A fruit gardener, a homemaker, and a few rugrats…
Hi! This is Marin, the wife of a plant nerd. Jason has a passion for growing tasty and productive plants and loves helping people design and grow edible landscapes.
As we have hosted a few neighborhood gardening classes over the years, it has become apparent that people are thirsting for more information than what is readily available.
We started this blog because we want to share our passion and what we have learned. I, for one, have absolutely converted to the idea of being able to go out into your personal Garden of Eden and eat amazing fresh produce.
We are both so excited to be able to share this journey with you, and our goal is to present information that is accurate, and from our personal experience, or from friends and fellow gardeners we know for real.
ABOUT MARIN:
I am a regular Arizona girl who played barefoot in the hot Sonoran Desert as a kid. My mom tried to plant a garden time and time again near the sandy desert wash in our large backyard with some success, but mostly she gave up.
When I was 10 years old I decided to grow my own flower garden. I didn’t know what I was doing and none of my seeds sprouted. Over the years I had been given potted plants from time to time only to have them quickly die.
When Jason and I started dating he gave me an ivy plant, which I loved… it died too. He used to leave me homegrown roses on my car. I loved it. In fact, I didn’t know how easy it was to grow roses until I met Jason. I loved the idea of growing things but didn’t have a CLUE!
Jason had been working on his parents’ yard since he was a teenager and decided he wanted a place he could have a graduation party. It wasn’t until I saw what he had created that I started to believe we could actually grow a beautiful green paradise here. Its hard not to believe what is possible when you see it growing right before you.
My husband has the BEST hobby in the world. Instead of sitting in front of a football game or hunting on the weekends, I find him outside producing a paradise for our family. Although, it took me a while to get used to his seed collecting habits… I am still finding seeds in the laundry!
ABOUT JASON:
My dad is a landscaper. I grew up spending many summer days doing landscaping with him- a hot, hard labor job in the Arizona heat. I hated it. Every summer my dad would take off work for a week and take our family camping in the mountains of Arizona. He would show us all the plants and tell us everything he knew.
I learned about edibles, medicinals, tannins, saponins, and fibers. I was always amazed by the abundance of the world and that a person could live off the land if they knew enough. I determined that I would someday have a huge piece of land somewhere and do just that. Hasn’t happened yet.
I also learned the value of growing food at an early. When I was five years old my dad dug out the Bermuda grass on the West side of the house. He brought in a huge truckload of manure and tilled it into the whole yard and planted a garden. (From what I am told, that year my bean patch apparently did very well). For being a picky eater, I sure ate a lot out of the garden. This being said, I never really cared for the aesthetics of a garden- nice neat little rows never appealed to me much, especially if I had to battle Bermuda grass.
But I had other influences at home as well. Both of my grandmothers always grew beautiful flower gardens. I learned at a young age to appreciate aesthetic landscapes and collected magazines and catalogs and poured over every image and every page.
I started working with my dad on weekends and during summers when I was 10. With opportunities to learn every aspect of both traditional landscaping and experimental gardening, eventually I grew to have an intimate understanding of landscape microclimates and knowing where plants grew the best. I learned to love aesthetic landscape design, though I have still never learned to enjoy digging the trenches. I have learned how to appreciate it.
Through years of digging, however, I did learn another very important lesson: why we grow landscapes. A beautiful landscape can be very healing. Despite growing up doing landscaping, I still loved the concept of self-sufficiency, and so one day it clicked. Every plant that we designed into the landscape could be substituted for an edible that could also perform the same aesthetic function. Trees, shrubs, flowers, ground covers, Edibles provided all those options.
And so I spent months and years of research, trial, and implementation. I developed a list of perennial edible plants that could potentially be used in edible landscaping in our local region. In 2012, with more than 15 years of hands-on experience, I started a little business that primarily focused on edible landscape education, design and consulting.
MARIN:
Jason is always helping people with their landscapes and answering TONS of questions. His favorite thing is talking about this stuff and he could do it all day. So I dreamed up the idea to build this blog and it didn’t take much convincing for him to agree. Thus, Edensteading was born. Our greatest hope is that we can be a resource for you in your journey to create your own edible paradise.
Happy growing!
