Hi, I’m Aimee.
And I spent most of my life as a second-degree plant murderer. But that all changed when Covid forced me to stay home and I became obsessed with figuring out how to grow just one tomato plant.
Let me be very clear - I am not a gardening expert and I have not been doing this all my life. But I am Type A and a 1 on the Enneagram, which means when I decide to do something, I do everything I can to perfect it, which is what I’ve been doing with gardening for nearly every waking moment of my life over the last year, when I’m not busy at work. The journey has been hard, it’s been painful and it’s also been extremely rewarding. My hope is to share what I’ve learn and continue to learn along the way so that you don’t have to go through the same pain and suffering I did (ok, you’ll go through some pain, but hopefully less!).
What I realized is that many of us are on the same path - we want to grow food, we try, we fail, we get overwhelmed with trying to figure out why we failed and we start the cycle over every spring until we finally give up completely. Am I right? And my gosh is the amount of information available overwhelming, leaving the beginner gardener spinning in circles, too tired and confused to do anything. I want to change all that by helping you to be a happy and successful every-day gardener, one simple step at a time.
HOW my love for gardening ALL BEGAN
My husband, Colin, and I were fortunate enough to buy our first home a few years ago. We had always dreamed about having a little bit of land that we could call our own… well that little bit ended up being just over half an acre. It came with 4 raised garden beds and a lot more dry, sandy dirt than we knew what to do with.
That first year we bought some transplants from Home Depot, and basically planted and prayed for a magical bounty of vegetables to appear. Well, that didn’t exactly happen. A plethora of cherry tomatoes and sweet peas did emerge, but only for a little bit, until it all fell over and wilted away as San Diego summer hit. The following year we tried again, this time with a bit more success with dill that took over an entire garden bed and some large, sumptuous beets. But otherwise generally a failure of seeds that never germinated and transplants that only lasted about a month before being eaten by bugs and animals or altogether dying for no reason I could understand (it couldn’t possibly be something I was doing. I barely water, check them once every few weeks and forget about them completely while traveling, and have absolutely no idea what I was doing - what could be the problem???). I’m pretty sure when plants saw me coming down the aisles of the local nursery they did their best to avoid eye contact or hide behind another plant as they knew coming home with me meant their imminent death.
Finally, as our third spring approached, I had decided that enough is enough, I’m done gardening and it was time to get rid of these raised beds for good! That thought came February and guess what happened in March… Covid. Everything normal in my life abruptly stopped - constant travel, packed schedules, throwing parties all became a thing of the past with no clear end in site. So as I looked out my kitchen window at what would be my only view for the foreseeable future, I quickly backtracked all those “death to gardening - let’s burn this sucker down!” thoughts that ran through my head just a few weeks prior.
In the dark and scary lockdown future that was before me, I decided gardening might be my only opportunity at sanity, but if I was going to give it one last try, I would have to give it the full Type A (obsessed, research everything, buy anything, plan like crazy, work til you drop, ask a million questions, plan even more) effort until I figured it out - otherwise I was done for good. And with my decree, encouragement from my family and support from our closest friend who built us 3 new garden beds on the back of our property (where there was previously a whole lotta nothing except ugly dirt) plus 2 planters for herbs, I began my final attempt at being a real, home gardener. And that is how Sagewood Farm all began… which is definitely not a farm in any way, literally it’s just a lot of garden beds and I wanted it to have a name, so please don’t ask my about what it’s like to be a farmer and own my own farm, seriously though.
life apart from Sagewood farm
I am a California native, living the first half of my life in the beautiful Bay Area and the second half in sunny San Diego. I met my husband, Colin, in college and we’ve been married for twelve years now. I can confidently say that after living and breathing the same space 24 hours a day, 7 days a week through Covid we actually still enjoy being together - shocking if you ask me! No, we don’t have any kids (that’s always the next question), but we do have a silkie chicken named Mini Cooper and share our life with my mom, who brings so much joy, crazy and selfless love into our funny little family unit, we don’t know what we’d do without her.
We’ve spent most of our marriage traveling as often and as we could handle without going broke or gaining too much weight (a constant battle in our household). There were many times we wouldn’t be home for more than one to two weeks for months at a time - it was (mostly) glorious. Our bug for travel led me to starting Type A Trips in 2014, passionately sharing my super detailed, Type A itineraries and travel tips for readers all over the world and continue to - although I’ve been on a bit of a hiatus lately.
While I wish I could just garden or travel all day long, I have an actual job as the Head of Operations for a software company and honestly LOVE what I do and the people I am privileged to work with. My role allows me to use my gifts and talents for finding efficiencies, creating processes and doing all that I can to encourage people to reach their full potential… which when I think about it, is pretty much my goal as The Type A Gardener.