It’s been a year since my first post on my gardening blog, and in that time I’ve only written 26 posts, a far cry from the 3 posts per week I originally planned on doing. But this year I want to do things differently, and if I write about it, I’ll have to stick by what I say at risk of looking unreliable to you, my readers. So here it goes!
Why I started a gardening blog
This isn’t as straight forward an answer as what I would have liked as there are a couple of reasons, but I guess the first reason would have to be that I enjoy writing. My father is a professional landscape gardener so gardening was always going to be part of me one way or another, but this wasn’t always the case. Despite starting my gardening career at just 16 years old as soon as I left school, I’ve taken breaks over the years and worked in well paid office based jobs which I loved. I was a sales and account manager for asset finance companies, so my job would be to sell equipment which involved emailing quotations, working out rates, completing paper work and so on. The problem with this is that as much as I loved my office job, I was still missing the gardening work so would still run my gardening business on the side and trade my shoes for boots to garden on the weekends. When I was gardening I missed working in an office, and when I worked in an office I missed gardening, I couldn’t win!
Anyway, after a couple of years I decided that leaving the office and focusing on the gardening company full time would give me the freedom needed with having a large family, and so that’s what I done. But something in me still feels like something is missing, and blogging fills that empty hole! To provide Garden maintenance and hard landscaping, and to then sit behind a computer and write about it… How amazing is that!
The other reason for starting my gardening blog is to help others. Whether that be an individual looking to do their own garden project, or someone looking to start their own gardening business, I want to be the ‘go to’ blogging website that can help. From what I have found, I am the only landscape gardener running a business and working every day that can actually post about my very own experiences when it comes to running your own gardening business, how tos, advice and so on. A blog truly unique in itself. When starting my gardening business, I wish that I had a dedicated website like this (or at least, how I hope it will be in the future) that I could turn to. The only struggle that I have had is making time to write about my gardening and hard landscaping since I work long days, sometimes 7 days a week!
What changes I will be making to my gardening blog going forward
The absolute first change I will be making is to post more! Running a garden maintenance and hard landscaping company, as well as having 5 children and a fiance to support means that it’s hard enough just to juggle work and family life, so adding a blog into the mix will be… Let’s just say…hard! But if we always do what we’ve always done, then we will always be where we’ve always been, and I have so much passion and sense of urgency to create good content for my readers that something has to change now. Whether I set an hour aside in the evenings, wake up that little bit earlier, or go to bed that little bit later, then I should be able to reach my goal of 3-4 posts per week. Its not too much to ask for!
The second change that I will be making for my gardening blog is to add to the content I am already creating. At the moment, I’m reviewing tools that I’ve purchased, or created ‘how to’ posts like ‘how to get stripes on your lawn’ or ‘how to install fence posts’ as well as advice on starting your very own gardening business. But I’ve been missing the most important reason for creating my gardening blog, which is that I am a professional gardener offering garden maintenance and hard landscaping so why haven’t I been sharing all of my work as and when I finish a job?! Every time I finish a landscaping project, I’m going to show what I accomplished and explain how it went from start to finish, as well as a guide on how the work was completed. I might have jobs that don’t go to plan, customers that I’ll never work for again, or even bad payers, but I’m going to write about it all! This will be the best way to give an insight on what it’s like to run your own gardening business and create truly unique content that I hope will help many of my readers.
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