Preston Manning

In 2016, Preston bought a houseplant with no plan beyond “put it somewhere and water it sometimes.” It died in under two weeks. He didn’t try again for a while, blaming the plant more than himself. The tomato seedlings changed that. He’d followed the instructions exactly, and they still died, all of them, within days. That was harder to explain away. So he started actually reading about soil, light, and watering schedules instead of guessing and testing what he learned on whatever plant was willing to survive the process. By 2018, things had turned around. The lawn stopped patching itself with dead spots. The houseplants stayed alive past the two-week mark, then past a year. What had been an embarrassing habit of killing things became, slowly, something he was actually decent at. Now, with close to a decade of doing this, he writes for people at the same starting point he was at in 2016, the ones staring at a dead plant, unsure what they did wrong. He still remembers just wanting someone to tell him what to do, so that’s what he does now no lecture, just what actually works, whether you’ve got a backyard or a single windowsill.