How We Started BerryBee Garden

We missed the taste of home. Perilla leaves, Korean peppers, green onions, napa cabbage, and radish are not just ingredients to us. They bring back memories of family dinners and the seasons we grew up with in Korea. A bowl of soup made with the right kind of radish can bring back a whole afternoon from childhood.

For a while, we tried to fix this by shopping around. We drove to different grocery stores looking for fresher perilla leaves or better napa cabbage. Some weeks the vegetables were good. Other weeks they were wilted, expensive, or just not available at all. That is when a simple idea came to us. What if we opened our back door, walked into a garden, picked fresh vegetables, and brought them straight to our kitchen? That idea became BerryBee Garden.

We are not farmers. We did not grow up gardening in Korea. We learned everything here, in Calgary, through trial and error. This blog is where we write down what we learned, so that other people trying the same thing do not have to start from zero the way we did.

Why We Grow Our Own Korean Vegetables

Food connects us to the places we come from. A single vegetable can bring back a whole memory of a family meal or a certain season. When we cook with perilla leaves we picked ourselves, the dish tastes more like the ones our grandmothers made. That connection is hard to explain to someone who has not felt it, but anyone who has moved far from home probably understands.

Instead of driving around looking for better Korean grocery stores, we decided to grow these vegetables ourselves. We started small, with just a few pots on a patio. Later, we added raised garden beds in the backyard. We picked plants based on what we actually cook with at home, not what looked interesting at the store. That meant perilla leaves for wrapping rice and meat, Korean peppers for soups and side dishes, green onions for almost everything, napa cabbage for kimchi, and radish for soup and pickles.

We do not grow a large amount of food. We are not trying to feed a whole neighborhood or sell vegetables at a market. We grow just enough of the herbs and vegetables we use in our own cooking during the week. After weeks of planting, watering, and pulling weeds, there is nothing better than walking outside, picking what is ready, and using it in that night's dinner. It turns a normal Tuesday dinner into something that feels a little more special.

How We Handle Calgary's Tricky Climate

Growing Korean vegetables in Calgary is hard work, and we want to be honest about that instead of making it sound easy. The weather changes fast here. We have had warm days in May followed by a sudden frost that damaged young seedlings. The growing season is short compared to Korea, so we have to plan our planting dates carefully and sometimes start seeds indoors before the last frost has even passed.

The soil and sunlight are also different from what these plants are used to. Korean peppers, for example, need a long, warm season to fully ripen, and Calgary summers do not always give us enough hot days in a row. Napa cabbage can bolt, meaning it flowers too early, if the weather swings too much between cold and hot. We learned this the hard way after losing an entire bed of cabbage one summer.

Some plants grow well here. Green onions and radish tend to do fine, since they are tougher and adjust well to cooler weather. Others struggle. Perilla leaves need patience and the right spot with enough sun but some afternoon shade. A few plants fail completely, no matter what we try. That is simply part of gardening in a climate this different from where these vegetables originally come from.

We do not treat BerryBee Garden as a perfect how-to guide, because we are still learning too. It is more like a diary of what we learn along the way, including our mistakes, the weather, pests, soil problems, and timing issues. We write about aphids that showed up on our perilla leaves, soil that needed more compost than we expected, and the exact week we finally figured out when to start pepper seeds indoors. We share these lessons because other home gardeners in cold climates, especially anyone trying to grow Korean vegetables outside of Korea, might be facing the same problems we did.

What We Learned From Seed to Table

Our garden follows one simple path. Seed goes into soil, the garden does its slow work through spring and summer, we harvest what is ready, we bring it into the kitchen, and it ends up on our Korean table. Writing it out this way helps us remember that gardening is not just about the harvest. Every stage matters, including the boring parts like watering every morning and checking for pests.

Sometimes what we harvest turns into a classic Korean dish we grew up eating, like a simple radish soup or fresh kimchi made with our own napa cabbage. Other times, it becomes something new, shaped by what actually grows well here and what we have on hand that week. A smaller pepper harvest than expected might mean we make a milder dish than usual. A big batch of perilla leaves might turn into a side dish we would not normally make in this quantity.

Our goal is not to copy Korean farming exactly, since that would be nearly impossible in this climate. Our goal is to find out what Korean food becomes when it grows in Calgary soil, with Calgary weather, and a bit of Canadian-grown patience added in.

Why This Garden Means So Much to Us

Korea is where our food memories started. Calgary is where our garden grows today. BerryBee Garden is the small space between those two homes, built one raised bed and one growing season at a time. It is not just a hobby. It is a way of keeping a piece of home close, even while living somewhere far away from where these vegetables first grew.

What's Next for BerryBee Garden

We hope that one day, making dinner will start with nothing more than stepping into the backyard, picking fresh leaves and vegetables, and bringing them straight to the table. We are not there yet, but every season gets us a little closer. This blog is where we document that journey, one season, one harvest, and one honest mistake at a time.