So it begins.
Well hello everyone. As this is the initial blog entry I suppose I should take a moment to explain a few things.
Who I am:
My name is John, I’m a middle aged man living in Ohio with a keen interest in gardening for a multitude of reasons, many of which will likely be explained in exhaustive detail on this site at some point. Growing up directly adjacent to a floodplain at the edge of the Great Black Swamp (go Lake Maumee!) I was no stranger to mucking about out in the woods and just generally enjoyed nature as a kid. I also like music, Reticello glass, Carnival glass, cats, gaming (in general) and table-top roleplaying (in specific) but that’s not really relevant right now. Well, unless you count farm/life sim games such as Harvest Moon on the SNES or Stardew Valley as related to gardening, which for the sake of this blog post I’m going to assume you don’t. Maybe later, as I seem to have an issue staying on topic.
Why should you care:
Honestly I’m not sure that you should, we all only have so much space in each of our monkeyspheres after all. If you aren’t familiar with the term monkeysphere, it’s basically a newer (circa 2007) name for a somewhat older concept called Dunbar’s Number, which is itself basically the theoretical upper limit on the number of important social relationships that we can maintain. In 1992 Dunbar claimed the number to be 150ish, though this number (and the concept in general) has come under a significant amount of criticism so the whole thing is likely bunk anyways.
I bet you didn’t think that would be the first piece of information covered by a gardening hobbyist’s website right? I know I sure didn’t. Isn’t learning fun?
Wait. I didn’t actually answer the question though. Suffice it to say that as a human I make mistakes (citation: see the above paragraph) and my goal is to document them along with the occasional (and likely accidental) successes. Maybe you want to try what I’ve tried? Maybe do the opposite? I dunno, I just know that I garden to relieve stress and though I like to learn I’m not always great about implementing that knowledge effectively (I’m an absolute clownshow when I try to bake, for example, because baking is science and science has rules and rules are hard sometimes like whatever eldritch rules govern which bread dough has to rest and which doesn’t; I can’t even seem to bake brownies from a box for instance since they only have three states: liquid, tar, charcoal) so I hope that the information presented here is at least occasionally useful. Or amusing. Either works, I’m not picky.
Why Harvestheim:
I garden in my backyard, at home. For the unaware - home is what heim means in several languages within the North Germanic language group, and also just regular German (which is part of the West Germanic language group) for some reason. There is a proposed grouping called Northwest Germanic (perhaps rather unsurprisingly) which would cover all of these bases cleanly so of course that’s not fully accepted by the linguistic community as of yet.
Yep, this blog is totally about gardening.