The Problem
The home you bought seemed perfect for your situation a few years ago.  Or, it was bigger than you honestly needed so you just moved in and quickly went on with life.

Then things changed, ever so slightly over time or in some bigger ways.  Maybe you're home more now, or working remotely from home.  Or you found yourself offering space to your adult daughter who is going back to school, and you never planned on that but here it is.  And it's just not working anymore.

What to Do?
Clearly, you have do something!  And I get that the most logical next step might seem obvious:  you need more space!!  It's too cramped.  It's creating stress and chaos.  You can't find things.  You don't have enough private space.  

So, you make the decision to add on 500 square feet to create an office and another bedroom.

But I've got a reality check for you...  there's a lot more to solving this challenge than just adding more space.

🌿 August in the Prescott Garden
Your Monthly Garden Keeping Summary from The Whiskey Porch
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August celebrates the start of harvest season in Prescott’s high desert. With monsoon rains continuing, your garden should be in full summer mode - filled with produce, flowers, and growth. It’s a month to enjoy your garden’s bounty and prepare for the cooler months ahead.
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If you've got a garden that's more bare than planted, or an expansive back yard that's at the bottom of an impossibly steep hillside with no access, you already know that feeling of the gap between your dream landscape and the weedy reality you are looking at.

Maybe your older home feels awkward and dated and you've got a Pinterest board with picture perfect ideas that make you feel frustrated because there's no clear path to bringing that vision home.

Keep hold of that dream or that vision. But know that making small edits and efforts along the way, maybe a little bit every day, counts as progress. Give it time.

And each step feeds the creativity and energy for the next thing. Take those impromptu ideas and let the dream evolve. Enjoy the process and just start.

From this week's dispatch in Letters from The Whiskey Porch - a weekly letter on home, garden, and smaller, simpler, more beautiful living, written from a 1924 Craftsman bungalow in Prescott, Arizona.

[Read the full letter →] 50 Fridays over on Substack.

National Simplicity Day is this Sunday, July 12th - the day, every year, that asks us to do less on purpose.

It's a bigger deal around here than you might expect.

I actually launched The Whiskey Porch on this date, years ago now, and chose it on purpose. The whole philosophy behind everything I write and design traces back to one idea that's over 200 years old - and it might be more true today than when it was first written.
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🌿 July in the Prescott Garden
Your Monthly Garden Keeping Summary from The Whiskey Porch
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​As July rolls in, Prescott settles into the heart of summer — a season defined by tending, timing, and watchfulness. With monsoons often arriving early, this month is less about big projects and more about daily presence: adjusting irrigation, watching for pests, and harvesting what your garden has to offer.

Tomorrow is summer solstice.  "Midsommar" in Sweden.  

​There’s something about the longest day of the year that brings so much joy.
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This week's letter over on Substack is a reflection on Midsommar, the Summer Solstice, and a few small ways to welcome the season with more beauty and less fuss.

Read it here:  A Simple, Peaceful Midsommar
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I hope you'll hop over there and say hello.

If you're looking for more inspiration, check out the other blog posts about Living with the Seasons here.

🌿 June in the Prescott Garden
Your Monthly Garden Keeping Summary from The Whiskey Porch

As the high desert moves into early summer, June in Prescott brings high temperatures, intense sun, and the beginnings of the monsoon season. It's a month focused on fine-tuning water habits and staying alert to pest activity — especially for new seedlings and recent additions to the garden.

A man in a mask with a mosquito fogger at the garden gate was not exactly what I expected during a client call.

But it became the beginning of this week’s World Environment Day letter - a small reflection on the imperfect choices that help us care for the living world close to home.

Read the full letter: The Dragonflies Would Like a Word.

One of the challenges with new-build homes is that everything can feel abrupt at first.

Stark walls. Bare soil. Little shade. No sense of age or belonging yet.
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This Prescott landscape project began exactly there - with an empty high-desert lot exposed to strong sun, wind, difficult soil, and wide-open surroundings.

The goal was to create a layered meadow garden that felt welcoming, rooted, naturalistic, and deeply connected to both the architecture and the surrounding landscape.

In this week’s Design Dispatch over on Substack , I’m sharing a behind-the-scenes look at the design thinking behind the project -  from blank slate to final landscape plan to a garden slowly settling into itself over time.  Plus lots of Before & Afters.

Bonus:  The Curated Botanical Guide.  A gorgeous 47-page companion guide that breaks down all of the plantings, color palettes, design principles.

🌿 Read the full story here:  A Meandow Landscape.

There’s something truly remarkable about herbs.

Long before herbs became little more than culinary ingredients tucked beside tomatoes in the garden, they were woven deeply into everyday life - valued for fragrance, beauty, tea, healing, ritual, pollinators, and household care.

Many herbs offer all of those things at once.

In this week’s Letter from The Whiskey Porch, I’m reflecting on the old wisdom of herbs and the countless ways they enrich a more sensory, grounded, and beautiful life - from lemon balm tea and rosemary shower bundles to lavender beside the bed and gardens alive with bees and fragrance.

This is less of a how-to garden post, and more of an inspirational story.
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The letter also explores some of my favorite herbs to grow for beauty, atmosphere, pollinators, and everyday rituals here in the high country of northern Arizona.

Read the full letter here:  The Old Wisdom of Herbs.