How I Learned to Grow Food

Why growing food was normal where I came from, and why I think it should be normal here too.

The village in Germany where I grew up. Farmhouses, a football pitch, and gardens everywhere you looked.

In Germany, where I grew up, gardening was a school subject.

I don't mean a special elective or an after-school club. It was part of the regular curriculum, right alongside math and reading. Every year, we walked to the garden behind the school, and our teachers showed us how to plant, how to take care of what we planted, and how to harvest it. We learned what grows in which season, what soil needs to look like, and why you can't just throw seeds in the ground and hope for the best.

Nobody thought this was unusual. It was just something you learned, the same way you learned to read a clock or multiply fractions. By the time I was ten, I knew that lettuce likes cool weather, that you rotate crops so the soil doesn't get depleted, and that a tomato plant needs more sun than most people think. I didn't know this was special knowledge. I thought everybody learned it.

The village where I grew up. The trains don't run here anymore, but the gardens still do.

Then I moved to the United States.

I settled in Seattle, started a family, bought a house with a yard. And I slowly realized that most of the people around me had no idea how to grow food. They wanted to, many of them. They'd buy raised beds, fill them with soil, plant a few things in spring, and by July the whole thing was either overwhelmed with weeds or half-empty because nothing survived. Not because they didn't care, but because nobody ever taught them the basics.

That gap kept bothering me. We've been growing food for thousands of years as humans, and somehow in one or two generations, that knowledge almost disappeared. Kids today can name every app on their phone but don't know that basil will bolt if you let it flower, or that you can grow kale through a Seattle winter.

I think about my little village school a lot. It wasn't fancy. There was no special funding or program name. It was just the obvious thing to do: teach children where food comes from and how to grow it themselves.

That experience is the reason I started Palatino Garden Adventures. I help homeowners in the Pacific Northwest set up kitchen gardens that actually produce food, planned around their space, their time, and what they like to eat. My Executive Kitchen Garden System takes the planning, the scheduling, and the "what do I do next" confusion off your plate so you can just grow.

Because here's the thing. Once someone shows you how, growing food is not that hard. And once you start, you don't want to stop.

If you have a yard and you've been thinking about it, I'm here to help you get started. You can check out the Executive Kitchen Garden System or sign up for my newsletter for weekly PNW-specific growing tips.

Happy growing,

Jackie

Palatino Garden Adventures

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April bookings are now open for both the Executive Blueprint and one-on-one consultation sessions.

→ The Blueprint is the full design phase - soil assessment, crop selection, succession plan, and layout - everything covered in this post, done for your specific space. Book here.

→ Consultation sessions are a good fit if you want to work through one piece of it yourself with guidance. Either way, the spring planting window sets the deadline, and spots fill before it arrives. Book here.