Amanda's Roots

At Least Four Generations in the Soil

Gardening runs back through my mother, my grandmother, and my great-grandmother. My great-grandmother came to America from Poland, and I don't know the lineage of gardeners who came before her there, but I've always felt that we have simply been growers from the very beginning. I still tend heirloom plants passed down from my great-grandmother's farm. My parents kept a big vegetable garden; my mother grew culinary and medicinal herbs; my father specialized in roses, always yellow, because they reminded him of his own mother. My first garden had trellises I could crawl through, with toy dinosaurs tucked among the vines.

When I was 16, my mother was diagnosed with cancer, which was the darkest stretch of my life so far. In the years following her diagnosis, my family lost our way with the garden; between everything else we were carrying, we got too busy and it simply ceased to be a priority for a long time.

But when my mother chose to step away from conventional treatment, our family returned to the garden in earnest. We went looking for a holistic path and fell into the world of food as medicine: permaculture, high-brix growing, nutrient density, and organic practice. We learned that it starts with the soil. Healthy soil grows healthy plants, healthy plants become nutrient-dense food, and nutrient-dense food builds healthier bodies. That understanding came too late to change my mother's outcome, but it reshaped my husband Todd's life and mine (more than 150 pounds lost between us!), energy we didn't know we were missing, and a clarity that runs straight from the garden bed into how we live.

When my father later passed away, I deeply struggled with my mental health. It was a single, sun-ripened cherry tomato that made me feel alive again the summer after his passing. Eating that tomato rekindled my love for the earth, and this time it became genuinely therapeutic: tuning into the pace of a plant instead of the pace of everything else. Planting a seed, watching it sprout, nurturing it, delighting in its height and its fruit, harvesting, and finally clearing the bed when the season closes. I found the same comfort in pickling and fermenting the harvest- watching decay turn, on my own countertop, into something nourishing enough to sustain life through any season.

The last conversation I ever had with my grandfather was about how everyone can have a countertop garden and grow almost anything in a pot. When I told my Pop-pop about my big garden and my deep love for gardening, he was so incredibly excited. He was deeply passionate about continuing his own gardening journey, even when he was living in independent living apartments. I always knew that one day I would build a service to honor him, helping people with countertop, windowsill, and indoor container gardening. We believe that a lack of traditional homeownership or acreage should never prohibit you from growing something beautiful.

A Lifelong Constant Through the Seasons
Ultimately, gardening means everything to me. While the physical practice and weather conditions are ever-changing, the dirt beneath my fingernails has remained the single, unyielding constant through all the changing seasons of my life. It is where I go to grieve, where I go to heal, and where I find my way back to feeling alive.