About

My name is Melissa. I have moved from the east coast to the west coast. I grew up in a very rural community, on a small family farm. We had pigs, cows, chickens, horses, cats, dogs, ducks, and grew a good portion of our food and flowers gardens everywhere. Even when I was in college I felt drawn to having plants in my room. My window sill was full of pots of plants.

Finally I got my own house. I put in flower gardens, and had plants in the house. And I also had a career. I turned out to not be the best at getting out and weeding the outdoor gardens. The creative ideas I had for the property always got put to the side with the focus of just getting the basic requirements for maintaining a house, career, marriage, and in general life.

Now I find myself having left the life I had on the east coast. My career, my house, my marriage, and in many ways I left everything familiar to me behind. Here in California I have started over.

Starting over brought back to me something I love, gardening. This time I am approaching it differently. First I have very limited space, and second I am using containers.

I want to share this type of gardening with people. I am seeing that here in California people do not use their decks. In my apartment complex there are 160 apartments. Of those maybe 10 to 20 have something on the deck. Mostly it is just a grill.

When you drive around the community, you see many complexes but rarely do you see anything on these decks. There are many reasons for this of course. The heat in the summer can be in the 100s. The resident could have no interest in plants, or ability to keep them alive. And of course some people don’t think of the deck as an extension of the home.

I am hoping to show that a small deck can be made useful, and easily maintained.

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