It turns out I needed to start a garden

because it kind of already changed my life?

Hello everyone! I write to you once again from my Hobbit House in Los Feliz. We are just one short week away from it officially being fall… which is probably my favorite season of all. I cannot wait. And today, I am excited to tell you all about my brand new garden, why and how I started one, and how it’s going.

I’ll be spending the rest of the year in Los Angeles. And when that fact dawned on me, that I’d get to have several months of being in one place (for the first time since 2020!!), I realized I could finally start a garden because I’d actually be around to tend to it, water it, watch it grow, and enjoy it.

This has been a dream of mine for a long time. You may remember a lyric I have in my song Chasing Spirits (“I could start a garden with the landlord, something good and simple and worth staying in town for”). I wrote that song over five years ago, and finally last Sunday, my dreams came true!

I spent the days leading up to last weekend gathering my supplies. I ordered an above ground planter online. I went to my local nursery and bought seeds and a few starter plants for pots. And then last Sunday, I got to plant everything and put my first seeds in the dirt.

I have spent every morning since then in a state of bliss watering my new garden with the hose in one hand and my coffee in the other. It’s been so exciting for me to go outside every morning to check on the progress of my seeds.

And then on Thursday, I got my first sprouts (!!).

my very first sprouts!! i think this is lettuce

I was very intimidated by this whole process, and I was pretty sure I would do it wrong, waste time and money, and be disappointed when nothing grew. That has always been my experience in the past when I’d do things like throw a few wildflower seeds in the yard at a random time, water the dirt kind of a lot over the course of a few weeks, and then wonder why no wildflowers showed up. lol. But this time, I did things a little differently and it seems to actually be working.

So today, I’ll go step by step with what I planted, the tool I worked with to learn what to plant and how to lay it all out, the exact planter I got, some mistakes I made, and why it feels like it’s already changed my life.

I hope if you’re a newbie gardener like me this post can help break it down super simply and show you that you too can start a garden, and it doesn’t even have to be with your landlord.

hello from planting day

Step 1: Acquire an above ground planter

The first thing you need to do is acquire an above ground planter. I know that true gardeners can just plant things right in the ground because they know things about soil, etc. I am not one of those people, and judging myself for not being one of those people kept me from gardening for years. I finally just got an above ground planter. I recommend this route.