Just Here for the Party: My Garden Why
I spent the entire last week with Abi for our annual planning retreat in South Alabama.This was our second year of extended, somewhat confined time together, and the week reaffirmed a core truth about her: Abi does checklists extremely well.
She journals every morning. She sets goals and crosses them off. She created a five-day agenda to plan the business for 2026—and we knocked it out.
Her recent blog article, 52 Weeks of Harvest, was genuinely inspiring. She set a goal to harvest from the garden for fifty-two weeks of the year—a full calendar of intention and follow-through.
I’ll admit it: I read it with admiration—and a teeny bit of envy. Because while Abi thrives on routines and long-range plans, I’ve always gardened a little differently.
At some point, my Myers-Briggs personality type was described as someone who makes to-do lists only to promptly lose them. That still feels painfully accurate. I love ideas, momentum, beginnings. But consistency and systems? Not so much.
Still, Abi’s article made me stop and think. If I’m not driven by lists and milestones in the traditional sense, what does keep pulling me back to the garden—especially now, when gardening is no longer just a hobby, but my work, my calendar, my inbox, my entire life?
My answer became clear when I got home with a cooler full of Gulf shrimp on ice.
I hadn’t seen my neighbors in weeks, and I was determined to throw a January gumbo party. I researched recipes, took notes from my grandmother’s copy of Mobile Jubilee, and learned the ins and outs of a two-hour roux. Halfway through cooking, I kicked myself for not freezing okra last summer and made a mental note that next year’s gumbo would include it.
But then—my buds popped in through the back door.
We served rice and gumbo in an odd assortment of bowls, passing kid-chasing duty from one adult to the next. At one point, I remembered my friend Thu loved spicy food, so I reached into the fridge and grabbed a jar of pickled jalapeños from the summer garden. That did it. The gumbo woke up. The garden made its way into the gathering—and that’s when it clicked.
My garden ingredients are central to my cooking and often the reason people gather. I love having an excuse to share—because it tastes amazing, there’s too much of it, or it’s so perfectly fresh that the only reasonable response is: come over.
Brian gave me Samin Nosrat’s new cookbook, Good Things, for my birthday last month. Her reflections on food, time, ritual, and community were so perfectly stated. “I now consider a good life to be one where I feel deeply rooted in my community and the natural world… it’s one where beauty and pleasure are paramount, and I do meaningful work that creates joy and connection.” A good life is about care. It’s about repetition. It’s about showing up for each other in small, ordinary ways that add up to something meaningful.
That’s exactly how my garden functions in my life. It’s not a perfectly managed system—it’s the source of a few key ingredients that help me stay connected to my people.There are a few key things that I have to plant every year— they are central to the party! And, then, there are new experiments to try, forgotten seeds to toss into the dirt, or a memory that I want to recreate through food.
Take my obsession with baba ghanoush: the perfect gather around the island and inhale pita dip. I usually don’t tell people it’s eggplant until after they’re hooked.
I also love BLT parties. My guests are used to the fact that I’ll still be in my overalls when they arrive—drink in hand—because I forgot to get ready.
Summer brings house cocktails sweetened with elderflower simple syrup or a rosemary gin fizz. I love popping the lids on my own fermented drinks and watching that champagne-style spurt announce the party.
Labor Day weekend is all about pesto. My sisters-in-law have made it clear: extra jars are a non-negotiable requirement.
These moments don’t happen accidentally. They require certain things to be in place ahead of time. Herbs growing thick and generous. Tomatoes worth freezing. Okra worth the effort. Basil planted not just for tonight’s dinner, but for a future afternoon when everyone is together.
So when I talk about “goal setting” in the garden, this is what I mean. Food is part of a gathering, and so the tomatoes, the basil, the eggplant and the butternut squash are always planted by me: the whirling dervish garden girl. This year, I hope to go back to the beach for Christmas, but I want to bring a jar of black-eyed peas home to cook with my mom on New Year’s Day. Those seeds will inevitablity get unearthed from the warm season seed box.
My goals aren’t about maximizing yield or keeping up with an ideal schedule. They’re about making sure the garden supports the life I want to live. I want the freezer stocked for winter meals shared with friends. I want perennial herbs established so that I can make up my own spaghetti sauce. I want a few reliable crops each season that anchor the rituals my family and community return to year after year.
In other words, I set goals around food and gatherings. I might not make it to the garden every day, but I am intentional with what matters to me.
What needs to exist in the garden so gathering feels easy? What needs to be growing so neighbors stop by? What do I want to be able to say “yes” to without a last-minute trip to the store?
When the garden is shaped around those questions, it stops feeling like another obligation. It becomes a source of abundance and creativity—not a system I’m trying to master.
I may never be a checklist gardener—and that’s okay. My garden doesn’t exist to prove anything. It exists so people can come over, eat well, linger longer than planned, and leave feeling cared for.
That’s the harvest I’m always aiming for.
