A shop full of
dirt and lamps

The fig cost $90 and lasted eleven weeks. Nobody at the store that sold it could say how much light the apartment needed, what was in the soil, or why the pot had no hole in the bottom. That struck us as a solvable problem rather than a personal failing.

Roothouse opened the following spring with fourteen products: four seed kits, two lamps, a peat-free mix nobody wanted yet, and a shelf of locally made stoneware. The catalog is a good deal longer now, and the rule has not changed — if we can't explain why something works, it doesn't get a page.

Everything ships from the same building it's packed in. When you write to us, you're writing to five people, one of whom is usually holding a watering can.