Wichita, Kansas — garden notes, herb guides, and a shop that's coming
I'm Barbara. I live in Wichita, Kansas, where the wind doesn't stop and the soil is honest. I tend gardens, build wooden things, and I'm slowly putting together a small home-based shop for garden-inspired goods — herb kits, dried bundles, seed packets with actual planting notes, not marketing copy. This is where I keep it all.
This is a working journal. I publish seasonal field guides for growing herbs in our part of Kansas — the hard facts about when to plant, when the first frost usually bites, what survives a Wichita summer without drowning. I also sketch out plans for the shop I'm building, and I keep notes on the wooden things I make — cutting boards, small shelves, herb-drying racks.
Everything is practical. If I write about an herb, you'll find its planting window, its spacing, what goes wrong and how to fix it. That's what I need when I'm in the dirt, and it's what my neighbors ask for too.
My current project is a field guide for the eight herbs I grow most reliably here, with specific notes for Zone 6b. It's not a general gardening book — it's my garden, documented honestly.
Read the Summer Herb Field Guide →I'm planning a small home-based boutique called Good Roots — a name I like because it means both the plant sense and the community sense. The idea is simple: sell things I make and things I grow, with notes on how to use them. Herb drying kits, seed packets with actual planting schedules, small wooden herb boxes, and dried herb bundles for cooking. No mass-produced stuff. Everything has a story and an instruction.
I'll share the shop plans and progress here as they develop.