I’m Colleen Vanderlinden, and I’m so happy you’re here. I’m a garden writer, blogger, novelist, homesteader, and small business owner. I’ve had 2 books published about gardening: Edible Gardening for the Midwest and Vegetable Gardening for the Midwest (both published by Lone Pine Publishing) and I’ve written articles about gardening and green living for Mother Earth News, TreeHugger, The Northern Gardener, Birds & Blooms, The Spruce (formerly About.com), Mother Nature Network, and The Detroit News. Currently, I’m the gardening expert at LovetoKnow.com

Grasshopper Hill Farm is actually my THIRD garden blog. I originally started writing about gardening in 2006 at my original blog, In the Garden Online. Over time, that became Gardening in the Mitten, where I blogged for several years. I wrote both of those blogs when we lived in the Detroit area, so they were very focused on urban gardening.

Then, in 2016, my family and I moved to northern Michigan, where I now garden on nearly 10 acres, and it seemed like a good time to start a new site.

My posts here will generally be informational, sharing things I’ve learned in the last 20+ years as an obsessed gardener. I’ll also be using this as a garden journal, documenting what’s going on in my garden. Thank you so much for being here, and I hope you find my posts helpful and (hopefully!) inspiring.

Q&A

Why “Grasshopper Hill Farm”?
Funny story there. When we lived near Detroit, we dreamed about what our someday-homestead would be, and we started calling that dream homestead Grasshopper Hill Farm. “Grasshopper” because grasshoppers are considered lucky and we just think they’re neat (as long as they’re not eating our bean plants…) and hill, because, I dunno, we just liked the way it sounded.

When my husband started our Etsy shop, he started using the name for that, and, when we found our current property in 2014, it seemed like the universe had aligned: not only could we afford the fixer-upper, but it was situated on nearly 10 HILLY acres, and there were grasshoppers aplenty. And so, here we are!