Mioasis: The Grove

Intro-duck-tion

This is my comfortable resting place, because I want to do nothing more than to disappear into the wilderness and lie down on the forest floor.

Before I get ahead of myself, I must stress that gardening is very area-specific! Hardiness zones isn't exactly a thing people talk about where I live, but I live in around 7a, central Sweden! If you follow along this website and go "I couldn't grow that", you'd probably be right! Bias will be DENSE according to location. If the tips and tricks on this site is not useful to you, maybe you could learn something new about a place you've never heard about before instead! Make sure to check out my Bulletin Board posts though, where I link people from all of the world I've been taught by.

Onto the meat and potatoes, this is a site where I journal, photograph and blog about my garden and my garden adventures. I have 3 years of experience growing veggies and flowers directly from seed—which isn't a lot—but many more exciting years of learning are sure to come. -And what better way to learn further than to gather resources and engage in teaching other people?

I've been frustrated about the gardening resources that already exist out there for a long time, as they care little about accessibility, disability and mental health. This can be a strenuous and expensive hobby, but I am of the firm belief that gardening can be for everyone, and I wish to spread the word that gardening is not as overwhelming as it first seems. I aim for all resources here to be friendly, lightweight and basic enough for anyone to follow at any stage of the process.

Side note:
Don't you dare call this place cottage core. I'm too filthy for those things /lighthearted

This website is also about all kinds of other things! I've always been in love with this site building and designing thing, and talking about mulch is a way to keep me real occupied before I choose to branch out as I learn more about HTML and CSS (I started just this year, in January 2025).

This is where I'll write more about why personal websites are cool (even if you already knew this).

When I garden
I look like this:

About me

1998. SHE-THEY-ANY. I'm Mio, queer, nonbinary, genderqueer, all those sort of things, I don't care about specifics. You can call me anything, I'm just Mio and I love PLANTS and MAKING THINGS. I'm part Swedish, part Finnish (North Karelia). While my Finnish heritage is a pretty major part of my identity, I unfortunately was not taught the language.

AUTISTIC about gardening, which is why this website exists. Learning is a bit of my forte. I love all things organic, but I also love all things technical, which is why I'm in the middle of learning all this HTML and CSS business, among a lot of other things.

I'm currently a master's student in DIGITAL HUMANITIES (digitization of cultural heritage & building digital archival systems). As much as I love nature it seems I pick computers and their relationship to humans first. I love categorizing information online, obviously! My BA was in English, which explains why I like writing so much.

SO, THE GARDEN. I started gardening in 2022, when I was 24 years old. I had been in and out of uni at the time, I was very disorganized, and I was recovering from whatever the pandemic was doing to me as an unemployed hermit, with war breaking out and anxieties enveloping me. -Then I found it mighty wasteful that my mom had purchased a bunch of vegetable seeds without the intention of growing them.

I don't know what happened to my brain at that point, but something really clicked. I had never made a potted plant survive in my life, and suddenly I had tons of seedlings I felt responsible for. I coddled them. I did everything in my might to make them survive -and it worked. It worked really well, even!

Now I feel like I owe gardening my life. There is nothing that makes me relax better. There's nothing that makes me feel so fulfilled and accomplished. I genuinely think it put my life together and brought me to where I am now! Therefore this has become a hobby I will continue to do forever, and I hope to spread that joy to other people!!

All the other things I do/like:

I've been an active digital artist since 2010, so I'm always up to something creative. I have a buttload of OC's with huge worldbuilding. I'm currently spending most of my time developing a graphic novel featuring said OC's. I mostly work in Clip Studio Paint and Affinity Publisher.

I'm a cultured vinesauce aficionado, I've been watching those freaks since 2014, so that's another thing you can talk to me about. My Randy Random fren is in Vine Worlds! Look out for imiogri in chat if you want tasteful commentary /sarcasm.

Top games: RimWorld (1.354 hours as we speak), Minecraft, The Binding of Isaac, Stardew Valley, Project Zomboid, Satisfactory, Abiotic Factor, the Mario series, and more...

Top food: I, like, REALLY like instant noodles to a comical degree. Otherwise I mostly just like looking at food and cooking as an aesthetic, stimmy thing. I watch most of the big foodTubers.

Music: You'll mostly find me listening to a lot of non-vocal atmospheric music, weirdcore, frutiger aero, and generic smooth jazz. When I feel spicy I take out the jungle/DnB. I LOVE Japanese City Pop and Future Funk. My current obsession is Taeko Ohnuki and Tatsuro Yamashita, among others.

I'm most familiar with game OST's, my current top spot is Pizza Tower. I frequently revisit Minecraft, Undertale/Deltarune, Hylics 2, Yume Nikki, Katamari Damacy and Silent Hill 1-4. Then there is my expertise, the Mario series. I plan to list quite a few tracks in my shrine!

For the more "standard" bands I listen to Petshop Boys (seen live), Depeche Mode, Death Cab for Cutie (seen live), David Bowie, Jean-Michel Jarre and Patrick Watson (seen live x2). I own all of Patrick Watson's vinyls and a few of Petshop Boys' records as well.

When I garden I look like this:

When I garden
I look like this: