Amid the great COVID quarantine of 2020, it was hard for my partner and I to ignore our dependence on the grocery store. Every week it was the same song and dance: mask on, walk to the store, stare at the wall of produce, pick up some combination of tomatoes, kale, lettuce, broccoli, herbs, and head home. We would unload the plastic bags, and hope that we would use everything before it went bad.
The entire experience felt out of touch with nature and driven by passive consumerism. While we cared deeply about reducing carbon emissions, the best we could do was buy organic, reuse plastic produce bags to line trash cans, and eat what we bought.
I sat on the couch in our small San Francisco apartment imagining a parallel world. One in which we grew our own food outside, in a way that matched our eating patterns. We could avoid plastic bags, know exactly where our food came from, and cook with the most flavorful produce possible. We would harvest just what we needed, as we needed it, and simply let nature carry on.
Gardening would be better for us, and more importantly better for the planet.
Like Alice, I jumped down a rabbit hole and came out a few months later in San Diego, CA with a sunny and spacious backyard to grow our own food.
At first, I spent a lot of time learning. I used two resources the most: a San Diego local’s Epic Gardening YouTube channel and the Square Foot Gardening book.
We learned how to make my own healthy soil from scratch, and spent hours mixing a bunch of things together.
We learned how to make raised beds, and used the cheapest lumber I could find at Home Depot knowing that we were likely to move after a year.
I sketched a rough layout of our yard to determine how much space we had. From there, we tried to pick where the raised beds should go.
After we had placed the raised beds, I assigned plants to individual square feet with optimism and excitement.
We learned how to divide the bed into squares, and space plants according to their expected size. However, most things were planted at the wrong time of year or in the wrong location and didn’t produce.
We then tired to start seeds in recycled plastic containers with very limited success. Most seedlings required indoor grow lights (which we didn’t have), or didn’t transplant well.
While outside gardening under the sun, however, my focus routinely ended up back on my phone to google and scan gardening blogs.
I just wanted to garden, but found myself constantly answering questions.
How many raised beds did we need in order to grow what we typically buy?
Where should the garden be located?
What crops would grow well in our climate? For each crop, what varieties would we enjoy?
How should we set up a compost?
How much space, water, and sunlight did each plant need?
When should each crop be seeded, planted, and harvested?
How should we manage these leaf-eating bugs that we’ve never seen before?
When is this crop “ready” to harvest?
How should we store each crop, and how long should we expect it to last?
How can we use what we have in the garden to prepare a tasty dish?
What should be planted once space opens up, such that we can continuously harvest we like to eat?
Three months in, we found ourselves without much produce. Some of the challenges, such as heat waves and caterpillars, were unpredictable. But all of the time spent searching the internet just to learn the basics felt avoidable.
Establishing a thriving garden is hard, not due to a lack of information but rather the decentralization of information.
I wanted something to tell me what I should be doing each week, such that we could live sustainably off our backyard as much as possible. So, I spent just over a month building the first version of Raddish and posted it to Reddit for other gardeners to use.
I was truly blown away by the response and inspired by how helpful it was to other gardeners, so I updated the tool and shared it again.
This brings us to today.
Raddish is on a mission to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions by empowering individuals to grow their own food.
From this mission originates the product’s three core priorities moving forward:
Help people garden sustainably. This will include: composting, using natural pesticides, rain-water harvesting, growing native species, and supporting local wildlife.
Help people garden effectively. This will include: continuously planting (or “succession sowing”) to get the most out of limited space, planting at the right time of year, and proper care techniques.
Help people use what they grow. This will include: reminders to harvest produce, and access to easy recipes using what’s available.
In the end, using Raddish will culminate in rad dishes: delicious recipes with ingredients that couldn’t be more local, sustainably grown, freshly harvested, or creatively prepared.
A typically day’s harvest before cooking, April 2021.