The GWG #3 prompt is to describe your garden right now and since it doesn’t exist, and all that is in the area is mud and snow, I’m going to move on to #4: write about your garden mentor or muse.
The earliest gardener influence I had was my father. He passed on a love of growing; not so much knowledge, though I did get his 1984 Sunset Western Garden Book, which was a huge source of information, even has old as it was, in Oregon. It’s not much use in Alberta’s climate, but I still love the book.
I am perhaps lucky, to have really gotten bit by the growing bug, after the internet got into full swing. Message boards, forums, and groups all over the place. Blotanical and the GardenWeb was amazing to find other gardeners and connect with them. Blotanical is long gone, sadly, (gardenweb was bought out and is just a mess of ads and impossible to navigate and needlessly endless forums) and while there’s thousands of garden groups, most are on facebook and really vary in size and quality… and god forbid people want to sell chickens and other livestock, facebook treats them like criminals and shuts the group down with no warning, often banning the people running the groups.
Facebook is definitely run by city people who have no farmers in their lives. Yes, I’m a little cranky after seeing many groups just go POOF overnight.
Anyway, the internet has been my source of inspiration – it might be safe to say the whole of the world’s gardeners and farmers, who write their information online, are my mentors. That’s pretty neat, eh? The WWW isn’t just for cat gifs and doggo rating!
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