Rejoining the World of Gardening

Raised Bed Gardening in Arkansas

5/2/2021  Subject:  Where Do We Start?

     First, I need to apologize for starting up this blog, and then just disappearing from the world back in 2013.  I know that even though these meanderings never did hit the mainstream, there were still several people that were already looking forward to the new information that I could provide, and I dropped the ball, and left people hanging.

     I could tell you stories about the dimensional portal that sucked me in and it took me this long to find my way back.  Or I could make up something about an alien abduction, where they kept me strapped to a table as they did all their nefarious probing.  Or I could just say, "I'm sorry guys ... I thought I was up to the task, but life threw me a screwball, I took the out, and I'll try to do better in the future."  With that said, I'm starting this thing up again, and I hope I can get all of you to join me again and put your hands in the dirt, and see just how special the world of gardening can be.

     The remains of my poor garden is just sitting out there, unkempt, unworked, and overgrown.  Looking at the task ahead, it's like an insurmountable range of mountains ahead.  No path forward is in sight, it all looks like a jungle from here.  The wooden borders on the beds are lost in the jungle of grasses and weeds that have taken them over, and many of them are rotted to the point where they can't hold the dirt in anymore.

     In my mind, I hear the crunching and munching of bugs eating the wood, and there are nests of ants, like prairie-dog mounds, where the little buggers have piled up their boring residue in giant piles of waste material.  The fencing was torn up a few seasons ago when an army of Viking Cows came up the coast and pillaged the entire area (I know they were Vikings because they had horns on their heads).

     Here's what it looks like now:

     I've got the picture of my mom sitting on the mantle, and it reminds me that no matter how big the task is, there is nothing that we can't do.  She has always been my inspiration and my guide.  My mom is the little girl in the middle, between her two older sisters.  You can just see the orneriness on her face.  We lost both of my parents a few years ago, but Mom sits up there on the shelf to say hi to me when I come in.

     Humans are the strangest species in existence.  Where other creatures struggle to survive and attempt to adapt to the everchanging and hostile environment (and many times fall to the wayside of evolution in the process), people reach out with their opposable thumbs, and their tools, and their intelligence (and most importantly, their desire) and mold their environment to fit their needs.

     I don't think that we ever really live in harmony with the world around us.  We can, we have the ability to, but what we almost always do instead is to force the world to become what we want.  I guess there's a happy medium between nature and human habitation somewhere in the mix, we just don't usually get to that place.

     So here's to molding the world and creating our own niche in the middle of all of it.  Here's to asking Gaia (the Mother and Spirit of the Earth) to bless our efforts at semi-harmonious co-existence and asking God to give us the strength to climb that mountain ahead.  It's just a mountain after all.  One foot in front of the other, one step forward at a time.  Each thing that we accomplish is another goal reached, and our path widens as we move into our future.

     Come with me as I bring my gardening world back to a point where I can sit with my little woman in our yard chairs, right in the middle of that jungle.  We'll sip on our cool drinks of choice, and marvel at how precious life is, and how blessed we are for being able to share all of it together.  Join with me in bringing my garden back from the brink of extinction.  Use the trials and issues that I work through to assist you in your own journey, and watch as the insurmountable mountain becomes just another bump in the rearview mirror of life.

     On the next post, we'll start to carve out the garden that is waiting in the jungle.  It's like a wood carving.  To get what you see in there, just cut away everything that doesn't match the image in your mind.

... Duane