Well, to begin with....

It's January of 2012.  I'm starting a Blog.

They say that record keeping is important for the garden.  Some say that's how writing began, but honestly, I'm bad at record keeping.  Way back when I first got here, I made a practice of writing every day.  It was a short narrative of what we'd done here.  And I made a practice of sending that out to various people, but somehow I lost the habit.  Now, I'm going to try again.

I live in a small coastal town in Maine, not too far from Bangor (the big city) or Acadia National Park.  It's a three mile walk to the end of the Warf Rd. where you can put your toes in the salt water and see Penobscot Bay.  It's a shorter walk to salt water the other way, but that water is further up the estuary from the open ocean.

I've lived here for ten years, or at least I will have in a little over a month.  I live here with my wife and cat.  The house is about 170 years old.  It's a hybrid timber/balloon frame, with lath and plaster walls (where they haven't been re-done) and a field stone foundation.  Bit by bit I'm tightening it up, and I'm burning about five cords of wood this winter to stay comfortably warm.  I came here thinking I was going to be a market gardener, and was for a while but not a financially successful one.  It turns out that my soil is not as inherently fertile as I'd hoped, and sometimes it's just no fun to be out in the heat, the rain, the bugs, or the mud.  I've gotten a day job but I continue to work in the garden as much as I can.

My soil is a heavy clay.  We could go from soup one week to concrete then next as the soil dried out in the spring.  We had grand plans, and many of them were hard work with no real reward.  There came a point about five years ago when I started hauling in everything I could enrich the soil.  I got seaweed and stable cleanings.  I put out a sign that said "Wood Chips Wanted".  And the soil has improved considerably.

I love digging in the spring.  I love the promise of the soil when I set out a row and put in seed.  It's the follow-through that I'm still working on.  The reason for writing this blog is to have a record of what I'm doing, and maybe to share that record with others.  And hopefully it will keep me honest about getting out there and keeping the garden in a condition I can be proud of.