I'm a dad of three. I hike, I take photos, I spend as much time outside as I can. I am not, by any natural measure, a gardener. I didn't grow up growing things. I couldn't tell you the difference between determinate and indeterminate tomatoes until an embarrassingly recent point in my life.
But a few years back I got pulled into a study on food deserts and I couldn't let it go. Communities across the country where fresh food simply isn't available. The standard answer has been to build grocery stores. Federal programs spent hundreds of millions of dollars on it. City by city, initiative by initiative. And study after study found it barely moved the needle. A store a mile away doesn't help if you have no car. A big chain drives out the corner market that served the neighborhood for decades. And none of it helps if nobody ever taught you what to do with a butternut squash. Access to food and knowledge of food are two completely different problems, and we kept solving the wrong one.
People used to grow their own food. Our grandparents did. We just forgot how.
What kept pulling me back was something older. During World War II, 20 million home gardens supplied more than 40 percent of all American produce. People grew their own food. Not as a weekend hobby. As a way of life. That knowledge didn't vanish overnight. It just slowly stopped being passed down. My grandmother grew vegetables. I had absolutely no idea how.
So I tried. First season, I killed my pumpkins. Grew a carrot that looked like it had been in a fight with itself. Had something eating my plants I couldn't name, and I was scared to spray anything with toddlers and a dog running around the yard. I planted one crop cycle and had no idea what succession planting was. Every answer I needed was out there somewhere: in YouTube videos, in forums, in the heads of master gardeners. But scattered. Pieced together. Completely inaccessible if you don't have hours to spare or a way to get to a class.
That's the gap I couldn't stop thinking about.
plant started as an app: zone-aware planting calendars, weather alerts, a simple traffic light that tells you where every plant in your garden actually stands. But I never thought of it as just an app. The vision was always bigger: growing guides, food bank partnerships, raised beds available in stores, education from seed to table. A platform with real roots in the communities that need it most.
The goal, and I mean this literally, is for plant to behave like a plant. To take root quietly. To grow into something bigger than what it started as. To eventually help feed people in a real way, at real scale, in places where the old solutions keep failing. Not a one-time donation. Not a grocery store that closes in five years. Something that grows back every season, and gets stronger for it.
I'm still not a great gardener. But I grew enough last summer to share with my neighbors. That felt like the beginning of something.