It's all a bang in July!
About The Griping Garden Goddess
The Purpose
The Griping Garden Goddess's purpose is to take the intimidation out of gardening by providing humorous and poignant reality based storytelling that also provides practical and easy to understand advice and insight to the burgeoning and expert autodidact gardener. Gardening is not just a hobby, but a wonderful way of life from which everyone and the earth can benefit.
The Griping Garden Goddess-Danielle Shelton Walczak
I started my first garden about 15 years ago. Before that I read about gardening for at least 10 years. My reading was really studying about how to start and garden. It came in all forms: magazines articles, blogs, and gardening shows. While informative, I found them all too serious and too complex which in turn made gardening seem very intimidating. Furthermore they often times seemed highly impractical. I did not {and still don't} have near an acre of property or more {our home sits on a city lot}, nor did I have tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars for a garden investment. We may call our home Logan House, but believe you me it sounds more majestic than it is. In BBC Agatha Christie movie parlance, we'd be considered skint.
Finally, one day my husband told me to stop reading about gardening and just begin. I finally did so. I realized it wasn't so bad, nor was it intimidating if I always kept in mind it is about experimentation and learning. Just like any scientific endeavor I have experienced A Lot of failure. Much of it in retrospect was and still is absurd and funny. It wasn't until recently {when I decided to actually read Jamaica Kincade, Robin Fox Lane, Katherine S. White whom sat on my bookshelves for years, and Charlotte Mendelson} that I learned that writing about the mayhems, mistakes, absurdities and hard earned successes made the idea of gardening much less intimidating, more relatable and enjoyable while still offering education and advice. With the GGG I hope to continue on with this tradition to all the GGG readers.
Sustainability
The Griping Garden Goddess, is committed to promoting organic and sustainable practices. I use organic and non-toxic products and attempt to follow best practices to promote biodiversity and conserve water. Perfection is never the order of the day. However, even one sustainable practice is better than none. I believe that a beautiful garden can also be an eco-friendly one.
Guiding Principles
- Gardening is hard yet rewarding work,
- Gardening should always be accessible to everyone regardless of race, color, nationality, orientation and economic status
- Gardens are healing spaces for individuals, communities & the earth and all the creatures within it.
- Gardens are meant to be enjoyed
- Creating, maintaining and talking about gardening is fun
