Seven years ago, Megan Gilger came close to letting her popular Fresh Exchange lifestyle blog wither on the vine. Instead, she dug deeper, put down new roots in Traverse City and weeded out what she didn’t value until she grew what did.
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For Megan Gilger, 2009 was the best of times and the worst of times. Newly graduated with a design degree and unemployed—thanks to a job offer that had tanked with the Great Recession—Gilger found her great post-grad expectations dashed, and herself, like her packed and previously bound-for-California boxes, rerouted to Traverse City for an extended layover in her parent’s basement.
The situation wasn’t all bad. It was summertime Up North. Her boyfriend, Mike, similarly degreed and likewise unemployed, opted to join her in the basement rather than head home to Texas. And in between applying for jobs and freelancing, Gilger worked in her dad’s garden.
Playing among the plants was a comfort. After nearly two decades away, Gilger got to recapture a bit of her childhood Up North, when her grandpa’s Harbor Springs home was her daycare and his one-acre garden their playground.
Kneeling in the dirt as a grown woman, yanking weeds and wheedling robust stalks from gangly sprouts as her grandpa had taught her, Gilger felt the worrisome what-ifs and restless what-nexts fall away like fistfuls of loam through her fingers.
Photo by Mike Gilger
It wasn’t long before uncertainty and basement living were in the rearview. She and Mike ultimately bucked traditional employment, formed their own design studio—logos and branding mostly—and rented a little house off M-72. Megan started a new garden. They married, traveled, moved to North Carolina for a few years, started a garden there. Moved back to Michigan, started another.
Along the way, Gilger documented their experiences on Fresh Exchange, a blog she had started in early 2010. “It was just this fun thing, like, ‘We went on a hike,’” she says. “It wasn’t anything super serious.”
Until it was.
Following a series of photo drops chronicling a trip to Paris, Gilger’s blog readership boomed. Sponsors came calling. By 2016, Fresh Exchange had evolved into a lifestyle blog—a full-time, fully monetized one.
It’s a feat many decades-long bloggers would cut off both index fingers to achieve, except for one thing: This particular lifestyle blogger no longer wanted the world watching her life.
Photo by Mike Gilger
Like her grandpa before her, Gilger is a big believer in bringing kids into her garden, chaos and all. “I’ve just embraced it. Their story here is as important as mine,” she says. “It’s not about me controlling the garden. My grandfather never did. I would bite the heads off his broccoli, and he never got mad—he thought it was funny. He never approached it in a way where ‘This is my space,’ and I never approach it that way either.”
Photo by Mike Gilger
Photo by Mike Gilger
Behind Fresh Exchange’s serene garden scenes, there are countless stories about the chickens tearing out veggies Gilger just planted, a toddler who lived to climb and collapse her bean trellis, a baby who loved to wake up early from her naps the moment Mom got knee-deep in a garden project. Gilger drops the occasional blooper reel to keep the lush life real and remind fans that, “There’s always something. You’re just human, and it’s nature. It’s going to be messy in some way. I think it’s just about finding the beauty among that.”
Photo by Mike Gilger
“When my son was born, I questioned it all,” she says. “I was encouraging people to buy things, and that’s how I made money. I didn’t feel good about that. It’s easy to enjoy in some way, but there’s no deeper value to it. I wanted to be able to tell my son …‘This is what I do,’ and for it to have an impact on the world in a positive way.”
During those first bleary-eyed post-partum months, Gilger says she didn’t know what she wanted, but she was clear on what she didn’t: “I didn’t want to take sponsored content anymore. I didn’t want to do graphic design. And I didn’t want my kids to grow up in a photo shoot.”
While Mike headed up the studio, Gilger decided to tighten Fresh Exchange’s field of view, whittling down its wide capture of her entire life to a narrower, but perhaps more revelatory, look at life itself at its most basic and accessible: the interplay of sun, soil, seeds and water.
The shift wasn’t so abrupt. As in Gilger’s own life, gardening and nature had always had a place on her blog. So, while finishing out her contractual obligations with Fresh Exchange’s sponsors, she began devoting more blog content to food, its origins, farmers markets, the changes that come with each season. She volunteered on a farm in Leelanau, picked the brains of local chefs and digested more and more about growing native plants and food in ways that regenerate the soil rather than deplete it.
Around the same time, she and Mike were building their first home, on a hillside south of Cedar. Conveniently—or perhaps not—it wasn’t the lush, fertile ground her 50,000-plus Instagram fans and blog subscribers gape at today.
Save for a few trees and a two-track, Gilger says, “This land was just gravel. It was gross. There was nothing here. There weren’t even birds, only hawks. It was almost silent.”
Photo by Mike Gilger
To see what crowns and cascades from their hilltop today is to first experience awe and, admittedly, next, envy. From a slope of scrub and sand, the Gilgers have liberated a landscape of native trees, shrubs, grasses and multiple gardens—perennial, kitchen, pollinator.
The scent of lavender wafts by on the same breeze that tickles tall fans of native bluestem and switch grasses, palm-sized leaves of wayward grapevines. As butterflies, birds and bees bandy about clusters of strawberries and spinach, a harem of chickens cluck and scratch at the ground beneath sunflowers and anise hyssop.
What the idyllic scene doesn’t show but Gilger is quick to note is that Shugart Builders built the family a home without removing a single tree or sapling. The Gilgers then put in retaining walls and created a five-year plan for the property that, as Gilger hoped, “gave back to the ecosystem.”
Photo by Mike Gilger
Photo by Mike Gilger
And finally, there are the last five years Gilger has spent, back hunched and usually bone-tired in the dirt, over the keyboard, or in the kitchen, feeding and tending to the soil, the plants, the kids (her second child, a daughter, arrived after the couple installed the raised beds in 2019) to bring her sponsor-free vision for Fresh Exchange to life.
But growing Fresh Exchange’s membership community, writing an e-book, creating instructional courses (five and counting), drawing up pre-drafted and tailored-to-buyer garden plans, recording a bi-weekly podcast, hosting free online workshops and more—for Gilger anyway—has been and will likely continue to be a lot like gardening itself.
“My grandpa set a really strong tone in my life about the power of our connection to nature. And also taught me how fun and exciting gardening can be,” she says. “I really do try to have a good time with it. And that’s what I am always trying to instill in people because I think we need places that aren’t about achieving or controlling, that aren’t about any of that. It’s about connecting with yourself, connecting with nature and enjoying the process of what it is, more than anything.”
Photo by Mike Gilger
Lynda Twardowski Wheatley is an award-winning writer specializing in stories that showcase Michigan travel and recreation, history and the passionate folks who make this place so extraordinary. ltwriter.com
Mike Gilger is the lens behind Fresh Exchange and a product designer for Google. When not working, he can be found skiing, stand-up paddleboarding or wrangling chickens and kids with Megan.