About Karlis

My name is Karlis and this is my garden notebook. I live in Latvia, in the Baltic countryside, where I write this site from a small piece of land I've been slowly turning into a working garden.

I started growing things at home in 2019, on the windowsill of a small apartment. The first tray was radish microgreens — I had read somewhere that they were the easiest to start with, and that turned out to be true. Three days after sowing, the seeds split. A week later there was a tiny forest. I have been hooked ever since.

2019 — A windowsill and a lot of trial and error

Those first months were mostly failures and small wins. Trays that molded because I overwatered. Seeds that never germinated because the room was too cold. A pea-shoot tray that grew so well I cut a fresh handful for a salad every other day for two weeks and felt like a magician.

I started writing things down here in August 2019, mostly as notes-to-self. The very first articles are still on the site — Choosing an Indoor Houseplant, A Terrarium as an Indoor Garden, Creating an Indoor Herb Garden. Re-reading them now, I can see exactly where I was guessing and where I knew what I was talking about.

2020–2023 — Building a real indoor setup

The apartment windowsill stopped being enough by the second winter. I added shelving, a small grow-light, then better trays. By 2021 I had a proper microgreens corner with rotation, a watering schedule, and a small notebook of what worked and what didn't.

This is the period most of the articles on the site come from. Best Lighting for Microgreens. pH Water for Microgreens. Common Microgreen Farming Problems and Solutions. Each one started as something I needed to figure out for myself, then ended up as an article in case it helped someone else.

I also started reviewing kits and equipment in this period. I've always tried to be honest in those reviews — including what I'd skip — because there's already too much of the opposite on the internet.

2024–2025 — Out of the apartment, into the soil

In the last year or so my life moved out of the city and into a small place in the countryside. The blog name is still Vertical Gardening — that's where it began, that's the technique I still use most — but the testing ground is wider now. There are real beds, real weather, real failures of a different kind. Slugs are a problem I never had on the windowsill.

The 2025 articles are written from here. They're still mostly about microgreens (those will always be the core), but you'll start to see more about composting at scale, growing vegetables outdoors, and the things you learn only when you have a real garden you can't control.

What I'm trying to do here

This site exists because there's a particular kind of gardening writing I wanted to read and couldn't find — first-person, specific, honest about what didn't work, dated so you know when it was written, and grounded in an actual garden someone keeps.

I'm not selling courses. I'm not running ads in your face. There are affiliate links on product reviews, and where you see one I genuinely use or have used the product. If something is overrated I'll say so.

If something here helped you grow something you ate, that's the whole point. Thank you for reading.

— Karlis

This page was last rewritten in May 2026.