The Slow Fire School of Permaculture is the next phase of Golden Egg Permaculture, a collaboration of North Carolina Piedmont area and Southwest Virginia Permaculture designers with decades of diverse Permaculture skills and experiences.
We offer accessible and affordable permaculture workshops and provide permaculture design to serve your goals through site visits, collaborative designs, and guidance. We also offer off-grid mentoring to support your journey to move off-grid. If something is outside our expertise, we rely on our network to find someone with the right experience for your needs.
Our Team
Matthew Tracy studied with numerous Permaculture teachers at Wild Abundance and apprenticed at Earthaven Ecovillage. In 2016 he began co-tending 17 acres of wild as an experimental forest farm community and model of resilient living for an uncertain future. He made a lot of really good mistakes. He now tends a new 14-acre off-grid homestead in the Blue Ridge mountains of Virginia and also helps to guide a 1-acre forest garden in the Piedmont of NC and long-term permaculture restoration of many acres of farmland in South Carolina.
Matt brings experience in forest gardens, climate-adapted food production, farmland restoration, regenerative water systems, foraging, herbal medicine, systems thinking, solar power, off-grid living, holistic decision making, and goal-setting methods. He lives to reconnect others (and himself) with the wild as a way of bringing us back into balance, vitality, and awe. In 2023, Matt became the father of a little girl who loves eating wild plants and collecting kindling as much as he does.
Liane Salgado trained in ecology and GIS at UNC and the University of Michigan (MS), and by working since the 1980s with numerous talented people on landscapes and lifestyles that work with nature to produce what humans need. She created and maintains a productive food forest near Carrboro, NC, and has designed pre-schools, suburban, and rural parcels.
Sheilah Tracy makes a short walk in the woods into a long, meandering tarry as she insists upon responding to the invitation of every ripe berry, every fallen black walnut, every little edible bite of green. She is a saboteur of overly bright lights, a squelcher of unnecessary electric hums, and the nemesis of refrigerators that would dare to disturb the peace of night.
Sheilah is a mother, musician, bodyworker, and poet. She tends wild gardens where the so-called weeds usually interest her more than what’s been planted! Sheilah has lived in small and slow simplicity and in an intimate dance with the forest for years. She creates off-grid spaces that shine with love, magic, and the scent of really good cooking. Sheilah taught Matt that to create something good, the steps of creating it should also all feel good. She is devoted to helping people find their way back to their bodies and to the kindness and help of the plants, animals, and elements.
