SpiritWorks Through the Years

Please Visit this page often for current information.

February 2025 Update

Amazing how time flies—we're entering our 12th season with an incredible team!

Darla Boley continues as our Farm Manager, leading us into her third year in this role.
Anna Lietman Prestegaard, a 2018 WWOOFer and a dedicated team member since 2022, has stepped into the roles of Education & Community Engagement Strategist. She is expanding our weekly herbal presentations (April–October) to include monthly workshops and wellness programs year-round covering a broad spectrum of topics. (Check our blog for updates!)
Sydney Halajian, our new Strategic Operations and Development Coordinator, is streamlining our financial, organizational, and HR systems, helping us work more efficiently than ever.

Looking Back & Moving Forward

We closed 2024 on a high note with our Making Medicinal Mocktails workshop, which was so well received that we’ll be offering it again soon—stay tuned for the announcement!

Our farm library was totally re-organized and given a loving touch of comfort for self-directed studies.

We also created the leadership team (see above) to catapult our offerings for our community and beyond.

The 2025 season is already off to an exciting start with:

Herbs for Wilderness First Aid
Crafting Your Own Herbal Tea Blend, presented at the Annual Women’s Farmers Union Conference

Both were met with enthusiasm and will be offered again.

2025: A Season of Growth & Creativity

This year, we are welcoming an extraordinarily talented group of Apprentices and WWOOFers. We’re thrilled to bring new apprentice programs on:
✅ Culinary Herbalism
✅ Herbs for Animal Wellness

✅ Marketing Herbs
…and more!

We will be repeating Herbal Boot Camp this season. These week-long immersions into our farm life will include team tasks to stimulate team building and address major projects needing to be done.

We’ve also added new wholesale accounts for our herbs. Plus, our discounted 2022 & 2023 herbal inventories are flying off the shelves—grab them while they last!

With a dynamic leadership team, dedicated participants, and an exciting season ahead, we look forward to sharing our passion, knowledge, and farm with you.

Stay connected for upcoming events, workshops, and special announcements!

Retreat & Stay With Us!

Looking for a peaceful getaway? Our Retreat Center still has some open dates, and our new Studio Apartment and Artisan’s Camper are also available for booking! Reserve directly at www.spiritworksllc.hospitable.rentals for the best price without OTA fees!

Plus, our campground now features a brand-new bathhouse, complete with a dedicated shower room and a laundry room, making your stay even more comfortable.

~ The Team at SpiritWorks Trilogy

* * * * * *

Now that the farm and retreat infrastructure has been created, our season will focus community connections and education on growing and learning about herbs in an individually self-directed and community integrated manner. Our farm goal is for each of us to become adept at incorporating herbs into our menus in a manner that is health building, therapeutic, and delicious. We have several curriculums to guide our learning (guided by David Wolfe, RP Khalsa, and Rosemarie de la Foret). Our learning will form the basis of the more structured living, farming and learning environment we create for daily and weekly routines. We will learn how to integrate herbs for health with our nutritional choices, expand the herbal apothecary, share what we learn with each other and our community. We welcome a month-long wellness immersion farm stay experience that may be extended if mutually desired.

We will continue to create community together, expanding on what has been learned during previous seasons and taking it to another level.

Our goals are to maximize productivity on this land, build health with our lifestyle choices, learn about and teach others the value of natural herbal health, and to live in community with each other, and intimately with nature, learning ancient skills for homesteading and survival - all supported by a sustainable, dedicated community lifestyle.

All this we hope to share with those who visit our farm, whether to purchase herbs from our Apothecary, camp, tour the farm, or attend a program/event.

* * * * * *

2024

This season we welcomed several WWOOFers who helped with extensive weeding, ,planting1000 rose bushes and harvesting an abundant harvest of produce and potent herbs.

We also launched our Monday night Herbal Presentation Programs, where each person presented an oral and written report on an herb they researched and got to know during the week. This generated a 750 page ebook that will be available on our Shopify store.

We upgraded the campground adding a bathhouse complete with a laundry. No more honey buckets!

2022-2023 Seasons

We managed our 2022 and 2023 seasons with a skeleton crew of volunteers, previous staff returning part-time or for boot camp under the leadership of Darla Boley, our Farm Manager.

In 2023, Lindy tore down her home due to mold and in six months, with an incredible crew of dedicated craftsmen under the leadership of Marc Scott, our new home was built. Our new home provides housing for mid-term rentals and solo reterats in a spaceous studio apartment.

In 2022 we hired Darla Boley as Farm Manger and began to offer educational botanical herb garden tours.

2021

We welcome the new season with our veteran Spiritworks, Lia Hardy as Farm Manager and protocols for social distancing. We learned that farming is a perfect vocation during a pandemic. We all stayed healthy, enjoyed our distancing when necessary and had a very productive season. In addition to focusing on the harvest, we focused on our marketing, social media, on-line store and developing our wholesale partnerships.

February 2020

Celebration of our new on-line Apothecary and highly organized and stocked Apothecary due to the detailed focus of Adam T. Larose, our new Farm associate. Adam has stepped into filling the big shoes left by Todd and Megan and is a most welcome jack-of-all-trades with a get-it-done work ethic. Persistence pays and now our apothecary is finally on-line. This has been a huge undertaking and one that we hope will finally help this farm to fly financially. We hope that all who read this will explore the drop down tab above that says Farm Store Apothecary and find something to augment health.

Due to the pandemic, we shifted to a minimal socially distanced work force with local employees and suspended our educational offerings to limit the spread of Covid. We sold off all of our chickens and converted the chicken house into a wellness spa.

2019 was very productive:

- created our trilogy team with a Farm Manager, Apothecary Manager and
Program Manager
- developed our state-wide and out of state wholesale markets,
- continued to develops nursery stock for plant sales,
- designed and implemented our weekly educational offerings for those living here
and within our local community,
- created our culinary herbalism farm to table meal options to be offered to
retreat guests and as the mainstay of our nutrition for those living here,
- designed and executed the planting beds in the high tunnel
- offered wellness education and farm stay wellness retreats that focused on farming,
herbs, yoga, cooking with organic food and herbs, creating a health building lifestyle,
and exposure to the healing arts practiced by Lindy (www.spiritworks.us).
- began offering week-long Herbal Boot Camps with an intensive stay of one one week
per month with activities that focused on main projects requiring integrated team work
- we developed our program for Apprentices and Interns with set orientation arrival
dates and a minimum stay of 60-day (Apprentices) and 30-day (Interns) total
immersion work commitment with full participation in the community we create
together. Participants were immersed in the on-site daily schedule dawn to dusk
(which includes 2 hours daily personal time) five days a week. Time off included
group and individual fun (rafting, hiking, swimming), farm visits, or personal time
for rest, recreation and relaxation.

January 2019

The most exciting prelude to our season is celebrated with the creation of a full venue management team that embodies the energetics of the triskelion, the celtic spiral of life. Todd Nestell, is the Farm Manager and former two season farm intern. Megan Neary is the Apothecary Manager returning after a productive internship last year and Lindy Dewey is coordinating Wellness, FarmStay guests, and on-site Programs. Together we are developing a management model we feel will not only yield high productivity but illustrate the value of interrelated mutually supportive elements in a multi-faceted coordinated system.

With this triskelion team as our basis, we are now able to offer comprehensive educational opportunities and have designed our apprenticeship and internship programs for those looking to deepen skills and experience in Farm Management, Herbal Apothecary Marketing, Wellness Program Design and Implementation, and Culinary Herbalism,

2018

We expanded the SpiritWorks Herbal Apothecary, fine tuned our herbal processing techniques, and honed our hospitality services for retreat and campground guests.

We expanded our campground to ten sites and welcomed campers from HipCamp.com. One site offers a lean-to and several provide tents with airpads. We opened our Farm Store Apothecary and finally began selling the hand-crafted artisan quality organic herbs grown here. FarmsStays in the Retreat Center were extraordinarily successful this first season.

2017 Season Summary

We continued with establishing herb perennial plantings and began chicken egg enterprise to close in our loop for soil building with their help, established our farm within this community and beyond as an experiential educational venue for farming, learning and building health.

Finished kitchen for Retreat Center, created a viewing platform to look into the gardens and built a chicken hotel using 1880 plans from the North Dakota Dept. of Agriculture to optimize light and ventilation at this northern latitude.

2016 Season Summary

In 2016, we built a Bunkhouse for Farm Stay guests and farm-based wellness retreats.

We put up high tunnel, focus on strawberry crop to support further farm herb development.

Of note is that we are not currently having Open Farm times. However we are going to the Farmer's Market in Kalispell on most, not all, Saturdays.

2015 Season Summary

During the 2015 season, several terraces with raspberries, goji berries, garlic, shallots, fruit trees, and 1000 strawberry plants were planted. We also created the triskelion - a 63 foot herbal mandala garden, installed a 20'x100' high tunnel, chicken coop, grape arbor, and established the herb nursery.

December 2015

This was a year of growth for me with our interns - we carved out the land with our terracing and created layout of our mandala with a focus on soil building.

As I sit down to write out the goals and our focus for the coming season, I need to acknowledge that the land here is the leader and that future information may shift what I write today. With the magical changeability that is inherent when working with nature identified, I will attempt to create some expectations for what it may be like during the coming year. My apologies in advance for the length of this. May the information provided help you make a confident decision regarding your interest in coming here.

If any or all of what you read below sounds of interest to you and is consistent with what you want to create for yourself, I look forward to hearing from you. Please respond to the questions presented below when you contact me.

Also, to make sure you are creating realistic expectations regarding your interest here, please read the reviews on my farm on the WWOOFUSA.ORG website carefully and also read my reviews of those who came here (These reviews can be accessed by clicking on the name of the person doing the farm review. If you do not have access to the WWOOFUSA.org website, please let me know and I will send the reviews to you). These reviews will help you to be realistic regarding what to expect.

2014 SEASON SUMMARY and LESSONS LEARNED

First of all, I want to say something about the previous season. There were many extraordinary people who came and worked the land here. This property and its productivity were transformed. We had an incredible first season bountiful harvest. While it was all happening, it was awesome to watch how the land worked on the people who came and on myself as we worked with the land. We grow more than plants here, we all grow together, individually and in the community we create. This is why I ask for those wanting to come here to reflect and to share on these questions :

What attracts you to SpiritWorks and what are your goals in coming here?
What specific skills do you want to learn and develop?
What are your personal development goals?
What are the aspects of your life experiences and where you are on in your life journey that you want known?
What do you want to experience while here?
What do you want to leave behind as your gift to the land and the community - both on this property and locally?

"Last season revealed much to me regarding what works well and what is needed to shift in the expectations I offer those coming here. Offering people an opportunity to develop themselves to become intune with nature and what is needed in a farming endeavor and then giving them a time clock does not work. Therefore I offer a nature based immersion experience with the expectation of long days, and an irregular schedule as we pace ourselves with the requirements that come with farming. I acknowledge that each person has their own pace, stamina and that the needs of the farm vary with weather and the plants themselves. I seek to offer a farming lifestyle that works well for the needs of this growing farm and is balanced with having fun with the other opportunities that this part of the world offers - rafting, camping, biking, hiking, hot springs, etc."

"For this reason, I have created more space for a larger community to be present here so that many hands can make light of the work here and we can more easily honor individual needs and stamina, acknowledging that it takes time to get strong with outdoor work, and that we all also want to play, especially me."

Wow it is May already -

spinach, carrots planted
swiss chard, lettuce, kale, etc up in cold frames
area that was clear cut, is ready for seed for green manure
major earthwork has occurred that includes stumping trees that were cut and creating the foundations for functional spaces.
one shed was modified into sleeping quarters for one intern with a kitchen and gathering space for eating and preparing herbal preparations for the apothecary
many beds have been turned and are ready for planting
grass is green, daffodils blooming and everything is popping up.
Ready for interns to arrive so there will be time to play and bike up Road to the Sun before it is openned to cars.

January 2014 -

Ordered seeds
cleared trees, fenced the big garden and intensive soil building practices begun
Cut down trees for new expanded garden area and for more sunlight to nourish existing gardens
Sent some of the trees to the saw mill
Put seed house back together (it is holding 59 degrees when is it 20 outside).
Networked for educational opportunities for interns
Met with locals interested in co-creating here
Skiied a lot, hiked some