I moved to NYC as soon as possible and never looked back in many ways. The ink was still wet on my diploma when I hopped into my friend's Honda with just a backpack and a few keepsakes and headed east on I80. New York City, specifically Brooklyn, offered everything I could have imagined, and I could not think of a better place to waste my roaring 20s than on its filthy sidewalks. Being a broke kid in NYC without a job or other financial support is exceptional. It's hard to describe, but not having enough for a subway token (yeah, I'm of that age) or skipping a meal never bothered me, for I would always find a way, which is part of the city's allure: its grit. And by association, it became my grit. I spent most of the next 20 years living in that beautiful city. I experienced all the highs and lows that one could imagine. I worked in nearly every industry imaginable and was always in a creative position. My professional and personal network was vast, and often the two would overlap.
I was married in 2012, and my little apartment became our little home. Four years later, we welcomed twins into our lives, and like most new parents, our world turned upside down. What happens when your kids have to nap in a city that never sleeps? Your options are limited when you're stuck inside a little apartment for hours until they wake. I never enjoyed watching TV or wasting countless hours online. I lived in NYC, dammit! The best entertainment was outside of my window! While the kids slept, I would pace around my apartment, looking for something to do. I needed a hobby! I only had a little to go off of, but there was a hardware store across the street, and that would be an excellent place to start since I always enjoyed tinkering around my college's wood shop.
I found a few terracotta pots, soil and some vegetable seeds and decided to grow a vegetable garden outside on my fire escape. After a few direct sunlight positioning attempts, I had a garden! It wasn't much, but it provided a lovely backdrop outside my window in the summer months, and we were allowed to harvest what the squirrels, rats and raccoons would leave for us.
Soon after, the relocation conversations became more frequent, and our nights filled with Zillow listings. My wife only requested a center-hall Colonial-style home with a fenced-in yard for the pooch. But drawing back on my newfound gardening hobby, I wanted a yard and dirt and trees! Alas! We found a house. And, shit! I cannot believe we just bought a house (sight unseen). Soon enough, we were traveling West on I80 in a moving truck, waving goodbye to our beloved city until it vanished from the rearview mirror.
The following spring, I set out to start my garden. Our house has a large yard and many suitable areas to plant. Behind the garage was a dumping ground with years of yard waste spanning several owners before us. This area would be my first order of business. Massive tree stumps, branches, and building material littered the grounds, and my first task was a complete and total ground assault.
It would have been easy to call in a dozer, scrape away the debris, and stick a bunch of random plants into the ground, but I approached this task like a designer. I needed this assignment to be both a beautification and a learning process. As a seasoned designer and, more specifically, a digital product designer, part of my design process is understanding the environment and basing my decisions around research, objectives, and a budget. Because, well, plants are costly.
Over the next several weeks, I cleared the dumping ground and leveled the soil by hand. I now finally had my blank screen to begin prototyping, and after several rough sketches of ideas, plants, and rough timelines, I began to construct my garden. Truthfully, I had no idea what I was doing but was young enough to use brute strength to get things moved around enough to look slightly better than when I began.
My first mistake happened by removing all the weeds and brush, and when the big rains fell, pools of water would now form. My seeds and young plants were either saturated or just entirely washed away. Drawing back to my design profession, I researched native plants with deep roots, drought tolerant, deer-resistant, and could weather a few -30 degree polar vortexes and return the following spring. Unfortunately, this is not as easy as it sounds.
I scoured Craigslist and Marketplace's gardening sections. Searching for free plants, rocks, soil, sand, you name it. My family and neighbors would drop off random plants they no longer needed, and I would find a home for them. I've built and rebuilt fences and raised garden beds. We've dug fence posts to keep the dogs (and deer) away from the blueberry bushes and employed our kids to help and teach them the wonders of harvesting a salad from the lettuce patch. The other day, I was having a gardening conversation with my daughter, which ended with something like, "Just wait until you see what it looks like in four years." Coming out of the rat race of NYC, where everything is immediate, this newly discovered philosophy on life was truly revolutionary.
Throughout the next several years, countless hours went into designing, testing, researching, and shlepping dirt from one part of the yard to another. My hands became hard, callused, dirty, beautiful. My clothes became tattered, dotted with patches of makeshift stitches to get one more season out of these {insert clothing item}. I would get excited at the amount of dirt running off my body and into the drain when I showered. I began to experience a level of pride and accomplishment, and suddenly, where my design background would influence my surroundings now, gardening was influencing my designs.
My garden has a Northstar vision, roadmap, and budget, including the estimated time to complete the task before the growing season ends. Thinking like a designer has allowed my garden to flourish over time, and my return on investment is the joy it brings to our family and the sense of pride when a neighbor compliments us on our hard work. I have never enjoyed a hobby, at least on this level, and to think back to all those years ago, it all started with a few pots and seed packets. I would never have imagined the outcome this minimal investment could influence and guide me as a designer and present a reason to slow down, enjoy life, and, now and then, stop to smell the onions.
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