About Caroline Kloppert, the creator of greenidiom

Thank you for visiting this website. My name is Caroline Kloppert, or sometimes Caroline Littlewort, which is the name I was born with. I am married to Stephan Kloppert, worm farmer and creator of the website worm-composting-help.com. I started building this website many years ago. Its been a labor of love, involving lots of work and research and I've learned a lot. However I haven't earned a lot, in fact so far its earned me about 2 dollars a month and cost me 300 a year, so I'm trying to 'monetize' from now on. Its against my taste, but it has to be done to make me able to go on writing.

The goal of this website has shifted as I've progressed in my learning and you will find a swathe of articles written in my various 'phases': from water-wise gardening and indigenous decorative plants to permaculture, to perennial food plants, to indigenous food plants and regenerative gardening.

I've alternated between gardening and art most of my life, the first as a passion and addictive compulsion which has earned me little, the second with some commercial success as a designer for screen printing and our own craft company. As a 'profession' if you can call freelancing and entrepreneurship such, I've been an applied artist most of my life, making puppets and stage props, illustrating books and designing t-shirts and floral table cloths.

But I've always returned to gardening and tried to make gardens everywhere I lived, on tiny balconies, in narrow alleyways and in my 100 meter square garden in suburbia. I've spent years of my life obsessively designing gardens and water systems and when I discovered permaculture design I think I'd found my first cognitive home.

Since then I've moved on however. I suppose I'm some kind of a post-permaculturist, frequently evangelizing about the flaws in this otherwise near to perfect philosophical-science of gardening, flaws that seem to be invisible to a lot of people.

About Caroline Kloppert: education and experience

I think I've learned a lot from my family, my mother who is an award winning amateur conservationist, my father the water engineer and builder of massive concrete hydro electric projects as well as mud dams, who had an encyclopedic knowledge of everyday technologies like woodwork, my two sisters, one of whom is a wonderful artist and taught me to value aesthetics, and the other who is streets ahead of me in gardening, and last but not least, my husband who taught me to be more business like (or at least to try be).

I've studied garden design, dreamed of but not realized creating gardens for other people. In the last four years blogging has really focused my attention on urban homesteading and growing a tough, perennial, partly native food garden and trying to lessen my footprint, carbon, water, waste and otherwise. The smaller footprint has been the impetus behind many of my experiments, and has been the thread running through all the apparent directional changes in ideology.

Before I started blogging I studied linguistics for many years, but when I failed to land an English teaching job in China due to my age, and could not pursue a PhD I had to start something else that was stimulating. I've done many different jobs and learned things from many different walks of life beside art and language: geology, banking, kitchen hand and coffin maker being some of the threads.

This restlessness is seen as a terrible flaw in the mainstream employment world and since I've abandoned all hope of succeeding there, life has been sweeter. People like me are supposed to have one strength though, having an overview of a lot of things, and the ability to make connections between apparently unrelated fields. But the negative press for those whose focus and attention operates in a different way to the norm can have a very destructive impact on us. I've done a lot of soul searching and talk therapy, and been labeled schizophrenic, borderline, depressed and attention deficit by professionals. In the long run, getting on with a project like this website has been more helpful in the formation of my identity and moved me a long way in the direction I'd like to go, trying to melt together my own mix in life's crucible, without a recipe to follow.

I think I've learned more being a blogger and trying to master the neolithic skills of a homesteader than studying in institutions of higher learning. It has been enormously rewarding so far.

About Caroline Kloppert: other platforms I'm on

You can see many of my fabric designs on pinterest, Redbubble, Facebook and Instagram. I'll give some live links below:

Redbubble floral design, animal desigs and eco designs. The geometric and Christian designs are my husband's creations.

Pinterest for floral, animal and eco designs and collections of tons of pictures on everything from domes to Chinese ink drawing.

Facebook for floral designs, animal designs, eco designs, the group 'urban mini-forest'.

Instagram: Floral fabrics and everything else in my life.

Restore Nature Newsletter

I've been writing for four years now and I would love to hear from you

Please let me know if you have any questions, comments or stories to share on gardening, permaculture, regenerative agriculture, food forests, natural gardening, do nothing gardening, observations about pests and diseases, foraging, dealing with and using weeds constructively, composting and going offgrid.

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What Other Visitors Have Said

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Winecup
Hi Caroline Love your blog, interesting and useful and so glad someone has done a cushion print of the magnificent, yet weirdly hidden gem of a flower, …

Thank you!
Caroline, thanks so much for the valuable information in your blog. I also try to garden in Cape Town in a garden that is battered by the Southeast in …

DIY Grey Water Wetland Not rated yet
Hello Caroline, I had hoped to have been able to get a copy of your book, but do not possess a Kindle or PayPal. How else could someone get a copy of …

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