About Us
About Us / Origins (Click here or each photo to expand)
Abby and Matt moved out to Haystack Mountain, about 25 miles north of Fairbanks, Alaska in the spring of 2022 and have been making steady headway towards building a community-centered farm and gathering place. Independently, we had been dreaming of living off the land and small-scale farming for almost a decade, and together, it’s finally happening! Largely our work up to this point has been focused on soil health and fertility through compost and mixed covercrop. We offer an annual spring plant sale to provide the community with transplants for their home gardens and will be selling at the Southside Community Farmer’s Market on Tuesdays throughout the summer. Next year (summer 2026), we intend on farming our field for the first summer but are giving it one more season of adding nutrients and building fertility. We practice intentional, ecological-based farming and are avid listeners of the land. We are on the ancestral, unceded lands of the Dena people of the lower Tanana River and strive to be advocates for change.
Abby Lutmer
Abby is the main farmer at Heartspace Community Farm. She has worked on farms in Kentucky, North Carolina, and Alaska and has volunteered and collaborated on farms/projects in Iceland, Ireland, Portugal, & Morocco, seeking to learn alongside different cultures and ways of being. Abby didn’t grow up farming, but developed a deep reverence for wild spaces tromping around Southeastern US and organizing community clean up days along the creek. She volunteered at her first farm in Tennessee the summer after graduating high school and from then on, knew the rhythm of farming was how she wanted to live. Work with a local nonprofit managing their school gardens brought her to Fairbanks in 2018 and since then, has deeply fallen in love with Interior Alaska and our short but spectacular summers. Abby speaks the language of plants and believes fiercely that everybody deserves nutritious, high quality food and medicine. Abby incorporates Ayurveda and biodynamics into her life’s work and loves to guide people to live more balanced lives.
Rico
Rico is our protector, pal, and joyful companion. He loves to eat vegetables, scrounge around in the compost piles when we’re not looking, and lay in the sun watching us in the garden. He brightens the lives of everyone he meets.
Matt Nunnelly
Matt Nunnelly is a master of ingenuity and creative solutions to problems. He has worked as a wildland firefighter for the state of Alaska for the last decade and before that, worked doing carpentry, conservation work, and disaster management in Texas, that being how he found his way to Fairbanks after extensive travel throughout the lower 48. Matt grew up spending a lot of time on the Llano River and shares a deep appreciation for outdoor recreation and adventure. Matt is our resident technology wizard, irrigation point-person, and handy-man for when things inevitably need repair.