A 100 Square Foot Rescue Garden Can Change Your Life

Hurricane Helene destroyed my 200-year-old trees but gave me something I’d wanted for decades – a garden I could actually walk to! After running a market garden 6 miles away, this tiny 100 square foot rescue garden completely transformed my daily cooking routine. Watch how losing something priceless led to the most practical garden makeover of my life.

IN THIS VIDEO:
00:00 – How Hurricane Helene Changed Everything
00:30 – From Market Garden to Backyard Reality
04:30 – The 30-Second Cilantro Solution
07:45 – Complete Garden Transformation Process
08:00 – Planting the Final 40 Square Feet
09:00 – Why 100 Square Feet Is All You Need

🌱 WHAT YOU’LL LEARN:

How to create maximum impact with minimal space
The difference between growing everything vs. growing what you need
My exact plant selection for emergency cooking needs
How to transform a shady backyard after tree loss
The psychology of convenience gardening

👉 GARDEN TRANSFORMATION DETAILS:

Total space: 100 square feet
Key crops: Herbs, lettuce, tomatoes, peppers
Setup time: One weekend
Daily maintenance: 5 minutes max
💡 PRO TIP: Think of your garden as a kitchen tool, not a farm. Grow what saves you the most grocery store trips!

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DISCLAIMER: Garden plans should be adapted based on your specific climate zone and growing conditions.

hurricane knocked down two hundred-year-old trees in my backyard last September i thought it was a disaster but it turns out it gave me the one thing I’d always wanted a garden that I could actually walk to this is how my accidental rescue garden changed everything i’ve always been a gardener but look at my yard an established neighborhood mature trees zero sun so I did what anybody would do if they were an obsessed gardener i started my market garden anywhere I could six miles away i grew gorgeous vegetables professional quality but I had one small problem i’d forget that I needed basil for dinner and end up at the grocery store anyway the irony I had a 100 foot row of basil but it was six miles away 24 Hurricane Helen two century old oaks were gone i stood in my backyard crying those trees were here before my house before my whole neighborhood and now sunlight for the first time in decades I actually had sunlight in my actual yard where I actually live i started thinking now I can have a garden i started small a few raised beds on the back porch nothing fancy just the basics some tomatoes basil because I’m always out cilantro lettuce some peppers mint in a pot i called it my consolation prize garden you know to make myself feel better about the trees it looked pathetic compared to my market garden but it was here so my first aha moment was Tuesday night I’m making tacos i need cilantro my usual mood would move would be to take the kids put them in the car drive to the store spend 40 bucks somehow and get home 45 minutes later but wait I have cilantro now like outside right now 30 seconds that’s how long it took me to get cilantro this time barefoot in my pajama pants the kids never even knew I left the kitchen 3 weeks later I realized I hadn’t made a single emergency grocery run so the rescue garden is just here like that’s my kitchen door i walk out here and I grab all kinds of herbs here you can see them right there and it’s absolutely so super convenient it’s I mean yeah it’s 100 square feet it’s not an acre and it doesn’t want to be an acre it is just exactly what I need at my fingertips i can’t tell you how many times I’m here in my kitchen cooking food right here on my stove clearly I’m not cooking now but if I were cooking that’s where I would do it and lots and lots of times that I haven’t had what I needed and now with my rescue garden I literally walk outside it’s like not even five steps here we are we’re right out here okay so now we’re out here in the rescue garden and you can see for yourself now check this out super close no it’s not no it’s not an acre size garden but who needs an acre when all you need is cilantro and you have it here you just grab it let’s just say I needed celery here lettuce i’ve got dill over here sage all of these things are literally at my fingertips here’s the door here’s my cat Callie here’s the garden like it’s crazy and here take a look at this beautiful purple lusanths so yeah this is the rescue garden it’s 100 square ft it’s just 100 square feet of garden space it’s not much but it’s literally all I need to rescue me i can feed my family maybe two or three side dishes out of this per week and then as I need herbs or um greenery or whatever for sandwiches you name it I’ve got it at my fingertips and yes it’s it’s not an acre garden but it’s also not an acre garden so that’s the beauty of the rescue garden me garden started saving my dinner two or three times a week but it’s more than that i’m not stressed i’m not stressed at 5:30 anymore everything I need is literally 20 steps away i call it my rescue garden because that’s what it does it rescues Tuesday night and Thursday and that random Saturday when I realize I have people coming over these are the lessons that I’ve learned you don’t need acres you need access you don’t need to feed your whole family you need to save dinner you don’t need perfection you need herbs just when you need them my market garden is my business but this this 100 square feet this is my sanity the difference between homegrown and store-bought isn’t just freshness it’s the difference between a 45minute store run and a 45second harvest those trees that fell I still miss them but they gave me something more and something that I’d wanted for years the ability to walk outside and feed my family sometimes the worst things like losing century old trees make space for exactly what you need and for me that was 100 square feet of never run out of food again so these are some here’s a look at some of my onions and some of my other plants here i’ve got some liies here i’m going to switch out once my daughter makes the bouques and veggie boxes for her fundraiser that she’s working on it’s called Blooms and Blessings for Hope and here I’m showing you the last addition that I’m putting into this rescue garden so this is a 2x 20 foot section down here at the base of my patio and today I put in tomatoes peppers and eggplant into that space and I actually put in a few kale plants um after I filmed this bit here but um actually I just get after it here in this video what I did was I planted two San Marzano tomatoes two Mountain Magic tomatoes and one Sweet Prince tomato from Row Seven Seeds then I also put in several shashidto peppers one Aleppo pepper and four eggplants i planted two Orient Express eggplants and two Artusa white eggplant so here you can just see me uh getting after this garden space here um this is very mature landscape there were lots of roots and le um lots of leaves but lots of roots from large trees around as you might expect we had a very shady backyard and so there were lots of things to have to dig with so I started off with the spade but quickly you uh switched over to the madic because that was going to help me the most when it came to actually being able to navigate that space so I’m planning out here what I’ve got so what I decided to do was put the tomatoes on the far left uh because that would get the that was not you know that was basically in the west so on the western side of things so here I am i I didn’t want to go too far i I know I’m not I don’t have the matic very high up over my head but that’s because I didn’t want to really um there’s a lot of rocks in this and and some bricks because this has a lot of old edging that people put into the landscape so I didn’t want to get um any of that caught on my matic here but yeah here I’m just digging out a lot of the soil and it is a claybased soil but there are lots of leaves in it too so I’m just digging the holes then I augment that soil with chicken manure well not just chicken manure it’s actually um Espoma Plantone it’ll either be plant or tomato tone garden tone any of those i love the Espoma line of products and they really work well so I’m just digging all those holes getting everything planted in and uh checking out what I’m doing here and I here you see I’ve got my holes augmented with the fertilizer in there and I’m counting off exactly what’s going to go in there and that’s a nice size space so that’s 20 by two so that’s 40 ft square and then up on top that top row in the on the patio is a 1 ft x 20 so that’s 20 square ft and then on the inside patio floor I have another 2x 20 space plus the two green planters that I have so we’re talking about around a a 100 square foot space and I’m telling you when I started thinking of this garden as a tool it’s a tool just like my KitchenAid mixer is a tool or a spatula fish spatula or my special sheet pans uh this garden functions as a tool for me it’s not about growing everything it’s just about growing what I need when I need it so as always guys I know you could have been anywhere but you chose to spend your time with me and I do truly appreciate it um bye for now and I hope this has given you some some inspiration on how you can create a rescue garden in your