Green Worlds & Otherwise

Gardening Blog: Welcome & Introduction

I’ve always loved plants and was lucky enough to grow up in an area where I could have a small garden. My family are all big gardeners, and my mom has a degree in ornamental horticulture. She’s able to identify most plants from a picture, which is a skill yours truly did not inherit. (I once trellised what I thought were cucumbers until a cantaloupe showed up on the vine. Did I plant that cantaloupe? I honestly couldn’t say for sure.) Save for the occasional potted plant that never seemed to get enough light in my string of crappy student apartments, gardening was on hold in college and graduate school, then again as I picked up and moved to different states. About five years ago, I snagged that full-time job I’d been chasing and moved to Indiana. Finally! I could put down some roots!

Oh, did I mention there will be puns? Good news/bad news, y’all, but I’ve been a writer nearly as long as I’ve been a gardener, and puns were once considered the height of literacy. (Don’t believe me? Check out The Pun Also Rises: How the Humble Pun Revolutionized Language, Changed History, and Made Wordplay More Than Some Antics by John Pollack and join me. We’re number pun!)

Let’s vine our way back: I picked up a plot at Indiana State University’s community garden, a series of plots available through the Office of Sustainability. I shared my progress on Facebook every summer. The posts were often my most popular, though I assumed my friends were just humoring me. What is friendship if not being an active listener while a friend goes on about something they love and you have no idea what about 30% of it means? This year, I discovered friends might actually be interested in my gardening posts. A friend and colleague suggested I look into pitching articles about gardening after I mentioned wanting to build a freelance portfolio. I thought, well, I’m not sure what I have to say, but maybe some friends will see something I don’t.

The enthusiastic response to “what if I started a gardening blog” is surely something I’ll never be able to replicate.

So, welcome, all, to Green Worlds & Otherwise*. I’ll be writing posts about gardening techniques, sharing my gardening progress, and taking suggestions for what you’d like to see me write about. Below, you can find the following tools/resources:

List of recent posts
Form to send me suggestions of a topic or topics you’d like to see (if I’m not familiar with a requested topic, I’ll create a post with resources that can better address the question and/or topic)
Email sign-up for new post notifications

I hope y’all enjoy reading about my adventures in gardening and find something useful on this blog. Stay tuned for my first post on Friday, June 4th!

*you guessed it: this is another pun.