Not quite sure where I'm going with this yet...

But I've got so many friends who have expressed an interest in starting a garden for the first time, or learning to garden better, or are just hoping to save a little money at the grocery store by growing your own instead!  I often hear "We need to have you over to see if you can help us..." and because I love to garden, I'd love to share what I know and realized the other day that a blog might be a very practical way to do so.

My goal here is to make gardening simple - to show you that a garden doesn't require you to clear your schedule on a spring Saturday and get to Home Depot right as it opens and then spend exactly $219.54 on tools, fertilizers, soil amendments, seeds, and plants and then spend the whole day digging in red clay that is so much harder than you anticipated, stopping at about 11:19 in the morning, questioning yourself, thinking how much simpler it would be to go buy some Romaine at Publix right now, and maybe a 6 pack of Sam Adams to go with it.  It would rain all day that Saturday anyways.

Instead, I'm hoping to inspire and encourage you into doing some little thing today, and then another little thing tomorrow, then skip a couple of days and maybe go buy 2 packs of seeds the day after that... and slowly and gradually work your way to the most satisfying tomato sandwich you've ever eaten.

I'm not guaranteeing that this will be the year you'll have a spectacular garden, because so much of gardening is trial-and-error.  But if you don't start erring, you're never going to learn what makes gardening work for you, in your soil.  This is about starting your garden - not somebody else's, not the garden you see pictures of on the front of all those springtime magazines at the checkout aisle.  It's about you getting your hands into the dirt and building a relationship with that dirt, and seeing what can grow from that relationship.  (Don't worry... posts will rarely include yoga positions, mantras, talking to or tasting your dirt... rarely.  We're talking practicals here, but you will really need to get to know your dirt.)  Some relationships click very easily, some take more time.

I'm also not guaranteeing that this will be easy, and I'm not guaranteeing results.  What I hope to do is keep it simple.  So that yes, you - YOU, right now, can decide to start a garden.  And if you stick with it for even just a few weeks, I do guarantee that you'll learn something that will make you a better gardener.

My credentials?  I come from a line of gardeners who learned to garden from their farming fathers.  I've learned from my dad, his parents, my great aunt who worked for the Extension Service all her life, and my mom's father who kept a 1/2 acre garden spring and fall every year for 50 years and taught me to garden organically in the last years of that garden.  I worked very hard in a diverse plant nursery for 5 years, and at 17 I was the youngest person to be certified as a South Carolina Nurseryman....or woman.  And I'm a registered Landscape Architect.  I'm not going to claim to know all the answers, and many answers I'm hoping we'll learn together - but these dirty habits have been a way of life for me since... well since I could pick up a trowel.

I'm hoping to keep this light and fun - I might visit garden centers and post reviews.  I hope to visit some of our local organic farms and post what I learn from them.  I hope you'll send me your questions, and I'll try to answer them.  I hope you'll join me and at least give it a shot at building your own dirty habits!