Can you believe You Grow Girl is eight years old? Neither can I. Sometimes it feels like all of this has passed in a blink of an eye. Eight years is a small child in grade three. When I look at it that way it pretty much blows my mind.

Of course I would be lying if I didn’t say that some days it feels like an eternity has passed in those eight years. On a personal level I really grew up with this project. It started as a fun idea based on an offhand remark from a friend poking fun at my obsession with gardening, and has changed and evolved over the years into what is probably (at least in hours clocked) the central focus of my life. So much has gone on behind the scenes over the years — I am often asked to explain what this is and the impact it has had on my life but to be honest, even after all this time, I still haven’t formed a language to encapsulate it. I know this is a bit cliche to say but there really is no way I could have predicted eight years ago the path this project would lead me down. And to be honest, things change so quickly and extremely that I really have no idea where it will lead me still.

I have a lot of people to thank for their help and support over the years — some who have been around since almost the start and others that have come and gone. Some of you contributed when the site was a magazine, some have moderated the forums, contributed to discussions, bought a t-shirt, came out to events, or just wrote and said “Hi.”

THANK YOU!

More than anyone I have to take a moment to thank my partner Davin Risk. He has quietly and patiently put more hours and thankless work into this project both behind the scenes and in a public sphere then I ever could have anticipated and to be honest ever had the right to ask. Over the years he has quietly stepped in to help in countless ways: from all sorts of technical and design work, to unofficial portrait photographer; to helping hand and unpaid laborer in the gardens and at various events and workshops (he has absorbed so much about gardening over the years that I look to him when my mind draws a blank); to being my shoulder when things got crazy, to basically living with and tolerating the endless insanity I have brought into our home and lives through this endeavor. Not only has he tolerated all of this for eight years without complaint, but during the times I have threatened to pack it in and get a “real job” he has always insisted I keep going. He’s a keeper.

Thanks so much to Organic Gardening magazine, Urban Harvest, and Recreating Eden for donating such excellent prizes (totaling approximately $120).