Welcome friendsThis is the story of Wild Heart Farm.
Wild Heart Farm was founded by sisters Kate and Kelly Watters, who grew up exploring the wilds of their rural Vermont home and picking roadside clover bouquets.
With over 15 years of experience as a botanist, Kate channeled her deep love for plants into creating a sanctuary of beauty and healing. Kelly arrived with her innate marketing and education skills coupled with child-like wonder to sustain the immense, ongoing effort that a farm demands.
After years in the wedding industry and community food systems, they returned to their roots, establishing Wild Heart Farm as a space where nature, creativity, and community thrive. Today, the farm offers unique floral designs, natural garden coaching, and wellness experiences, all reflecting these sister’s deep connection to the land and commitment to fostering meaningful relationships.
Our Story,
The seed for Wild Heart Farm was a place to combine Kate’s passion for flowers and gardening and her partner’s passion for nature-based healing–a retreat to practice meditation and explore the lessons of the dharma.
Kelly began spending summers on the farm during her school breaks as a teacher in Tucson. In 2023, she moved to the farm full-time. The rest is history, and now they are a farm-ily, welcoming in an ephemeral community in this special place.
Our synergy is rooted in the soil, where life begins. This same soil nurtures the plants we grow and in turn nurtures us from a deep place. Both gardening and healing are soul work and sharing the abundance, the beauty, the medicine and what we learn in this place is our offering to the world.
The seeds we sow,
The magic behind Wild HeartMeet the Team
Kate Watters
Founder - Farmer - Florist
For as long as Kate can remember she has dreamed of having a place to root down and grow beauty and biological diversity. Wild Heart Farm is that dream realized. The seed was planted while growing up in rural Vermont with a big backyard garden, and beyond that a small mountain and river to explore. For 15 years as a botanist and conservationist Kate studied plants and led groups of volunteers to protect, restore and monitor impacts of wildfire, grazing and other human interventions on public lands. As she grew older she yearned to study and live with plants more intimately and intentionally. Kate traded a million acres for one acre to work to make a difference for plants, pollinators and people.
Kate is passionate about all aspects of flowers–their innate artistic beauty, pollination ecology, physiology, and especially their medicinal, magical and mystical healing properties. The farm helps her stay present to witness wonder and change and cultivate a spiritual life with her partner, Mike. She loves bringing people together to experience flowers, food and creativity for workshops and events.
Read Kate’s writing on Substack.
Check out Kate’s Art on her website.
Kelly Watters
Co-Founder - Marketing - Education
Kelly’s earliest memory was witnessing the seeds of the plant mountain impatient or jewelweed, burst open between her fingers when they were ripe. This same wonder of co-discovery is what excites Kelly about the confluence of nature-based education. Kelly has years of experience in the realm of food security and food justice in Tucson. She also worked in education at the Food Conspiracy Co-op in Tucson until transitioning to the public school environment. Kelly enjoyed being a teacher assistant to students with intellectual disabilities but quickly discovered having her own class was outside of her comfort zone. After spending three summers on the farm, she moved into a tiny clubhouse in 2023 and works part-time at the local school/public library. Her roles on the farm include being Kate’s thinking partner, marketing, permaculture and education program design, and events. She is in service with anything she’s asked to do like being a delivery driver, wild forager, food garden tender, and humanure turd herder.
Dr. Mike Knapp
Naturopathic Doctor
Dr. Mike knew from an early age he wanted to be a doctor. He grew up in a suburb of Des Moines, Iowa watching the vast corn/soy fields surrounding his neighborhood become stripmalls and golf courses. As a young pre-med hospital intern he witnessed the patients he cared for get sicker in the hospital from many chronic diseases that could be avoided by eating real food. He quickly changed course and got a degree from National College of Natural Medicine in Portland, OR.
He is a naturopathic doctor and sees patients in person at Living Light Naturopathic Clinic in Flagstaff, and online at his farm office through Pure Homeopathy. He is a mindfulness meditation instructor offering online and in person training for medical professionals. At Wild Heart he is our master tea blender and herbal medicine maker, chili head, safety officer, health advisor, math tutor and practical thinker. He provides loving guidance and cultivates the “Open-Hearted Garden,” a diverse collection of medicinal plants.
Our Canine Companions
Martin
Juju
The Sheriff and The Deputy
No farm would be complete without dogs. Juju, aka the sheriff (14) and Martin, deputy (4) are all about visitors and fun. They enjoy all the seasons of the farm, especially the leaves. As long as they have sticks and clover lawns to lounge in, life is good.
The Extended Farm-ily
Wild Heart Farm is an educational and experiential farm.
We are passionate about training the next generation of farmers (through our annual apprenticeship) and welcome adults of all ages to volunteer and participate through WWOOF to learn about small-scale, people-powered permaculture farming practices. To learn more about volunteering on our farm through WWOOF click the button below. If you would like to get involved with Wild Heart Farm we encourage you to reach out to us via email and introduce yourself, we’d love to see if we’re a good fit.
A sacred place for the heart.About the Land
The moment we stepped through the gate we knew this was a special place of sanctuary. The land pulled us into her shady bosom in a loving embrace. Giant Arizona ash trees tower above a limestone cliff in the Beaver Creek floodplain. Beneath this shady riparian canopy grows a diverse array of twenty fruit trees including mulberries and an ancient pear that must be close to 100 years old. Wild Heart Farm is situated in the unceded lands of the Yavapai-Apache Nation, who were the original stewards of the Upper Verde area prior to European invasion. The modern nation is an amalgamation of two distinct tribes the Wipukyipaya (known as Yavapai ) and Dilzhe’e (known as Western Apache).
The name Wild Heart Farm comes from a deep love of wildflowers and reverence for wild places. Plants yearn to be wild. They want to make seed, to ramble beyond the confines of the trellis and their roots can only survive so long in a pot and then they grow static. Humans also need to connect to that wild, untidy, chaotic, magical unknown place in our hearts—the place we knew as children before the rules and confines of the world told us otherwise. The place where we were unfettered and free, and we can hear the voice of knowing inside our hearts.
Come visit us.
We hope you find,Interconnection arises from the relationships at work on the land. Everything has its role and function to keep the whole system intact. This is also true with human connections—we need to express ourselves—our true essence and to be connected to others to serve the whole.
Magic & Awe comes from the childlike spirit that is captivated by the wild openness and freedom of the outdoors - springs in the mountain, baby frogs on the river’s edge and fireflies that glow and disappear in the summer night. We endeavor for you to experience magic with our flowers, gardens and experiences on the farm.
Mindfulness & Intention guide our daily decision making, interactions with the land and one another. These practices help turn our values into action, to stay focused on what is important, reduce stress, and appreciate what is already here.
“We want to partner and learn with the land in a way that nurtures community, biodiversity and well-being so that the farm serves as a place of love & sanctuary for all beings.”
Connecting through place.Our Why
Our mission is to foster meaningful connections between plants, people and place bringing the magic of the natural world into everyday life.
At Wild Heart Farm we nourish body and spirit by connecting people with the beauty and wisdom of nature.
Our Core Beliefs
We want to make a positive impact on the world.
Sustainability is at the heart of what we do:
Saving & reusing resources
Mending hearts
Planting seeds of joy and wonder
Regenerative Farming
We protect relationships between people, land, water, wildlife, and even microbes.
Farming can be tough, but we learn, adapt, and build rest for both the land and ourselves.
Woman-Owned and Run Farm
A small team of passionate, big-hearted women runs 85% of the farm’s operations.
We also have supportive, thoughtful men who help with projects and care for our well-being.
Giving Back to the Community
We redistribute excess produce to:
Hospice care
Family shelters
Neighbors, friends, and native communities
Sharing Knowledge
We share what we learn through the Rimrock Seed Library and local community outreach.
Measuring Success
We measure success in terms of:
People
Planet
Prosperity
Want to support the farm?
Support our mission by contributing today. We are proud to offer our community ecological and ethical plant based support.
