My first container garden was a cherry tomato in a pot I found behind the garage. No drainage hole. Garden soil from the yard. Full shade for half the day. It produced exactly one tomato before it died.
I’ve been writing gardening guides for this site for a while now, and most of them sound like I know what I’m doing.
We didn’t buy this house for the garden. We bought it because it was the only thing we could afford with enough space for a growing family, and it happened to come with a yard.
I spent my first summer weeding the strip between the sidewalk and the fence. Every weekend. Down on my knees, pulling crabgrass and dandelions from bare soil that grew weeds faster than I could remove them.
The north side of our house gets maybe two hours of sun on a good day. I planted three astilbes there my first spring, expecting the fluffy pink plumes from the tag photo.
The redbud at the end of our street blooms before anything else wakes up. Pink flowers straight out of bare bark, no leaves yet, just color against gray sky.
Last summer I stood in the front yard and realized everything bloomed at once in June, then nothing happened until September. Two months of bare green stems and wilted petals. Not the look I was going for.
The front of our house used to be a row of overgrown boxwoods that looked like they’d been there since the house was built.
Last spring I dumped Epsom salt around every plant in the yard because a Pinterest pin told me to. Tomatoes, roses, herbs, the blueberry bush. All of it got a generous scoop.
I wanted a real tree on the patio. Not a houseplant pretending to be one. Something with actual bark, actual height, and actual presence. The problem was the yard wasn’t ready yet and I had exactly zero ground to plant…
