What plant brought you the most GARDEN JOY in growing – harvesting – eating – giving away?

Which garden memories keep you smiling the longest?

What part of gardening brought you the most JOY:
Food,
Flowers,
Bumblebees,
Friends? 

For me, and maybe most of us, it’s an intricately interwoven patchwork of all of the above. As gardening teaches us so well – everything is connected.

But since it is also fun to name a special memory or two…

Top Homestead Garden Memories of 2024

My favorite plant of 2024: Blue Lake 7 pole beans that took over an arch FAST even though I planted them LATE.

My favorite harvest of 2024: the handful of cherries from our new Mesabi Cherry tree. Pictured below with homegrown currants, strawberry, raspberries, and honeyberries.

Blue Lake 7 pole beans from my homestead garden.
A handful of berries grown in my homestead garden.

Between the pounds of food harvested and preserved, the herbal teas, spices, and freezer full of veggies (and eggs) – I am proud of my quantifiable accomplishments. But the lasting JOY my garden provides me, that comes from the moments lost in my garden, revering nature.

And I can’t wait to share more ways to grow that JOY – along with really great food, in 2025!

But right now… I wanted to take an extra moment to share this life changing ‘neuro-info’.

Staying Positive

There are so many memories of being in my garden that bring me joy. They all seem to be from when I took time to STOP, DROP + REST.

Turns out: we need to consciously savor good moments for a minimum of 15 seconds for our brains to bother storing them as ‘positive emotions’. If they don’t get that much time, they just dissolve into nothing.

A bumblebee on a chive blossom

This is all part of brain bias where we tend to focus on negative situations – with those negative moments getting stored instantly compared to having to consciously hold our attention on a positive experience for 15 seconds.

Being aware of this 15-second concept gave me the freedom to relish more moments in my homestead garden. I mean, we’re spending endless hours starting seeds, weeding, hauling compost, and squishing bugs…

We might as well take 15 seconds a day to find garden joy that will improve our mental state as well!

For me this 15 seconds often looks like tilting my head up to the sun, closing my eyes, and breathing in the smells, or sitting down to marvel at bumblebees, sweat bees, or butterflies, digging into the compost pile and being overwhelmed by the life from decay phenomenon.

What could it look like for you?

I wish to give us all a happier, healthier 2025, and building in time to savor the good is so important!

Taking time to acknowledge our accomplishments is equally important. And while 2024 was a year of ups and downs, there was so much good that came out of it.

2024 Moments I Savor

A basket of vegetables from my homestead garden.
  • 3rd printing of our book, Small-Scale Homesteading
  • Spoke at the Minneapolis Spring Home and Garden Show, Keynote at ‘Garden Fever’ Rice County Master Gardener Days, and taught Seed Starting at Patagonia, all with my coauthor, Stephanie Thurow
  • Keynote speaker at the Carver-Scott County Master Gardeners day, spoke at the Eagan Garden Club, St. Anthony Park Garden Club, the White Bear Lake Library, the MN State Fair, and taught multiple in person and online classes with MN State Horticultural Society
  • Volunteered on a variety of community garden projects with the Ramsey County Master Gardeners (and made more friends!)
  • Wrote 5 articles and 2 blogs for Northern Gardener Magazine, 2 articles and 2 blogs for Hobby Farms Magazine, 2 articles for Edible MN Magazine, and 13 articles for my Forks in the Dirt website
  • My Instagram account @forksinthedirt was awarded the Golden Laurel for 2024 by Garden Communicators International
  • Continued as Market Manager for the 8th season of the WBL Winter Farmers Markets (over 2,000 shoppers attending in 2024)
  • Grew 668 pounds of food from just over 100 varieties of plants in my suburban garden
  • Preserved 128 jars of food
  • Shot 2 wild turkey with my crossbow
  • Recorded 12 different gardening classes (9 for MN Horticultural Society + 3 on my own)
  • Countless new garden friends made along the way!

Of course, I am still voraciously reading through soil science, nature, permaculture, and root cellaring books…. And those seed catalogs are calling my name!

I hope each of you can find something that brings you as much garden joy – so much that you get lost for well over the required 15 seconds – and the sense of hope that growing food in my homestead garden brings to me.

Peas and Light.

Dig In,
Michelle