I “sat down” over email with my good buddy Brad to discuss his epic home-growing setup. Known for his basement chaos garden, complete with veggies, DIY drippers, and a knot of toads. Brad tells us all about his journey through the art of growing plants and so much more! Read on to learn what it’s all about!

Adam: Okay, so this seems like an obvious place to start, but can you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got into growing plants?

Brad: This is, probably strangely, the most difficult question to answer about my relationship with plants haha. My plant journey kind of starts with my electronics journey which, I’m realizing as I age, is a direct result of the way I fundamentally approach the concept of “knowing” things. You’ve signed yourself up for a weird interview, my friend. I assure you, plants eventually get mentioned.

To simplify the whole deal as much as I can, I do not feel like I understand or know something until I know the reasons and mechanisms via which that thing (usually a machine of some sort) comes to be. Essentially, I didn’t feel like I understood my parents’ VCR when I was 7 until I disassembled it.

Brad (continued): That general vibe has been the driving force behind most of the directions in which my life has been moved. There is a very clear, straight line from my seven-year-old self sitting on a blue shag carpet with a screwdriver pondering over where each wire went and my current engineering career.

At one point, I was given the opportunity to work as an automation engineer for a startup company. I won’t go into details, but I got burned so badly by the owner of the startup that I entirely refused to work with electronics of any sort indefinitely.

It was in this period that my attention turned toward plants. Prior to any of my electronics work, when I was delivering pizzas, I had attempted to grow a single onion in a container. It immediately died and I did not think about plants again until I swore off electronics after this experience.

Brad (continued): No matter how hard I try, I cannot be anyone but myself so 100% of the energy that used to go into electronics work, repair, and personal projects was now focused solely on plants. It started with a single 5-gallon bucket deep water culture growing garlic and tomatoes and has spiraled into the man you know and loathe today.

Adam: You’re well known for having an expansive chaos garden in your basement, complete with self-watering systems, DIY slow drippers, and even a small knot of toads (yes, that is what a group of toads is called and yes, I looked it up for this question) My question is how did that start?

Brad: “Well-known” is certainly a flattering stretch of my current reality :) It all started with indoor hydroponics. My first foray into plants in a holistic sense was with deep water culture hydroponics. Given the context of my life at the time, I think that I needed a growing system over which I had complete control. Looking back, I think my transition from computer man to plant man needed a transitional phase in which the entire growing process was modular and tightly manually controlled so that my successes and failures would be immediate and obvious.

Brad (continued): Once I gained a deeper understanding of the systems at play and their various interactions, it made much more sense, in my mind, to transition to a live soil environment. Once I reached a point at which I could no longer logically justify prioritizing hydroponics, I basically accumulated what amounts to a pile of soil on my basement floor. I have many reasons that I tell myself internally to explain why I prefer chaos gardening specifically but, honestly, it’s just the most fun you can have gardening, in my opinion.

I’m a very “trial by fire” kind of guy and I love that I have the privilege of tossing these seeds in here and discovering what works, what doesn’t, and what’s possible. The toads (by the way, I had no idea that there was a name for a group of toads and the fact that it’s a “knot” is honestly incredible because I am also obsessed with knots) were, to me, somehow the logical extension of my carnivorous plants. “I’ve created an environment here that has plants, decomposing material, microfauna, etc; I think we need a small predator in here” was the distillation of my internal monologue on it, I believe. Also, I just love toads a lot. They are a top-tier animal, and nobody is talking about it.

Adam: It is certainly impressive. How do you feel about it at the moment? How do you envision it in the future?

Brad: I find that my relationship with my plants is closer to my relationship with a person or a pet than with a set of objects and, as a result of that, I tend not to think of them as things in a place that I am acting upon. At any given moment, I’m truly and deeply thrilled that I get to look at it. Not to compare my literal pile of dirt to a human child but I see my plants through a lens similar to that through which I see my children: The pride and privilege I feel having been party to the genesis of this thing is truly immense. It is the purest joy and a source of endless fascination, growth, and reflection that I am party to shaping this living thing’s life.

I do not own the life that is happening, though. I am simply stewarding something beautiful that I believe in. Regarding the future, I really only have the goal of increasing diversity and eliminating my need to buy any inputs. I’m aiming for (and am getting somewhat close to) complete self-sufficiency (for the plants. My home/life is a much larger and more daunting task). Past that, I, for one reason or another, am very interested in increasing water efficiency and growing in water-constrained and electricity-constrained environments so I’m sure that will shape the general evolution of the plant area.

Rising Above the Soil - Seedlings Emerge

Adam: Are there things you would change about it if you had to start over?

Brad: The only thing that I think I would do differently would be putting more consideration into the containers I used and the way I’ve arranged them. I’m currently at a point where, if I want to remove a pot or rearrange, I could realistically kill a plant on the opposite side of the room. I’ve got buckets, self-watering pots, cloth pots, and between-pot volunteers thrown all willy-nilly in there and, 99% of the time, it’s fine but, 1% of the time, it’s the worst possible thing that could have happened. Now that I’m thinking about it, a smarter version of me would have done all of this significantly closer to the floor drain that’s in the room.

Adam: You are a man of many talents and even more interests. What are you currently obsessing about?

Growing Food Underground: Tomatoes in the Underground Garden

Brad: Knots have always been an object of fascination for me but, lately, I’ve been just over-the-top into learning knots and which knots work best for which applications. It is exceptionally useful, and I recommend everyone at least check out how to tie a few basic knots. I’ve also gotten pretty heavily into locksports, specifically lock picking and covert bypass techniques. Locks are a marvel of engineering and the extent to which you get to understand them while picking/bypassing them is indescribably cool.

It does give one a strange, somewhat muted version of a god complex, though, so I’ve been trying to work through that. Professionally, I’m a surveillance engineer so I’ve always got a background hum of security equipment, door access systems, and cameras which I do find very fascinating as well. I’ve been dabbling in AI and purpose-built models/custom training stuff because that’s popping up in all the new products and I want to know how to break it.

Brad (continued): Adjacent to that, I’ve been setting up servers and services in my home lab to, as much as is possible, eliminate google, amazon, and facebook from my life so I’m also always jumping down service/app hosting rabbit holes and currently run like 110 services out of my basement.

At the risk of making this random, disconnected list of things too long, I’ve also been reading a lot of books about prion disease which is horrifying. Also, I’ve been using hand tools to make other hand tools and trying to get good at carpentry and joinery. I’m sure there’s 10 other things that I’ll think of after it’s too late to add them.

Adam: What has been your biggest struggle as a plant grower?

Brad: If you had asked me two years ago, I’d definitely have said “getting discouraged by failure” but I’ve come to respect and even be grateful for my failures in this realm. Currently, my biggest struggle is definitely inattentiveness or, perhaps over-dramatically, neglect. I have a pretty extreme anxiety disorder, depression, and ADHD and my plants have a tendency to reflect my mental state. I mitigate a lot of issues with drip watering and other automations but, because I made all of this indoors, they are ultimately victims of my executive function at any given time. I find that “My plant died and I don’t know why” stings much less than “I knew what to do and how to do it but I simply did not do it.”

Adam: And lastly, what is the ONE piece of advice, knowledge, or inspiration you wish every grower would know?

Brad: My advice would be this: Your plants are going to fucking die. It’s going to happen and, if you’re lucky, you might get a hint about why it happened. Learn as much as you can and then stop wasting time thinking about it because, someday, that dead plant will have helped you grow a hundred healthy ones. Celebrate your victories, failure doesn’t exist.

You can (and should) follow Brad on TikTok and Mastodon @bradganley

And to learn more about your new favorite plant care system check out my book “Leave it the Fuck Alone” out now!

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