Over the years, I’ve made stuff with various mediums. (Yes, stuff. It’s as inclusive as it can be.) What’s relevant here, though, is art and words.
At some point after the internet started to have this thing called a blog, I finally got around to making one and inserting it into a site I had wanted to make that had nothing to do with gardening because we were moving far too often for me to even try to do that. I had even given up on houseplants at that point.
Then life happened, we moved around a lot, and later when we settled in a new state, I picked up blogging again, but about other things. Yet I didn’t have a lot of time for it, so there wasn’t much to show for my desire to do more, and then when we moved yet again (not for the last time), I dropped what little I had started like a hot potato.
I started this site roughly a year after we took ownership of our first new old house that actually had some property to maybe do something with besides pave or deck over it all. Interestingly enough (or not), I had already come back to blogs because a certain photo storage site suddenly changed their third party hosting policies, and a hobby project I had going on at the time blew up when all the work I had done could no longer be seen by the community it was intended for as it had been in the past. I needed a quick and easy way to host that above all was more reliable. Without getting into detail, I’m no stranger to websites on the server side end. Yet at the time I didn’t want to yet worry about choosing a host long term or dealing with FTP and all the other fun bits. I realized I could use WordPress to do what I wanted to get done, and that’s what I chose.
It wasn’t long after that I started thinking that maybe I shouldn’t stop there. This site is one of the ones I thought might be worth a shot trying my hand at blogging again. At that point, I was hoping to use it to spur myself on in our garden when it would be all too easy to slack off. I also missed writing as much as I used to in the past. From my own experiences our first year here, I also knew that pictures can be very helpful to new gardeners, having tried and often failed to ID plants and critters here. It seemed a no brainer to also include imagery. So far, it’s been pretty easy to find stuff to post about because I started this blog around when most folks with more noticeable season shifts start thinking about their gardens too: springtime when the snows were still falling, but lessening.
The other gardeners lead to another reason I wanted to start Growing in Gardner. I wanted to share what I was learning, knowing it’s pretty darn hard finding info that is super or at least fairly specific to your area. 5b is a huge zone. It’s just one facet of gardening. There are other zones too (which I’m sure I will keep finding more than I’ve learned about since last year over time.) Even though some bits I post about are fairly garden variety and can be found all over the web, this is also a site that someone can come to and know to what degree the information here is relevant to their interests. We could share some or many factors that affects one’s garden. Maybe they’re in a 5b Hardiness zone. Maybe they live in an older part of a small city where some of the plantings could be older than them, and what was fashionable in, say, the late 1930s for gardeners to plant would help them better ID some of what they have. Maybe they’re also near to 1,000 feet above sea level. This is why I try to include as much as I think of to add to the Data page, to help folks understand how relevant what’s here may be to them.
So far, although I haven’t kept as on course for my not as grand as last year but still pretty ambitious plan for this as I would like for our property, it’s still helping me get out the door and make things happen outside. It’s also helping me remember what I’ve learned over time, what I was mistaken about, and what I need to do going forward.
I will likely taper off in my postings as the growing season winds down this year, because then I’ll spend more time focusing on our new old house, the blog for which I’ve neglected since the snows have melted here.
Time will tell.