About My Life Is Peachy

This site started as a windowsill. Then it was a windowsill, a shelf, and a spot by the back door that wasn't supposed to be for plants but became one anyway. Somewhere between the third agave and the aloe I bought "just to try," I realized I'd learned enough, mostly by killing things, to be useful to someone else standing in the succulent aisle wondering if they're about to make the same mistake I did.

My Life Is Peachy is where that gets written down: succulents, agave, and aloe vera, and the specific, unglamorous work of keeping them alive. Watering (or, more often, not watering), propagating, spotting pests before they spread, rescuing a plant that's gone soft and sad, and figuring out what soil actually works instead of what the label promises.

How our articles are made

Every guide here comes out of an actual plant problem: mine, or one I went looking into because it kept coming up. I try a thing, I watch what the plant does over days or weeks, and I write up what actually happened, including the version where I got it wrong the first time. Where I'm not 100% sure from my own pots (say, a species I haven't personally grown, or a pest I've only read about) I check it against reputable growing sources before it goes on the page. I try to say so rather than dress it up as firsthand experience it isn't.

I'd rather publish a shorter, honest answer than pad a page out to look more authoritative than it is. If a plant just needs to be left alone, the article says that.

About the author

Georgia Poole writes and runs My Life Is Peachy. Her windowsills got out of hand years ago, and at this point a good chunk of her house is agave, aloe, and whatever succulent she couldn't talk herself out of at the garden center that week. This site is where she writes up what she's figured out keeping these plants alive: the watering schedules, the propagating attempts, the pest scares, and the mistakes, so readers don't have to repeat them. Her rule of thumb: if it stores water in its leaves, she's probably killed one at some point and learned something from it.

Editorial standards

A few things we hold ourselves to:

• We write from real care and propagation attempts, not from spinning up generic plant-care copy.
• When something is a judgment call or varies by climate, pot, or light (which is often, with succulents) we say so instead of pretending there's one universal answer.
• We fix things when we get them wrong. If an article is out of date or a tip didn't hold up, it gets corrected.
• Some succulents, including agave and aloe, can irritate skin or be toxic to pets if eaten. Where that's relevant, we flag it, and we'd rather over-warn than under-warn. Always check a specific plant's toxicity before bringing it near kids or animals.

What we cover / what to expect

The site is organized around three plant groups: succulents broadly (soil mixes, indoor care, propagation, display ideas for a growing collection), agave (spacing, winter prep, outdoor growing, garden design, rescuing a struggling plant), and aloe vera (growth stages, protecting it from pests like deer and birds, disease and rot prevention, propagating it correctly).

If you came here because a leaf looks wrong, a plant won't stop rotting, or you're not sure how much space to give something before it outgrows its pot, that's exactly the kind of question this site is built to answer. It's not a botany textbook. It's notes from someone who's dealt with the actual problem you're dealing with.