For most of my life, I would have told you I was the happiest person on earth - and the luckiest. I got to be a passionate technologist in Silicon Valley. I spent nearly thirty years as an engineer and a leader, building systems and companies through every kind of pressure. I loved it. I genuinely thought nothing was wrong.
In January 2024, I had my first panic attack.
I didn't have a word for it at first. I just knew I felt completely dysfunctional, and I blamed the job - the politics, the pace, the grind. When I was laid off, I was angry and relieved at the same time. But then something strange happened: no opportunity excited me. Nothing did. That's when I finally understood that what I was carrying wasn't burnout or a bad job. It was depression, anxiety, and stress I'd been outrunning for years without ever noticing.
I didn't leave to chase a new idea. I left because I physically and mentally couldn't do it anymore. And almost by accident, I started building a garden in my yard in Oceanside, California - by hand, from nothing. I did the landscaping and the hardscaping. I dug and excavated and ran the irrigation myself. I built the beds. Then I started planting: a rose garden out front, strawberries in back, tomatoes, peppers, flowers, and a row of tiny fruit trees - each one barely more than a branch, propagated from my parents' trees.
Watching those plants take hold did something for me that no job ever had. The garden gave me a reason to go outside, a rhythm, and a kind of quiet I hadn't felt in years. It brought me back.
One of those trees taught me how. I'd planted a little plum - again, just a branch - and then forgot to run irrigation to it. By the end of the season it was bone dry and bare, and I was sure I'd killed it. When spring came, I went out to pull it up and plant something else. But right where the branch met the soil, I saw the tiniest speck of green - almost too small to be real. The dead branch had come back to life after the rains. Two years later that plum is nearly seven feet tall, and next year it will bear its first fruit. I think about that tree a lot. I came back the same way it did - slowly, quietly, after a long dry season.
The garden also humbled me fast. I learned that planting is the easy part - keeping things alive is a whole other world. I'd planted my fruit trees wrong, so their roots couldn't spread. I nearly killed my roses with kindness, dumping huge amounts of plant food into them because I thought I was being generous - never once knowing what I was actually feeding them, or why. Then came the diseases, the pests, the mysterious yellowing leaves.
To keep up, I leaned on generative AI, and something unexpected happened: knowledge I thought was gone started coming back. I'd studied agricultural engineering more than twenty years ago and had completely written it off - a thing I was sure I'd never use again. Suddenly I was using it every day.
For a while, the AI felt like a miracle, and I trusted it completely. Then one afternoon it told me - confidently, urgently - to spray a systemic disease control on my summer crops. I was already spraying when my old training surfaced and stopped my hand. A quick check confirmed it: the chemical was toxic and would have absorbed permanently into the plants and soil. I had to uproot and trash every crop I'd touched. A novice with no background would have harvested those vegetables and served them for dinner.
That moment changed everything. I realized two things at once. First, I didn't hate technology - I was more passionate about it than ever. And second, the kind of help I actually needed didn't exist yet: a gardening companion that's genuinely knowledgeable, but humble - one that asks before it answers, explains why, and never hands you a confident, dangerous order. So I decided to build it, using both halves of my life: software engineering and agriculture.
Over the past two years, since I planted my front rose garden, I've watched little kids stop by to smell the blooms - leaning in wide-eyed, asking their parents question after question. And I keep wondering: why does that excitement about nature fade in most of us as we grow up? It doesn't disappear. It just goes into hiding - the same way I had.
That's what MyGardenGuru is for. Not a know-it-all. A patient mentor for every plant in your life - the orchid on your kitchen counter, the beds in your backyard, all of it - meeting you wherever you are on your own journey.
Because there's a gardener inside every one of us. Mine had gone into hiding, and the garden brought it back out. I built this so yours can come out too.
- Mo Sedighi, founder · Oceanside, CA