Why another blog?

Recently, we have been having the sweetest autumn ever in Wisconsin.  Day after day of clear, dry weather, and warm enough to be outside, at least around midday.  The garden has been getting a complete makeover (as has my wallet) since I met a bobcat operator who will lay paths where I want them, re-grade where I want re-grading, build mounds, excavate pits and so on.

Instead of knitting (my other great love--see TECHknitting blog) I have been gardening.  Usually, gardening does not overlap to this extent with knitting.  Knitting usually starts like an itch as soon as the days get cool, and since 2006 (when TECHknitting began) with knitting comes blogging.  But this year, in this sweet, sweet autumn--the mosquitoes long gone, the Japanese beetles snug in the ground, the roses still carrying a few last blooms--this year, the weather permits of overlap.  This autumn, gardening is happening INSTEAD of knitting. 

With gardening comes an absence of blogging because--well, because TECHknitting blog is not about my exploits, but about knitting.  Yet, blogging has become an itch too. 

It'd be a stretch to say I have conventional bona fides for blogging  this topic.  A middle aged female frump, I hardly fit in the demographic for popular garden writers--neither British nor trendy and certainly not possessed of impeccable taste.  Plus, what little Latin nomenclature I have is surely out-of-date. In fact, I don't even know any famous gardeners--the closest I ever got was sending an e-mail to a "plantsman," who was quite short in his reply--not a promising start in the article of garden gossip.

I do, however, possess a vast curiosity and a surprising amount of actual college-level soil science.  Aaaaand, I do have the qualifications, hard-won, in at least one major field of gardening endeavor: I've made enough mistakes to fuel any amount of garden writing: paths put in with unsuitable materials which had to be ripped out, stone patios built and re-built and re-re-built, "perennials" which either were not or much-too.  In fact, this blog's pre-debut name was "what not to do and how not to do it," being in the nature of reports from the front lines of gardening's Hard Knocks U.

visiting the goldfish

The bottom line-- I'm blogging because I like the discipline which writing provides, because I can possibly save you some big (and expensive) mistakes (don't thank me, I did it all for science)and because it's too damn dark to garden so early in the AM in Wisconsin in November, too dark to even visit the goldfish. So, with the knitting still sitting quietly by in its basket, a new blog is born.