Be Brave and Garden: Planting the Blogging Seed

First post ever! I have been gardening now for about two and half years, but have not been very successful. All my plants started from seedlings (young plants that have already sprouted) and I’d put them into containers in my backyard. I’ve tried to plant seeds as well, but I couldn’t germinate seeds for the life of me. I had some success with the seedlings though, yet it mostly resulted in very few of my plants actually fruiting and most were dwarfed. I gave up often and didn’t really try to maintain it well, and after a couple of months most of what I planted ended up going to the trash due to pest infestation, or they just weren’t growing whatsoever. I’ve gone through about five of six cycles of this since I had started gardening.

Around the beginning of April 2020 I read this book called The Urban Homestead by Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen. It’s DIY gardening book along with other types of self-sufficiency tools that range from raising urban livestock, powering your own utility, to making your own sake! I bought it initially because I wanted to check out some new DIY tricks, and the thought of being self-sufficient has been much more appealing to me these days. After reading the first few pages I was hooked, and I will probably never turn back.

It reinvigorated me to not only start planting again, but to think more consciously about what we are doing to our environment and what we could do to make the best of our landscape. And the fact that these authors are based in Central Los Angeles made the possibility of living like country folk in an urban environment much more realistic to me. I live in an area near South Central Los Angeles. To be frank, it’s kind of an eye sore with the drab buildings, empty parking lots, and boarded up shops, but I do live in a nice home with a decent sized yard. After a couple of years, my perspective on where I live has changed and I now have an appreciation for the space I call home.

That is why I am starting this blog. Even if you live in an apartment, the art of growing your own food is something attainable to virtually anyone, and does not need to be reserved for farmers or people with 10-acre properties only. I want other people to not feel intimated by the process of gardening. I am farther along with my gardening experience, so I would consider myself more of an advanced beginner than a complete novice. While I have made some progress in the past, I am still learning so much. This time is different though, I am much more serious about having a lively and abundant garden. Since I do have a couple years of trial and error, research, and acquiring some bits of knowledge from local gardeners under my belt, I can build sort of a guidebook on building a working garden from an advanced beginner perspective. Though this may seem unorthodox, I feel just with getting advice from expert gardeners alone that they might gloss over some of the small but important details that most people that start wouldn’t know to be aware of. Gardening is not hard, but there are lot of intricacies to it and I would like to shed light on those very small details.

This is my timeline growing a fruitful garden. I planted 80% of my current vegetables at the beginning of April, so it is still a fresh start for me. Let’s see what we can learn along the way!