Silvan Goddin stands ankle-deep in the carrot bed at her shared homestead, tugging up a fistful of purslane — wild, nutrient-packed, and stubborn enough to grow where nothing else will. In minutes, her hands are overflowing. Next up, she points to lamb’s quarters, an amaranth that tastes like spinach but richer and earthier.
“We don’t grow a lot of greens in our garden,” she tells Homegrown Handgathered’s 510,000 Instagram followers on an Instagram Reel. “But it’s not because we don’t like to eat them. There are just so many wild greens growing all over the place, it feels silly to be planting them.”
Purslane, technically a weed, she explains, is a succulent you probably already have growing somewhere near you. This huge batch popped up uninvited in their carrot beds.
She chops through the purslane with a knife, her mic picking up the sharp, satisfying, crunch.
“In Mexico, quelites is the blanket term for tender wild greens that are used in tons of dishes, and they often come from the so-called weeds that pop up in cultivated corn patches,” she continues. “I love that tradition of incorporating whatever green is already abundant. Why use tons of water or shade cloth to try and grow spinach in the summer, or have it shipped in from across the country, when purslane and amaranth are perfectly adapted to thrive in warm weather?”
Tossed with tomatoes, cucumbers, a crumble of feta, olive oil, lemon, salt, and pepper, the “weeds” turn into a summer salad you’d pay $17 for at a trendy farm-to-table spot. “So,” Silvan says, grinning at the camera, “get out there and eat some weeds.”
A few swipes later, the screen fills with rainbow heirloom corn. Goddin and her partner, Jordan Tony, are making homegrown tamales. They’re grinding the corn: Hopi Blue, Wapsie Valley, Painted Mountain, and Bloody Butcher varieties by hand, turning kernels into fragrant masa. They press the dough flat, pile on slow-cooked venison ribs, wrap each tamal in a husk, and stack them in heaps. Even through a screen, the scent of corn and wood smoke seems to rise up.
It’s a far cry from their first experiment in a tiny Pittsburgh community garden, when Tony first dared himself to eat only what he and Goddin could grow or forage. Their space was small — a single raised bed — but Tony figured it was worth a shot.
“It went horribly that first time,” Tony tells Pittsburgh City Paper. “We ran out of food within days.”
But what began as a personal challenge quickly transformed into Homegrown Handgathered, a platform now followed by nearly 2 million people across TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, where the couple shares their journey into gardening, foraging, food sovereignty, and a deeper relationship with the land.
Soon after that experiment, the couple doubled down on calorie-dense crops like chickpeas and heirloom flour corn, learned to grind their own cornmeal for tortillas and tamales, and began to study the region’s wild foods, from pawpaws to black walnuts, while sharing every triumph and failure online.
From the beginning, they documented it all in photos: the muddy hands, the first scraggly harvests, and every small, stubborn victory.
“At first, I was just posting for our friends,” Tony says. “But then it kind of blew up. People wanted to know how we were doing it, down to the smallest detail.”
That question—how to live off the land, even in a city—is what drives the couple’s work to this day.
Both trained biologists, Goddin and Tony first met in a college community garden in North Carolina. They instantly bonded over a shared “curiosity about the natural world, the interactions between plants and insects and the soil, and all of that. Being a gardener is a lot like being a scientist,” Goddin tells City Paper. “You set up experiments, manipulate a few variables, and then let nature take the lead. You observe. You adapt. You fail and try again.”
Tony and Goddin moved to Pittsburgh in 2015, drawn by Tony’s family roots and the city’s surprisingly rich green infrastructure. “I didn’t know much beyond what we learned about Andrew Carnegie and the steel boom in history class,” Goddin says. “But I really like the laid-back culture here, and right off the bat, I loved that there are a lot of green spaces and agricultural things happening in spite of its very industrial past.”
They applied that mindset to their East End backyard, packing every square foot with fruit trees, berry bushes, medicinal herbs, and pollinator plants. Meanwhile, Tony’s experimental videos gained traction. In their Living Off the Land Challenge series, they documented weeks eating only homegrown and foraged food: loaded nachos made from their own corn, pawpaw custard pies, wild mushroom ragù.
Another series, Dealing With the Abundance, showed how to turn mountains of cucumbers into fermented pickles or grind acorns into flour for pancakes.
As their following grew, so did their impact. Followers from as far as Australia wrote to say they had planted their first gardens, tried pickling for the first time, or tasted pawpaws because of the couple’s videos. Many described their content as the push they needed to reimagine what a backyard, or even a balcony, could produce.
By 2024, their audience had grown to over 845,000 on TikTok, 566,000 on YouTube, and more than 500,000 across Instagram and other platforms. According to Goddin, they remain committed to making, growing, and foraging food accessible to people who don’t own land because “for so long, that was us.”
Meanwhile, their Pittsburgh backyard was overflowing. So Tony and Goddin bought land with two other families near Bolivar in the Laurel Highlands. “We couldn’t have done this alone,” Tony says. “But together we were able to buy the farm, split the land, and build a shared future.” Their days now are filled with composting, setting up Hügelkultur beds, harvesting chickpeas, and experimenting with heritage grains.
“Leaving behind the perennial fruit trees and berry bushes we planted in our Pittsburgh yard was hard,” Goddin says. “But we’re happy they will go on to feed other people, and we’re excited to be able to expand in a way that wasn’t possible in the city.”
On the homestead front, the summer garden — and their lives — are in full bloom. Tony’s prized three sisters patch of flour corn, beans, and squash is thriving, while Goddin has “been on a real pickle kick lately and has two giant crocks of pickles fermenting right now.” They had a glut of cucumbers to deal with, a good problem to have.
They’ve already begun trading seedlings and produce with their neighbors, slowly weaving themselves into their new rural community. They’re also in talks with nearby CSA farms about growing specialty crops like mushrooms, heirloom beans, and heritage corn.
Their first book, Homegrown Handgathered: The Complete Guide to Living Off Your Garden, distills their philosophy into a hybrid of practical instruction and storytelling, with chapters on everything from pawpaw foraging and fermentation to building wildlife habitat.
“We wanted it to share the joy that gardening can bring to your life,” Goddin says. “You can look at it through a history or anthropology lens, like how humans shaped and created these foods that we eat every single day. And of course, you can also get into the nitty-gritty science, like how the roots are interacting with the microbes in the soil, or all the different insect life present in a garden.”
At the core of their work is a philosophy they call “honorable harvesting,” inspired by Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book Braiding Sweetgrass. “It’s a name for a concept in a lot of Indigenous American cultures that we should have a reciprocal relationship with the world around us, especially with the things that sustain us, and express gratitude,” Tony says. “So in a foraging example, if we frequent a particular fruit tree every year, we should say ‘thank you’ by planting some of her seeds to grow elsewhere, or making sure the area around her is protected from development or contamination.”
They see this as intertwined with food sovereignty: the belief that everyone deserves the right to healthy food and the knowledge to grow it. “We’re better stewards of the land when we have a closer relationship with it,” Goddin says. “And it’s good for our minds and bodies, too.”
Despite the move, their ties to Pittsburgh remain strong. Tony’s family lives in the city, and the couple plans to host seasonal workshops, foraging walks, and farm-to-table dinners where guests can taste flour corn tortillas and wild mushroom stews cooked over a wood fire.
Now, as they build the infrastructure of their homestead, Tony and Goddin envision a future rooted in reciprocity, between people and the land, and between neighbors who share what they grow.
“The more people fall in love with the plants around them, the more they’ll want to protect them,” Goddin says. “That’s how we all get rooted together.”
This article appears in Aug 13-19, 2025.
