About Me

It honestly feels like I’ve been gardening and growing things my whole life, and after years of encouragement from many friends in my life I’ve finally decided to share my gardening knowledge with the world wide web. I started Everyone Can Grow because I really do believe that everyone can grow. Now, I understand you might not feel the same way, especially if you’re one of those people who always say something like ‘Oh I just can’t grow anything, every time I try it all just dies!‘ But I assure you nothing could be further from the truth. Anytime I’m talking to one of my friends about my house plants or my garden and they’re commenting on it, I always remind them it’s easy to miss the failures when you’re admiring only the successes, and even the most practiced and experienced gardeners can make simple mistakes that lead to catastrophic results.

I’m the oldest of four boys, and I started working with the public when I was fifteen years old, graduated when I was seventeen, and moved out at eighteen. My first job was for a local pizza chain, I started off on the register and by the time I left I had become a key holding shift leader. I went to work for a nearby deli as a catering manager, and after that I was a trainer for servers and bartenders at a local steakhouse. I was taking college courses throughout these years, and after I finished earning an Associates degree in Business & Commerce from Volunteer State Community College, I transferred to Middle Tennessee State University to pursue a Bachelors of Science degree in Organizational Communication. While I was a student I worked for the campus’s catering company setting up for all kinds of university events, and I stayed involved on campus through a few student organizations. Those jobs along with a few side hustles, and the gracious loving support from my Maw, helped to cover my school and living expenses throughout those years. After graduating from MTSU in 2014 I started working at a shoe warehouse where I later became store manager; I loved the accessories more than the shoes to be honest. Funny enough I ended up back at MTSU scheduling campus programs and managing trainings for their Intercultural & Diversity Affairs Office before I was recruited by the campus Development Office to manage the University’s fundraising call center operations. And then of course like everyone else on the third rock from the sun, in 2020 I had to navigate the novel coronavirus thusly named Covid-19. After leaving MTSU that spring in the wake of it all, I started working for a technology company as a coach on their outbound call center team, and today I am the manager of that team. Who knows what the future will hold!

In my personal life, you already know when I started gardening. And if you’re reading this along the road in the future, you can read that first blog post here! When we were kids Gameboys or a Nintendo were never too far away, we didn’t have the internet in the 90s and even if we had you can’t “stream” anything through a dial up connection. That said, many summer days involved my brothers and I playing outside, roaming around in the woods or on trails that Paw had bush-hogged for us. Many times we would meander down to the creek by the road and try to build little rock dams to make a swimming area, or chase after frogs turtles and garter snakes. Other days we were so far back in the woods that we could barely hear our mom hollering for us to come back home. When I got a little older I started helping Paw cut hay, and by help cut hay what I mean is I helped drive the truck hauling the trailer where the square bales were getting stacked before being unloaded into the barn loft while I sat in the truck. Sometimes it was the blue truck, sometimes it was a white one, and every time it was a Ford. As a kid I had really bad asthma, so this was a major feat of achievement for me at the time, and as I got older and spent more time outdoors and in the garden I grew out of it. Between the ages of ten and twelve Paw also bought me a hatchet, a slingshot, and a Ruger 22 long rifle for small game hunting and target practice – all three of which I still have and use today.

I more so use the hatchet than the other two if I’m being honest. When I was nine I begged for a hatchet because of this book that we read in my fourth grade class called Hatchet about a young kid who’s the sole survivor of a plane crash in the Alaskan wilderness, and as you may already know or have guessed, all he has with him during this existential and traumatic life crisis…is a hatchet. Of course, one might imagine that a kid would be THRILLED to be gifted something they’d truly wanted and excitedly begged for, and something which in this case both their parents had to ‘OKAYyyyyy’ before the hatchet was purchased at Tractor Supply – right? (…some of y’all just heard your own parents in your head say “okayyyyyy” in your head as they hesitantly granted you permission for something) You would image that kid would likely be jumping for joy and chopping suckers off of trees and roses off bushes out in the yard moments after opening it – right? Just running around wild and screaming, hacking away at the overgrowth out behind the garage, clearing out more bank space to explore more of the creekside, and cutting pesky branches out of the way in my roaming trails throughout the woods – right, RIGHT?! Well, you might suspect by now that this was in fact not the case when I ripped away the wrapping paper and exposed the neon yellow handle. “In the book, it was a wooden hatchet,” I declared, “I wanted you to get me a wooden hatchet not a plastic one!” I am sure there was more to what I spat out, and for those of you who do know me personally you also know I probably did say a lot more than that…but that line stands alone in this particular memory. Paw calmly sat me down, and repositioned the cigar nub he had been holding in his mouth, he took the hatchet and held it out for me while he spoke. “This hatchet is made out of hardened fiber glass,” he said, “and the ax blade is made out of stainless steel, sealed at the top here to hold them both together. If you take care of this, you don’t leave it outside, and you don’t let it get wet – this hatchet will be with you for the rest of your life. And it will be here long after I’m gone. If I got you a wooden hatchet like in that book, it’s handle would eventually break. Maybe not now, and not in a few years, but I know that one day it will break. And if I’m buying you a hatchet I wanted to buy you one that was well made and easy to care for, and that was this hatchet.” As you already know, Paw was right. He was a very smart man.

The following year Paw bought me a slingshot, it was black metal with a wrist brace for stability, and a yellow rubber draw strap that you could pull back really far if you felt like it. It was perfect for shooting hickory tree nuts or small round rocks if I could find good spherical ones that were aero dynamic, and I can promise you there were no animals maimed or otherwise injured in the shooting of this slingshot. Unfortunately thought I cannot say the same of the glass soda bottles and cans…or the old glass windows that were laying around and already falling apart…or a few of the burned out and rusted old barn lights…or of course that Ruger 22 fle which was gifted to me a year later, along with a hunter’s safety course and a lifetime hunting license. He took me hunting with him very often after that, I remember so many mornings having to get dressed all in camo at three or four o’clock before the sun rose, and trekking out into the woods to find a good rock or stump to sit on…and wait. If he couldn’t bag a deer then we’d try to get some squirrels or rabbits to take back with us. The deer of course you’d have to take off and get processed first, but Maw would handle the squirrels and rabbits for us when we got back home. Regardless which one we had for breakfast, they all came out great after she batter fried them in a cast iron skillet.

As I got a little older through middle school, high school, and early college I spent a lot of time writing and drafting ideas for a fantasy novel series. If I wasn’t writing something of my own I was reading someone else’s literature. When I first started exploring options for college I really wanted to be an archaeologist, but there were two fundamental flaws with that plan. The first, and most obvious flaw, was that Indiana Jones is not a real person, and what he does in those movies is not what archaeology is. So there was that…the other, and much more material flaw, was that at that time you could not major in archaeology anywhere in the state of Tennessee, so I was going to have to move way out west somewhere if that’s what I wanted to do. After accepting this and considering other options, I settled on teaching, at first, and then changed over to accounting, and then as you already know I settles on organizational communication. 

Like I said in my first post, I am new to blogging but I’m not new to gardening. I decided to start Everyone Can Grow because unlike a lot of people I’ve been taking care of plants almost my entire life, and all my life I’ve met people who simply don’t or “can’t” garen because they’ve tried it before and they failed. Working with plants can teach you many things about the journey of life, afterall they’ve been here a hell of a lot longer than we have, and what you may not realize is that the only difference between those folks who “can’t” and the gardeners who thrive is that gardeners keep trying until we figure it out. That’s just what you have to do in life, keep trying and keep figuring it out. In the end I hope that everyone can take something positive away after visiting Everyone Can Grow, but ultimately I hope that you become inspired to start growing and encourage others to come along too.

Thanks for reading!