A little About Me

I've made several posts, but let's back up a little for a moment, if you don't mind........

I just realized there will be a lot of folks reading this blog now and then who don't know me.  It isn't that I'm not famous, it's just that nobody knows that I am.

I grew up in Southwest Louisiana about an hour from the coast in a town of about 60,000 (at the time).  You know the cliches.  You didn't have to lock your doors, you could leave the keys in the car and it would still be here when you got back. Communities were not walled in, houses were not fenced in. Yards were somewhat expansive with lots of trees.  I could ride my bicycle across town and my parents were okay with that.  Heck, grade school was about 4 blocks from home and I walked to and from school by myself.

My grandfather had been a contractor and built his home and the one I lived in. They were back to back, facing opposing sides of the block.  We had chickens, rabbits, and a duck now and then. We even raised quail for awhile. Although I was prone to hanging out with the animals a lot when I was a kid, these were not pets.  They provided eggs and meat. So I fed the chickens, gathered eggs, and yes, slaughtered a fat hen here and there for supper.  We had White Leghorns, Rhode Island Reds, and Barred Rocks.  There was always a rooster or two in the crowd, which meant the eggs were fertile so we would sometimes gather up a quantity of eggs and place them in an incubator to be hatched.

When I was in my early teens, I somehow got interested in vegetable gardening.  I can't remember what the trigger was, but one day, there I was, digging up the back yard in ever increasing chunks. When I announced that I was going to grow all kinds of vegetables, my mom's eyebrows raised a little, but she kept her silence. Well, the first season it was just tomatoes, peppers, and cucumbers.
Everything done conventionally, with lots of tilling (by hand...I had no tiller), chemical fertilizers, and pesticides.  I had a decent harvest and this spurred me on to rip up even more sod.  Of course my father was okay with this....he didn't like mowing grass anyway, and we had way too much of it by his way of thinking.

Somewhere between the end of that summer and the next spring I came across the concept of organic gardening and began to read everything I could find about it.  For some reason, I just got all fired up about it.  I went on to plant all sorts of stuff, even some things that I was told "You can't grow that here". Well, that was the wrong thing to say.  Like dropping a steak in front of a wildcat. Sometimes, they were right, of course, but usually "You can't grow that here" really only means "I don't know how to grow that". In gardening, like most things, it's always better to try and fail than not to try.

Gardening probably should be taught in school somewhere along the way. It contains many lessons about hard work, patience, forward thinking, paying attention to the details, planning, and responsibility.

The long and the short of it is that I spent many a summer tending a rather expansive garden, using only shovels, hoes and a garden rake.

After high school, I moved to Houston with a friend and became a Texan.  Trouble was, I was living in apartments and there was no way to garden. Well, after that, life sorta happened and many years passed.  Way too many years.  Well, I finally got a little patch of dirt in the country now and will have time to play in the dirt again.  Maybe I will even make a mud pie or two.

And so begins this blog.