Karen Baker

My grandmother had a vegetable garden that fed half the block, and I spent every summer growing up in it without realizing that was training for anything. I made it official with a Horticulture and Crop Science degree from Ohio State, focused on landscape design, then spent years managing planting crews and a garden center. Soil is where most garden projects go wrong, and it's rarely discussed with specificity; people obsess over which plants to buy and skip figuring out what's in the ground first. That's where my writing starts, even about arch dimensions or bed layout.