in poetry writing. During her four years at Emory, Cait devoted a lot of time to Emory Christian Fellowship, regularly volunteered in the neurology department at the Children’s Hospital of Atlanta, and taught at Walden Early Childhood, a school for children with autism. Post-college (and pre-realizing she wanted to be a farmer) she practiced photography and worked as a fact checker at the National Geographic Society in Washington, D.C. Her first year of farming was spent as a field hand at Greenbranch Farm in her hometown on the Eastern Shore of Maryland.

Cait says she is inspired and motivated by the generous community she’s encountered here in Charleston and is excited to connect with local students through gardening while furthering her relationships with local farms, restaurants, and chefs through school-restaurant partnerships. After just a few short weeks onboard, it’s clear that Cait has seen the tremendous impact that our programs have on our students:

“Every time I work with kids in the garden I’m writing down the beautiful things that they say and the questions that they ask. The blessing in disguise for this generation of children is that everything garden-related is new to them. Every seed packet they open, every weed they pull, every bug they find and every leaf they taste is like an eye-opening discovery! Even watering the garden is this very tangible, therapeutic activity that the kids anticipate and even fight over. They are so willing. It’s difficult to even rein it in because they so desperately want to poke in the dirt and plant all the plants at once and just smell and look and taste and be involved in everything. It makes sense when you think about it. iPhones, as wonderful as they are, are flat little rectangles of glass. The garden has dirt and water and leaves that move when the wind picks up. It’s the real kind of engagement that a screen or a grocery store can’t get in the way of. We are so privileged to provide and enjoy the daily wonder and curiosity that can be experienced there.”

We couldn’t be happier about Cait joining our team and can’t wait to see just what those green thumbs can do … We know she has big things in store!

Quick Bite with: Cait Etherton, Agricultural Director

• Hometown: Salisbury, Maryland
• Favorite food: Sugar snap peas
• Fave farm chore: Harvesting and sowing seeds
• Biggest Green Heart project to date: Installing 18 raised wicking beds and a 50-plant blueberry field at Windwood Farm in Awendaw
• Next on the agenda: Installing 10 additional raised wicking beds at Zucker Middle School in North Charleston.