I have a self-professed brown thumb. Or I did. I guess that might not be true anymore as I have quite the container garden on my deck. My crops are huge right now, and my neighbors are impressed, and I think a bit surprised when I tell them this is my first year successfully growing anything more than houseplants.

It’s all thanks to Monty.

Last summer, I was holed up in my one-bedroom apartment feeling absolutely miserable. Don’t get me wrong, it was a great apartment, top floor, lots of light, right in the middle of San Francisco’s Mission District. And because we got it in 2008 and it had rent control, we were paying about half what similar apartments were going for. It didn’t matter that it had no outdoor space, because the whole city was our back yard. But then the pandemic hit. And the heat waves. And the wildfires.

That summer, we couldn’t go anywhere because of lockdown. There was no place to go. And even though we could have gone camping, we chose to heed the guidelines of no unnecessary travel. It wasn’t all bad. During nicer weather, we could bike to the park and have a distanced picnic with friends. But when ash from the wildfires lingered over the city making the air toxic, we couldn’t even open our windows, much less go outside.

So, like a lot of people, I resorted to escapism. I spent a lot of time dreaming about a home with some kind of outdoor space where I could have a garden. That meant looking at homes on Zillow and watching A LOT of gardening shows.

I suspect Monty Don is a household name in the UK, but I’d never heard of him until last summer. I learned a lot from him and his gang on Gardener’s World. I also learned a ton from a show called Grow Cook Eat, which is nicely organized by crop. Even though I had no way to apply what I was learning, it surprises me how much I soaked in. I can identify way more plants now. I even know the latin names for some of them. And the difference between espalier and fan-trained trees. And what stepover apples are!

So when my Zillow journey led us to buy a house back home near family (for less than we were paying for our SF apartment), of course I started a garden of my own. Our yard is by no means expansive, but I’m happy to start small. I put a few containers on the back deck in which I’m growing lettuce, cherry tomatoes, tomatillos, five different peppers (including two we inherited from our neighbors), and a whole bunch of herbs. It’s basically a salsa garden.

I’ve been planting, watering, pruning, and tying back plants for months and now it’s finally harvest time! It’s a nice feeling going out to water the plants in the morning and coming back in with a colander full of produce.

Next year I’m definitely adding more fruit. I want to have a few different berry bushes, plus some kind of fruit tree. My neighbors have figs, and I kind of want one, but maybe I’ll go with a plum and see if they’ll trade.

Do you have a garden? If not, what do you wish you could grow?