Hi, I'm Marissa. I teach elementary school art, and the rest of the time I garden on a deep front porch and in a very small backyard in Mount Kisco, New York.
We live in a white clapboard house built in 1924 with my husband Nate, our son Mateo and Pim, an orange tabby who treats every pot of cat grass as a personal gift. The covered porch faces southwest and gets the best sun on the property, so that is where a lot of the growing happens: tomatoes in buckets, herbs in terra cotta and galvanized pots on an old bench, petunias and geraniums spilling out of the window boxes on the rail. Out back there are two 4-by-8 raised beds, a chain-link fence covered in peas every spring, and a groundhog we call Gus.
I grow almost everything from seed under shop lights in the basement, and I keep a notebook of what it all costs. A garden on a teacher's budget only works if you know where the money goes.
What you'll find here
- Porch & Containers: tomatoes in buckets, herbs and window boxes, a fig in a fabric pot, and keeping a 100-year-old porch in one piece.
- Vegetables & Herbs: two raised beds, a pea fence and what grows in about six hours of sun.
- Seed Starting: basement shop lights, February onions, potting up and saving our own seed.
- Flowers & Pollinators: native plants, cut flowers and planting around hungry deer.
- Home & Garden Budget: what the garden really costs, water bills, repair quotes, pest control and insurance, with our real numbers.
- Seasons & Harvest Kitchen: what we cook and preserve from the yard, and life around a school-year calendar.
A few honest notes
I'm not a horticulturist or a master gardener, and I'm not an insurance agent, contractor or financial advisor. When I share what we planted, paid or decided, it's our experience in zone 6b, not advice for your yard or your budget. For plant problems, your county's cooperative extension knows far more than I do.
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Say hi any time: contact@tinyporchgarden.com.