Before I ever stepped into a data center, I worked with my hands. Low-voltage cabling. You could point to a house and say “I helped wire that.” There’s a specific kind of pride in visible, finished work. As my career moved into the corporate world, the work got more abstract. The impact was real but you couldn’t point at it from across the street. I missed that.

The garden fixed it

A few years ago I started gardening and it scratched that exact itch. Something I could build, shape, watch grow, and point to. My Mom was a green thumb and this is how I keep her memory alive — I grew up on 4 acres with a garden plot I explored as a kid. Took all those veggies for granted. Ate so many cherry tomatoes I wouldn’t touch them for years. Now I’m in an urban lot dealing with squirrels that treat my peppers like a buffet, but it still feels like the most real work I do outside of my day job.

Why it’s hard to write about

Planting seeds or fixing a tangled drip line is one thing. Stopping to write about what happened is harder than the gardening itself. Seasons blur together fast. I’ll look back at photos from two years ago and barely remember what I planted or what worked. That’s frustrating because the lessons are there, I just didn’t capture them.

So here we are

That’s the point of this blog, at least the garden part of it. Not just what grew or failed, but the actual experience. I want a record that’s better than my memory. And maybe someone else who’s trying to grow tomatoes in a small yard with questionable soil will find something useful here.

It’s the closest I’ve gotten to that old feeling of pointing at something and saying “I did that” since I stopped pulling cable.