Hello, I'm Tiffany.
I'm so glad you're here.

It started with two women and a windowsill.

I learned to grow things before I knew it was a skill.

My grandparents were born in Humacao, Puerto Rico, and what they did was grow, cook, gather, and sit around a table together. Cooking, eating, celebrating — that was the whole life, and they put it in me.

My grandmother carried it to Brooklyn. In the projects we had one good window, one prominent window with real light, and that is where she set her plants so they would grow. Sunday was hers — the prep, the church, the food after. There was no handing anything over a fence to a neighbor. There were the strays. We fed the dogs and cats in the neighborhood rice and beans and chopped-up chicken. Even they got gathered and fed.

For a long time I didn't have a garden of my own. And when I finally got near one, I didn't teach myself — there was a second woman. Her name was Bertha, my foster mom in Valley Center, California, and she had twenty-two acres. Grape vines. Pomegranate trees. Fruit, vegetables, and flowers everywhere. She would send me out for blackberries and we would come back and make apple pie. Tending, pruning, raking, watering — those were chores at her house, so I learned all of it young.

It took me years to understand that both women had been teaching me a skill. I thought that was just how you lived.

So when I got my own property, the garden was the first thing I did. It wasn't hard. It was second nature.

I have always been creative, but making something with my hands that makes another person feel good, or brings joy to somebody's biggest day, is the part I love most. The flowers were the same instinct. You grow something beautiful, and then you put it in somebody's hands.

Today that's two things under one roof. Growing With Tiff is the garden — teaching people to feed themselves from their own soil, at their own pace, in their real life. Tiff's Haus is the flowers — weddings and events designed so that nothing goes to waste and every guest leaves holding something.

Both are the same sentence, said twice. Grow it. Gather people around it. Live like that's normal.