What is Brunette Gardens?

Gardening 🌱 and life, with a little snark and a lot of healing heart. ❤️‍🩹

I launched this Substack in 2022 with the intent to share my knowledge based on many years of gardening with native plants and trying to homestead on a quarter-acre backyard in the city.

The archive’s still there if you want to peruse all that content. But what happened along the way is that I rediscovered an essayist I’d abandoned decades ago when I needed to write for a living, and essays didn’t pay the bills.

Readers loved those essays, the vulnerable ones. You know them: the writing that feels scary, risky, sure to stir up trouble. You all flocked to those, virtually ignoring the rest.

I also burned myself out trying to run a homestead and several businesses while my “autoimmune” condition only worsened, despite the great pains I took to make sure everything I ate was clean and unadulterated. I went to an extreme, growing much of my own food, soaking and grinding my own grain, raising chickens for eggs, and more. All of this was commonplace for most of human history, but none of our ancestors had the added stress and distraction of days spent sitting in front of screens, Zoom calls with clients half a world away, and the march of AI changing everything.

I had to go away and heal, and in that time I learned that healing does not mean going back to the way things were before.

So my return to this Substack comes with a narrower focus—on the kinds of essays that most resonated with you readers. I’ll stop pressuring myself to issue weekly urban gardening and homesteading tips. And the only product links you’ll see will be for great books to read. What I will do is share my experiences as someone who’s worked for nearly half a century to heal from the trauma I lived through in the first two decades of my life. That’s at the root of the condition that drove me toward gardening and healthy eating in the first place, and I think trauma might be at the root of most modern illness.

Perhaps this honed focus speaks to you. If it does, I extend to you a fond new welcome.

Top essays from the archive

• 🧺 How to homestead when you don’t have a homestead. With and without chickens, in the midst of neighborhood shootings.

• 🐦 The year of dying. A cathartic account of loss and redemption in the garden that resonated with many. This essay will also soon appear in County Highway.

• 🥗 Salad days. A no-recipe recipe for going from garden to table with ease.

Free, paid, and founding memberships

Free members receive my right-to-the-marrow personal essays and more, delivered straight to your inbox.

Paying members also get:

✅ The satisfaction of supporting thoughtfully written, independent, ad-free writing.

✅ Longer, more in-depth, more intimate essays, arriving more often, plus all new podcasts.

✅ Two-plus years’ archive content (200+ posts) on city homesteading, including podcasts and a printable recipe archive.

Founding members receive this additional perk:

✅ My garden-planning and companion-planting guides honed over seven intense years of gardening for food and to support wildlife.

With your paid membership to Brunette Gardens, you’re showing you value and understand the time and effort spent on research, image creation, and writing for this publication. You’re also acknowledging the many years my guests and I have put into cultivating our soil, as well as our talents.

Memberships cost just $5.99 per month, and you can cancel anytime.

My background

Through a lifetime of frequent moves—a military brat childhood and nomadic adulthood—gardening has been one of my constants. Whether working a community tomato patch in the inner city or accepting a platinum award for my current garden, my love affair with growing things has been lifelong… and complicated. A wordsmith by trade, I’ve published journalism, books, and games, often winning awards.

Guests

I sometimes feature other voices besides my own: guest writers, podcast interviewees, fellow Substackers, and book authors. My husband also writes on occasion.

Connect with me

I often hang out at Permies.com and am part of the commentariat at Ecosophia.

You can always reach me at brunettegardens[at]gmail[dot]com (replace what’s in the brackets with the symbols).

🌱 🌱 🌱 🌱 🌱

I wish you health and happiness, whether you got your hands dirty today or not! 😉