It all started with a single peanut plant in second grade, sprouted in a plastic bag and left on a windowsill in the classroom. I took that little sprout home, put it in the ground, and forgot about it. A few months later, at my dad’s encouragement, I dug it up and was amazed to see peanut after peanut after peanut emerge from the soil.

My childhood summers were marked by this kind of amazement at what could come from such a small patch of ground. Years later, I got my horticulture degree to deepen this knowledge and find a way to use it professionally to improve people’s lives and help protect our environment. It started with annoying garden experiments, configuring and re-configuring my family’s vegetable garden layout to try to optimize it. Turns out, my dad had figured some things out over his many years of gardening and there was a reason the garden was laid out the way it was. Oops. It eventually settled into a slightly improved version of what we’d already been doing with some subtle adjustments to make it a little more productive, a little more water efficient, and a little easier to manage.

I completed that horticulture degree in 2017, gained more than 7 years of professional full-time experience working with plants, volunteered and consulted with a dozen different small businesses and community organizations, and through all of that have now visited and worked with hundreds of property owners in the DC area. I’ve had the privilege to learn from and work with small-scale organic farmers, public garden horticulturists, arborists, garden volunteers, and many others.

I now find myself with the unique opportunity to combine all of this experience and knowledge and use it to help those who want to make more of their outdoor space.

Thanks for visiting! It means a lot.

-Keith