Katie Oglesby

Katie Oglesby We design thriving organic kitchen gardens that change the way people eat + live + feel: people like you.

We'll deepen your connection with food, uncover the abundance of your landscape, and teach you how to nurture the garden-to-table way of living.

If you’re going to grow 320 square feet of vegetables, you might as well make it gorgeous.Four L-shaped beds made from 4...
09/04/2026

If you’re going to grow 320 square feet of vegetables, you might as well make it gorgeous.

Four L-shaped beds made from 4-inch-thick cedar. Bright white limestone underfoot. Farmhouse arches and custom trellises covered in climbing crops. Flowers woven throughout the vegetables. And built-in lighting beneath the beds that gives the entire garden a warm glow after sunset.

Then summer gets ahold of it.

Vines climb the obelisks. Tomatoes cover the arches. Flowers spill over the beds. Vegetables and herbs fill every available inch.

The Half Moon Garden is one of my favorite examples of how much beauty and food can come from the exact same square footage.

This garden was built for a family planning to spend years growing here, and I have a feeling 320 square feet is going to hold a lot of good summers.

Which detail would you steal for your own garden?

Photography by Sonya K | Founder + Creative Director Jessica Licht

The beans are telling us it’s time to move on. 🫘By early September, both our green beans and shelling beans are starting...
09/03/2026

The beans are telling us it’s time to move on. 🫘

By early September, both our green beans and shelling beans are starting to wrap up. Once they’ve stopped flowering and given us their final harvest, we’ll pull them and put that valuable garden space right back to work with something for fall.

This year I grew Jade, Rocdor, Flambo, and a new one for me: Beefy Black beans from Row 7 Seed Company

Bean growers: which variety earned a spot in your garden again next year? I’m always looking for another one to try.

📸 Sonya K | Brand Identity + Creative Direction

✨ August really knows how to show off. I can barely see my kitchen table underneath the harvest.If you could only grow O...
08/30/2026

✨ August really knows how to show off. I can barely see my kitchen table underneath the harvest.

If you could only grow ONE warm season crop, what’s making the cut?

📸 Sonya K | Brand Identity + Creative Direction

There comes a point every August when you’ve eaten the tomatoes, given away the tomatoes, canned the tomatoes... and the...
08/29/2026

There comes a point every August when you’ve eaten the tomatoes, given away the tomatoes, canned the tomatoes... and there are still tomatoes. 🍅

So here’s another one for the preservation list: tomato powder.

Dehydrating tomatoes concentrates all that peak-summer flavor into a powder you can keep on hand for soups, pasta sauces, dressings, dry rubs, eggs, roasted vegetables, dips, salsa - basically anywhere that could use a punch of flavor.

HOW TO MAKE TOMATO POWDER

Rinse and dry your tomatoes, then slice them approximately ½” thick. No need to peel, deseed, or core them. Use a mix of varieties if you have them.
Arrange the slices in a single layer on dehydrator trays.
Dehydrate at 130–135°F for at least 8 hours. Timing will vary depending on the tomatoes, so start checking around 8 hours. They’re ready when they’re completely crisp with no pliability.
Once completely dry, grind in a blender or food processor for about 30 seconds at a time, allowing the machine to cool between rounds, until you have a fine powder.
Optional: add ¼ tsp salt for every 5 tomatoes while grinding to help the powder last longer.
You can even reconstitute it with equal parts water to make tomato paste.

📸 Sonya K | Brand Identity + Creative Direction

Save this one for the next round of tomatoes coming out of the garden.

There comes a point every August when you’ve eaten the tomatoes, given away the tomatoes, canned the tomatoes... and the...
08/29/2026

There comes a point every August when you’ve eaten the tomatoes, given away the tomatoes, canned the tomatoes... and there are still tomatoes. 🍅

So here’s another one for the preservation list: tomato powder.

Dehydrating tomatoes concentrates all that peak-summer flavor into a powder you can keep on hand for soups, pasta sauces, dressings, dry rubs, eggs, roasted vegetables, dips, salsa - basically anywhere that could use a punch of flavor.

HOW TO MAKE TOMATO POWDER

Rinse and dry your tomatoes, then slice them approximately ½” thick. No need to peel, deseed, or core them. Use a mix of varieties if you have them.
Arrange the slices in a single layer on dehydrator trays.
Dehydrate at 130–135°F for at least 8 hours. Timing will vary depending on the tomatoes, so start checking around 8 hours. They’re ready when they’re completely crisp with no pliability.
Once completely dry, grind in a blender or food processor for about 30 seconds at a time, allowing the machine to cool between rounds, until you have a fine powder.
Optional: add ¼ tsp salt for every 5 tomatoes while grinding to help the powder last longer.
You can even reconstitute it with equal parts water to make tomato paste.

Save this one for the next round of tomatoes coming out of the garden.

📸 Sonya K | Brand Identity + Creative Direction

Some vegetables earn their place in the garden twice. Malabar spinach is one of them. It loves the summer heat when many...
08/28/2026

Some vegetables earn their place in the garden twice.

Malabar spinach is one of them. It loves the summer heat when many of our usual greens are struggling, and it might be one of the prettiest crops we grow vertically.

The vines have this gorgeous reddish color against big, green leaves, and by late summer they’ve worked their way up and around the trellis until the whole thing becomes a living piece of the garden.

That’s one of the things I think about when choosing what grows vertically. A trellis can produce a surprising amount of food in a small footprint, but the crop growing on it also becomes part of the garden’s design.

If you’re running out of greens in the August heat, put Malabar spinach on your list for next year.

📸 Sonya K | Brand Identity + Creative Direction

08/24/2026

Peak summer ☀️

📸 Sonya K | Brand Identity + Creative Direction

Who needs a plane ticket to Italy when dinner can feel like this?This client already has a full kitchen garden, but we a...
08/23/2026

Who needs a plane ticket to Italy when dinner can feel like this?

This client already has a full kitchen garden, but we added a custom L-shaped Corten steel bed right beside the outdoor dining area for the things she wants closest to the table: fresh herbs and flowers.

Our client loves bright colors and wanted her patio to have a subtle Italian feel, so we filled it with aromatic herbs and flowers in bright yellows, oranges, and pinks. Now herbs can be snipped while dinner is being made, and the fragrance of everything growing becomes part of dining alfresco.

A few steps away, the rest of the property is producing too, with a larger garden for vegetables and strawberries and blueberries growing right in the landscape.

If you could reach over from the dinner table and pick one fresh herb, what are you planting?

Photos Sonya K | Brand Identity + Creative Direction

This garden started as a retirement hobby. A year later, he needed more growing space.When we first came to this Lake Ge...
08/20/2026

This garden started as a retirement hobby. A year later, he needed more growing space.

When we first came to this Lake Geneva property, the landscape directly outside the kitchen had become overgrown and wasn’t doing much for the homeowners. We cleared the area and tucked three cedar raised beds into the existing footprint, creating 100 square feet of growing space just steps from the kitchen.

Because we were working within an established landscape, none of these are our standard bed sizes. Each one was designed specifically for the space, including two L-shaped beds that wrap around the patio. We weathered the cedar to give it a gray patina that works beautifully with the home’s exterior, then added an arch and obelisk trellises for vertical growing space.

The goal was for the finished garden to feel like it had always belonged here.

And then our client started gardening.

By the following year, he was ready for more, so we expanded into another part of the property with a Corten steel raised bed and a custom panel trellis made with repurposed barn wood. It’s a great spot for squash and larger crops, with a seating area beside it that gives him a place to sit and enjoy everything that’s growing.

I love seeing a garden evolve this way. You don’t have to know exactly what your garden will look like five years from now. A well-designed first phase gives you room to learn what you love growing, how you use the space, and where you might want to take it next.

This one started with 100 square feet outside the kitchen. Now we’re at 120... and I’m not convinced he’s done yet.

📸 Sonya K | Brand Identity + Creative Direction

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Lake Geneva, WI
53147

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