How Pandemonium Gardens Began: The Story of a Northwest Indiana Micro-Garden
A Northwest Indiana micro-garden, garden-to-table by design.
It started with a Loewe tomato
A few years ago, a campaign image stopped me in my tracks. A tomato.
Ribbed, dramatic, the kind of fruit you don’t see in a grocery store. I’d built a career working on luxury brands, training my eye on this exact thing, the small object that does heavy lifting because someone took the time to find it.
I wanted to grow that tomato...HAD TO grow that Tomato. That’s “kind-of” how Pandemonium Gardens started, although we didn’t call it that yet, and we weren’t yet a company. We had a new raised bed garden in Valparaiso, Indiana, built three summers ago with Lions Landscaping, and a list of varieties I was determined to track down.
Two expansions later, we’re officially Pandemonium Gardens, a Northwest Indiana micro-garden growing heirloom tomatoes, peppers, herbs, and a small selection of fruits and flowers. Peter and I run it together.
Who is the Loewe-ist of them all.
The garden taught us first
The first variety that hooked me was the Costoluto Genovese, a deeply ribbed Italian heirloom that looks more like a cathedral rose window than a tomato. Then the Burmese Sour, smaller, denser, with a tartness that practically demands flake salt. The first time I grew one, I couldn’t believe how beautiful it looked on the vine, like a work of art. The first time I tasted one, I understood why people romanticize tomatoes and why Tomato Girl Summer was more than just a trend.
That season I also fell for Sakura, a Japanese cherry variety, sweet and clean and small enough to eat by the handful. Three tomatoes, three completely different reasons to grow them. By the end of the summer I’d stopped thinking of tomatoes as one thing.
That’s the part the garden teaches you first. Histories matter. Breeds matter. A tomato can be a hundred kinds of tomato, and most of them have been quietly disappearing from the food system because they don’t ship well, don’t hold up under fluorescent lights, and don’t fit the standardized weights that supermarket logistics demand. The trade-off has been flavor. We’re growing the varieties that flavor came from.
Then we started giving the harvest away
Once the garden started producing more than two people could eat, we started boxing it up for friends and family. I’d lay everything out, take a picture, and put it in a box. Lettuce, cherry tomatoes, beans, potatoes, whatever was peaking that week. I love hosting. I love giving thoughtful gifts. The boxes were an extension of both.
One of the first boxes I made went to a family member who’d seen me posting about the garden on Instagram. She asked, after she ate it, if I would make her another. She’s not someone who pushes for things lightly. The ask landed.
But the part that stayed with me wasn’t the request but the quieter realization that for years I’d been making things look good for a living, and for years I’d been hosting and gifting in my personal life, and the garden was the first place those two things combined into the same activity. The food was beautiful, and it tasted like something. The aesthetic and the flavor were finally telling the same story.
That’s when this stopped being a hobby.
A 15-year partnership, before it was a garden
Peter and I met in New York fifteen years ago, through a mutual friend. We’ve been married for ten years. Pandemonium Gardens is the first business we’ve built together, but the garden itself is older than the company.
Every apartment we lived in, Peter built some version of a garden. Fire escape herbs. Window boxes. A balcony that shouldn’t have been able to hold what he asked of it. He’s the one who’s been chasing growing things for as long as I’ve known him. The flavor instinct, the curiosity about varieties, the willingness to fuss over a single basil plant in a fourth-floor walk-up, all of that is his.
I came to the garden much later, and through a different door. I came through that Loewe tomato, through my eye for beauty, through an instinct I’d been training on objects and brands for years that finally found a use for itself in a row of ribbed tomatoes against late afternoon light. Peter taught me how to grow things. I taught myself how to see them.
He brings the curiosity for varieties I’d never heard of and the history that sits with them. I bring the eye for what makes them beautiful.
What Pandemonium Gardens is now
The name comes from the idea that the garden is chaos, but from that chaos comes extraordinary flavor. We’re a small Valparaiso micro-garden, garden-to-table by design, focused on heirloom varieties almost no one else around here is growing. We sell at the Valparaiso Farmers Market on select Saturdays, and we deliver across Northwest Indiana.
Our flagship offering is the Seasonal Wild Kit, which Peter curates each week around what’s at peak. Produce, a recipe, the kind of technique notes you usually only get if you ask, and each kit is different. We also sell heirloom seedlings, small-batch preserves, and cut flowers in season.
We’re staying small on purpose. The point isn’t scale. The point is to grow things worth tasting, and to put them in the hands of people who will care about what they’re eating.
Fresh from The Vine
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