How We Ended Up With a Garden (We Didn’t Plan This)
- Garden diary
- Our story
- From zero
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.
A neglected, weedy, slightly sad yard that hadn’t been loved in years.
Before this place, we lived in an apartment.
No balcony. One window with decent light where I kept a couple of houseplants alive, barely.
Alex had a basil plant on the kitchen counter that he managed to kill within two months. That was the full extent of our gardening experience.
The move happened fast. We weren’t planning it.
But when we walked through the house and I saw the backyard through the kitchen window, something shifted. It was overgrown and messy and full of things I couldn’t name.
I wanted to figure out what was growing back there.
The first week we pulled weeds. Just weeds. I had no idea what was a weed and what was a plant.
I’m pretty sure I ripped out at least one thing that was supposed to be there. Alex found a garden fork in the shed and spent an entire Saturday turning over a patch of dirt near the fence. Neither of us knew what we were doing.
I planted flowers first. A flat of marigolds from the hardware store because they were $3 and the tag said “full sun, easy.”
They lived. That felt like a big deal at the time.
Alex went straight for tomatoes because he wanted to grow something he could eat. His first attempt produced exactly one tomato before the plant died.
We made a rule early on: try everything, kill a lot, and write down what actually worked.
Not for anyone else. Just for us. So we wouldn’t make the same mistakes next year.
Those notes turned into this site.
I write about the flowers and houseplants and the trees I keep researching even though we don’t have room for another one.
Alex writes about the vegetables, the soil problems, and the tools he buys that I roll my eyes at. We split it that way because that’s how we actually garden.
I plant the pretty things. He plants the edible things. We argue about where the new bed should go.
Our three-year-old has started helping now, which mostly means pulling things up and eating dirt. There’s another one on the way, so the garden will probably get messier before it gets tidier.
That’s fine.
We’re not experts. We’re two people who went from a basil plant on a kitchen counter to a yard full of things we planted ourselves.
Some of them are alive. Some of them are not. We write about both.
If you’re starting from zero like we did, you’re in the right place.
