My very first post.....

HELLO!

Welcome to my new blog...'What's Growin' On?' I've had this blog set up for quite some time but have never done anything with it as I'm pretty unfamiliar with the blogging world. Guess I was a bit inspired by Annie who writes a food blog called The Dabble. Her husband works with my son and to make a long story short - I started following her blog! I thought - HEY! this looks fun so I'm gonna give it a whirl. The only difference is I will be talking gardening and not food...though for me gardening is 'food for my soul!'

In January 2000 I enrolled in a 48 hour core course at the University of Minnesota for the Master Gardener program. While you are thinking January...garden classes - what are you thinking....well it made a very cold January go by fast. After taking the class I then needed to do 50 hours of volunteer work either teaching, mentoring, etc. on anything gardening! What fun - I had a 'license' to talk gardening. One of my projects was working with kids that had to do community service work through the juvenile detention system. We were tasked with planting a vegetable garden at a local nursing home. Some Saturday's were a bit challenging but all in all ended up being very rewarding! My favorite story is when we were planting tomatoes, oregano and basil. I told them that if you rubbed the herb leaves between your fingers that the smell would remind of you pizza. Well the 'lesson' was met with eyes rolling in the back of their heads but then I had to keep from laughing when I saw two of the young boys do it and then overhead them say...HEY it does smell like pizza!

After my first year - my volunteer hours are now reduced to 25 hours and 5 hours of continuing education each year.

Shortly after my first year I contacted our local cable station in my community to see if they would be interested in some gardening segments for their monthly news casts and they said YES! The show has gone through a few changes since it first started but I still continue on! I have a wonderful sponsor - Farmer Seed & Nursery who pretty much lets me come in and do my 'garden thing.' Over the course of the years people have actually said to me, 'Hey - I've come to see you several times down and Farmer Seed and you're never there!' That's right - I do have a real job (gotta pay for my plants somehow) and then I explain to them how this all works!

So - for the past 10 years I've been the 'star' of my own little TV show and it's funny as I'm out shopping or running errands people actually recognize me...though they don't ask for an autograph!

So - there you have it - my first post in my blog. I'll admit right off the get-go that I'm certainly not a professional writer - so I will probably have bad punctuation and dangling participles BUT what I do know is that I can share with you my love of gardening, advice and even a few photos of flowers in my garden (I'm not a professional photographer either but I love to take pictures of some of my favorite flowers).

So for today, my first post I will sign out now and say....Happy Digging!'