Fresh Start

Our New Year’s resolution is to make this blog less pedantic and boring. Sure, these notes are mostly for ourselves and not our legions (ha!) of readers. Gardening might not be the most exhilarating topic to some, but it sure gets us fired up. We want to be informative and serve as a record of our trials and errors, but is it too much to ask that the content be readable and ideally spark discussion with our friends and visitors? We think not.

Mark is using terms like “paradigm shift” (*yawn*) to indicate that he’s vowing to be less obsessive and nitpicky about the garden this year. While Kate loves his charts and thirst for information, that approach can be frustrating for all of us. Or, as Mark so cringingly says, “I can’t see the garden for the seedlings.” I can’t believe I just typed that. What he’s trying to say is that we’ll be focusing on the big picture this year.

We also noticed that the number of posts declined as the growing season got busy and we got distracted, which undoubtedly disappointed our ravenous fans. Part of the reason was our disappointment with our mediocre results, especially after the huge success in 2006. But we’re always learning from our mistakes, and last year was the year of too many interventions. We’re starting to think about this gardening as a year-round activity. We’re looking at ways to make our space sustainable using techniques like permaculture and companion planting—two thrilling ideas that you’ll be hearing more about. Basically, our goal this year is to achieve fantastic results with natural ecology rather than trying to control nature with interventions. It’s not easy for a couple of Gen-X instant-gratification junkies (and an engineer, to boot) to embrace holistic methods, but it’s a critical step in our horticultural education.