Welcome to The Garden Dish!
What is The Garden Dish?
Hi! I’m Willi and I love gardens and the people who make them. The Garden Dish is a bi-monthly newsletter that comes out on Sundays. It explores the world of gardens through my lens as a gardener, recipe developer and devoted lover of magazines. My friend Mari came up with the idea to call the newsletter the Garden Dish and I love it because the word dish can mean both a vessel that serves up something enticing and sharing fun tidbits of information.
This is the Garden Dish’s first season, and like a garden it will surely evolve as I figure out what I want to say and what you want to hear. My vision for the newsletter is to take the best parts of a gardening magazine–dreamy garden tours, approachable gardening tips, lots of juicy plant photos–combined with unfussy seasonal recipes, genuinely good finds, and off-beat link recommendations.
People are what make gardens so special. Without people, gardens are just a collection of plants. So yes, I want this to be a place where you discover new plants and get inspired by gardens, but I also hope the Garden Dish becomes a place that connects people who love to cultivate things. Gardeners are almost always interesting people (and quite often quirky) so the garden profiles will also delve into the people and communities who make the garden. I want to explore the motivations of why they garden and also what they are into (what podcasts do they listen to while they weed? What’s their favorite cookbook? Do they have a favorite brand of tea?).
So, welcome to my garden! I can’t wait to see what we grow here.
About Willi
I am a writer, recipe developer and home gardener who loves to grow food and cook with the vegetables I harvest from my little urban kitchen garden. I got my start in gardening as a little kid planting peas alongside my mom in our backyard garden and my grandmother, who owned a book shop, sparked my love of reading and writing.
After college, I landed my dream gig as an intern at Organic Gardening magazine, where I eventually worked my way up to being the West Coast Editor. I had the best beat at the magazine: writing stories about vegetables and people who love to grow them. This work led me to meet and learn from a fascinating group of gardeners–from a group of Hmong refugees growing traditional foods in urban community gardens to farmers working to breed new open-pollinated, regionally adapted vegetable varieties.
I’ve grown food in pots on rooftops, in small plots at community gardens, and in the sunny back (and front!) yards of my home. I’ve been lucky enough to teach joint gardening and cooking classes, including with chef Matt Dillon at the Corson Building in Seattle and I served as the resident vegetable gardening expert for Seattle’s NPR Station, KUOW.
My first book Grow Cook Eat: A Food-Lover’s Guide to Vegetable Gardening published in 2012 and, after selling more than 40,000 copies, the second edition just came out in February 2025! Plus, I have a new cookbook Veggies for Breakfast: 100 Deliciosu Plant-Focused Recipes for Healthier Mornings due out in the November!
I currently live and garden in Portland, Oregon!
