I’ve been feeling a bit down about my yard: it is covered in weeds. I don’t feel like I really know what I’m doing, and if I did everything would look a lot better. I try to write at least once a week, and not wanting to write anything, I decided to sort through some old blogs posts.

I have posts from five years ago, what I was doing then in my garden that was north facing patio. I have failed a ton. I have also succeeded. I have learned from my failures and successes, and I am gardening better. My view and knowledge of gardening has grown from doing my best where I was and also experimenting a lot.

Gardening is interesting. I went to school in Horticulture. I’ve grown gardens everywhere I’ve lived. I give people advice and even get paid for it. I am not a beginner. Yet I also feel I have a lifetime of knowledge yet to gain. I might not be a beginner to most people’s standards, but I feel like one compared to the vastness of wisdom and knowledge I can still gain. Gardening is studying ecology, biology, climate, soils, art and more. It is studying the work of God, and any study of that will take longer than a lifetime to figure out.

Back to my garden: I started to see it a little differently. Yes, they are rampantly growing weeds everywhere. It looks, to a normal person, like a mess. But it so abundant compared to pictures from a year ago. Then soil stayed bare. Weeds grew slowly. The landscape was flat, boring, dry. It isn’t anymore. It doesn’t meet a normal standards for a good garden. But it is my garden, and in it I can see years of changing views, years of studying, and an attitude of throwing out traditional practices.

My garden does not meet traditional standards for I have made my own standards of experimentation, permaculture, and patience.

And I remembered why I’m blogging. It’s a little bit for people who might read this and gain something. It is far more about me being able to see where I’ve come from and understand where I am in the present.