My avid interest in gardening started when I was very, very little. Like toddler little. My mom, God bless her, had a home garden she managed annually. And I tell you, it was my favourite part of growing up on the farm (aside from working with my dad in our stocker cattle operation). I loved getting my tiny little hands dirty, exploring the soil between my fingers, and helping Mom out as much as possible.

It was probably as organic a garden as organic a garden can get. While it wasn’t perfect, looking back on it now, it grew very healthy plants that far exceeded the quality of any grocery store produce. Mom grew corn, beans, pumpkins, lettuce, carrots, peas, Swiss chard, potatoes, tomatoes, spinach, beets, and spaghetti squash. She had an abundance of flowers, too, from lavatera to cosmos. My absolute favourite part was eating raw peas and pulling a carrot out of the ground, wiping the dirt off with the garden hose, and chomping down on it. Mmmm mm!!

Dad helped a little by adding composted steer manure to the garden and tilling it up with the disc. He would till the old garden plants in the fall, then work it up again in the spring. Like I said, it’s not ideal when it’s by “working with nature” standards, but it did the job and still produced some really good, home-grown food.

When I had to go to university and take several jobs, I didn’t get to start a garden of my own. I had some plants on my balcony, which I tended to in as natural a manner as possible, and that bit of greenery cheered me up during the summer months. I grew tomatoes, pansies, Swiss chard, gerberas, and herbs. It wasn’t much, but like I said, it was nice to see some greenery as I worked on my computer inside.

You can say that much of this “gardening with nature” stuff was self-taught. Because, genuinely, it was. I didn’t learn much about crop production or gardening in university. However, when I worked as a forage-beef specialist for the government (ironically, because as a specialist, I was paid to give conventional advice to farmers regarding herbicides, tillage, and fertilizing, not necessarily anything “regenerative”), I started learning about regenerative agriculture.

More specifically, I learned about regenerative agriculture through this ambiguous term called “soil health.” The fact that “soil health” leans towards caring for the soil and working with nature to help us grow food fascinated me to no end.

I never learned any of that in university! I mean, I knew a tiny bit about bacteria, fungi, nematodes and earthworms in the soil, but not enough to connect the dots between how we look after the soil and those subterranean critters.

It took going to “YouTube University” while researching odd questions from farmers about things like, “How do I deal with X weed in my pastures without using any herbicides” to teach me more about this… soil health, regen-ag stuff. So, I dug into webinars and presentations by folks like Dr. Christine Jones, Dr. Elaine Ingrahm, Ray Archuleta, North Dakota farmer Gabe Brown, Dr. David Johnson, Australian farmer Charles Massey (who wrote the awesome book Call of the Reed Warbler) and Colin Seis, and many more.

At first, I was understandably skeptical. I was sure I knew what there was to know about soil.

That is until I watched one of Archuleta’s presentations. In it, he showed a video of a rain simulator test on three different batches of soil. I was certain the batch with the bare soil had soaked in as much water as the other two. When the man flipped that pan upside down, I saw the dust and just how bone dry that dirt truly was.

Seeing that made me really emotional.

It marked the beginning of a change in how I viewed the soil; how I see dirt.

So, I had to find out more. Why was this dirt like the dirt I saw in that little video clip? Why did “plants grow soil” and not the other way around? What role did bacteria and fungi play in the soil? Nay, in their association with plant roots, no less?

All that learning has gotten me to the point where I must satiate my intense desire to share it with others. I’ve given presentations in which my knowledge about regenerative ag/soil health was just at the cusp of emergence. The more I research to find out more, the more I want to share what I’ve learned.

Guess what? I’m still learning. I’m still connecting the dots.

I guess that is precisely why I’ve had to start this Gardening with Nature blog.

I’m ashamed to admit that I haven’t started a garden of my own. However, I have two sets of lawns with a house I currently own to work with. I’ve been wanting to start doing some gardening with both post-stamp pieces of land and have some ideas and goals. My only problem is that, as I write this, I’ve no idea how long I will be staying at this place, what with moving between jobs and such.

At least, regardless where I go, this blog is here to stay for as long as I am able to maintain it. I just hope, wherever I end up, I can garden with nature and actually practice what I preach.