My name is Denis and I’m the creator of GardeningNoob.com. I’m in my thirties now and currently live in Slovenia, in a town called Bled. Alhough I love to write and talk about gardening, I’m not a gardener by profession…
In fact, up until recently, I had zero real-life gardening experience and knew absolutely nothing about how to grow your own food…
Then, one afternoon in late autumn of 2013, my mom asked me if I could help her harvest some vegetables. I was well aware she started gardening that year. After all, she’d been bringing home all sorts of tasty vegetables on a regular basis. She invited me to go check her garden on several different occasions before, but I always had other (supposedly more important) things to do…
However, for some reason, on that particular day I decided to help her out. And never did I know it’s going to change the course of my life forever…
The first thing I noticed once we got to the gardening site was the abundance of all sorts of vegetables. Everywhere I looked, there was fresh food ready to be picked. She’d been growing everything from cucumbers, tomatoes, poll beans, lamb’s lettuce, cauliflowers to strawberries and even peanuts. After only ten minutes of harvesting, I had more garden produce in my basket than I could carry!
And the best thing about it was it was all free…
Not one single vegetable I picked that day came with a bill. All I had to do was pull it up or dig it out of the ground and then put it in a basket. If I were to buy the same amount and the same variety of vegetables in a store or a supermarket, it would cost me a small fortune. If you’re paying for fruit and vegetables (like I did at the time), then you already know that such type of food just doesn’t come cheap nowadays.
Once I came home and made the salad out of the vegetables I just harvested, I realized that fresh homegrown vegetable is not only free, but also tastes much better than the store-bought one!
At the end of that day, I felt calm, blissed, refreshed, as well as energized and full of life. I knew that gardening is something I want to do. And that day I made a decision that I’ll have my own garden. However, at the same time, I also felt sad. The fact that the gardening season that year was ending was a bitter pill to swallow…
But I had no choice. If I wanted to start growing my own food (and I did want to!), I had to wait for the winter to pass. It was a long wait, however, I didn’t let that time go to waste. During my wait for the next (my first!) gardening season to start, I spent all my free time learning as much as I possibly could about organic gardening. While I didn’t learn nearly as much as I wanted, it was still enough to get me started…
As the spring was approaching, my newly discovered passion for gardening didn’t pass, but rather on the contrary, it has become even stronger. And when the spring finally arrived, I was ready…
To be honest with you, the beginning wasn’t easy at all. I regularly run into difficulties. And I definitely didn’t succeed at getting a produce out of each and every type of vegetable I planted. However, I still managed to harvest a significant amount of all sorts of vegetables during my first gardening season. And that is without using any herbicites, pesticides or synthetic fertilisers at all!
Now, I’m hooked to gardening and I can’t imagine my life without it anymore. With each new season, I get more excited about it. With each new season, I try to grow new vegetables, new herbs and new fruits. And with each new season, I learn new things.