An Amateur’s Garden Chronicles

Hello and welcome to An Amateur’s Garden Chronicles. First, let me explain what it is: I was so excited about spring because I wanted to include gardening tips and tricks here on Charming Imperfections. But, as I brainstormed post ideas I realized, I barely know anything about gardening! How could I write tutorials and helpful posts on a topic I have a lot of passion for, but no experience? So, I came up with this idea of journaling the adventures of my first year of gardening and we can learn how to make things grow together. I’ll still include tutorials and stuff, but the premise will be coming from someone who is trying it for the first time. Maybe you’ll learn from what I do or maybe you’ll learn from what I do wrong. This will be so much fun and I can’t wait to dive into this journey together.

Really quickly, I want to take you back to our first few years of marriage. We lived in a little duplex in town. Coming from a home in the country with five acres of pasture land made the tiny and not-so-private backyard feel uninviting. While my soul longed for the outside air, I tended to opt for staying inside even on beautiful days simply because I disliked our yard.

Now, fast forward to last year when we began looking for a house to call our own very casually in the spring. The biggest requirement for me was a more private backyard. What we found exceeded all of our expectations. The home we found, bought, and moved into has a large backyard that runs straight back to a rolling corn field. It has a playground for the kids, a beautiful deck, and a beautiful big garden area!

The patch of dirt you see there may not seem like much, but I see tons of potential for a beautiful and bountiful garden. I’ve been planning and dreaming of what we will plant ever since we moved in last summer.

My plans include:

• A fence that surrounds it to keep the critters away
• Raised beds of varying heights
• Paths that wind around those beds
• A bench to rest and enjoy the view
• Vegetables and flowers not planted in rows, but scattered about as they would be in nature.

I’d love to just go out there and make it all happen in a day, but lesson #1 that I’ve learned about gardening so far is that you have to wait. The weather, the ground thawing, the seedlings growing just cannot be rushed. Spring is beginning to make its appearance in small ways around our home in tiny buds on the trees and little sprouts from the ground.

These give me so much excitement and motivation as I wait for the land to warm.

I hope you are as excited about spring and gardening as I am!

Now, this introduction post of the Garden Chronicles is open to all, but from here on out, only email subscribers will get to access it. Don’t worry though, it’s easy to subscribe! Just fill out the information below and you will receive the password for all future Garden Chronicle posts. At the end of the year, if my garden grows successfully, I plan to make these posts into an eBook to sell, which means they are only free to subscribers for a limited time.

God gave us such a beautiful earth to cultivate. Let’s go grow some things together!