And So It Begins...

Hello! Welcome to my blog, also known as "the place where I can ramble on and on about plants without having to pretend I don't see the glazed stares of disinterested listeners."  Allow me to introduce myself; I am Dens, a.k.a. The Garden Nut, and I probably need an intervention.

 Let me ease you into my little world with a bit of history. As a child, I had only a vague awareness of gardening or agriculture in general. My grandmother in Cape May, New Jersey had a vegetable garden, and I remember wandering through it when we visited and trying to figure out what that shiny black thing was (I later learned it was an eggplant. I also learned that I do not like eggplant). I remember eating snap beans raw right off the vine, and I remember refusing to eat them any other way. I remember watching a discarded peach pit in the compost pile grow into a young peach tree over the course of several years, and noting its new growth every time we visited. I remember my grandmother trying to interest me in it all, but alas, I also remember not really caring all that much. I would listen for a short time, then run back inside to draw horses. Horses were my sole obsession at the time, and gardens had little to do with horses, so I'm afraid my grandmother's attempts to impart horticultural wisdom fell on deaf ears.

 It wasn't until many years later, in my early 30's, that I was abruptly possessed by a sudden desire to grow a tomato plant. Most people entering a midlife crisis buy fast cars or motorcycles or start chasing after hot young sex objects, but not me. I bought a Black Krim tomato plant and a few hanging petunias. One might be tempted to suggest that at least my midlife crisis was inexpensive. Anybody who would say that has obviously never had a garden, but I digress. I managed to get a few strikingly delicious tomatoes off of that plant, and a few hummingbird visits from the petunias, before I inevitably killed all of them. That was the beginning of the end for me. A new addiction was born.

 The following year, we bought a house, and I started a garden, which I then proceeded to kill. Feel free to just insert the castle in the swamp speech from Monty Python and the Holy Grail here, because it serves as an excellent metaphor for my clumsy slogging through my first few gardening seasons. I took comfort in gardening after an unpleasant divorce, I moved, and moved again, and everywhere I went I made a bigger and less weed-infested garden.

At some point, small glimmers of success began to appear every here and there as experience and research forced their way into the way I handled my horticultural habits, and more and more of my life and wallet became dedicated to the not-so-simple joy of growing things. I read everything I could get my hands on about the subject, I spent hours googling solutions to problems the books couldn't answer, I got a job in a garden center, and slowly, over the course of a decade, I learned.

 I also got arrogant as hell. There's nothing like becoming "the expert" in your workplace to inflate one's ego. After a few years at the garden center, I decided to go back to school part time and start working on a horticulture degree. Easy stuff, right? I knew my shit, and I knew it well, and I figured I'd waltz in there, do my time, and walk out after a few years, piece of paper in hand, with little to no effort.

 I'm here to tell you that life has a way of slapping you down and reminding you of your place. Horticulture Science class did that for me. I walked out of my first day of class stunningly, uncomfortably aware of the fact that I did not know jack shit. It's been a few years since that first class, and I've learned so, SO much since then, but always, with each new semester, I'm constantly reminded that I will never be the expert I thought I was. I say this because I've realized that experts do not really exist. There is always more to learn, no matter what subject you're studying. No matter how well regarded you are, no matter how much you think you know, somebody out there has something to teach you. Maybe I can use this blog to teach you a few things about your yard and the plants in it. Maybe you can use it to teach me something, too.

 tl;dr: I got into gardening late in life, I'm obsessed with it, I go to school for it and I sell things for them. I like to think I know a few things, but you know things too, and the things you know might not be the same things I know. Let's grow together.