Welcome to Rainy Day Gardening!

In this very first post, I'll try to answer the who, what, where, and why questions, so you can decide if Rainy Day Gardening is for you.

Who and Where
My name is Janet, and I'm a plantaholic... oh, wait--wrong forum. But we'll start there. I've been gardening since I was a small child, helping my mother plant vegetables in Northern California. But I never really pursued gardening as a hobby until a few years ago, when I moved with my family to Portland, Oregon, and bought a big corner lot with a house, a creek, and not much else. Most of the landscaping was washed away in the floods of 1996, leaving me with a blank and very muddy slate. Time to take up gardening in earnest! My yard is still a mess (though no longer a blank slate), because I've made many mistakes along the way. In the last couple of years I've done more reading, which is considerably cheaper than my previous approach--buy lots of plants and wonder why they die. I feel like I'm finally making progress, and I'd like to share what I've learned.

What and Why
So, what will Rainy Day Gardening be? Why call it that? And why a blog?

I'm not just a plantaholic--I'm also a librarian. As a librarian, I'm trained to organize and share information so others can benefit. That's one purpose of Rainy Day Gardening. I do lots of reading and online research on gardening stuff, and the information I gather just sits on my laptop, helping no one but me. It's time to share the fruits of my labor (bad pun) with other gardeners. Eventually I hope this blog will become an online community of gardeners, a place where we can learn from each other's mistakes and become more informed about this wonderful hobby/lifestyle/irrational obsession.

Why Rainy Day Gardening? The obvious answer is that I live in the Maritime Northwest, where it rains a lot. Because I don't especially like to get wet (a side effect of growing up in California), I often indulge my passion for plants on rainy days by reading, researching, and surfing gardening sites. Maintaining this blog will join my list of rainy day gardening activities and, hopefully, reading it can become a rainy day activity for other gardeners.

And finally, why a blog? 1) Easy setup. I know basic HTML, but I have little time to spend doing web design. 2) Blogs can become communities, without a lot of programming to enable posts and comments.

That's it for now. If you found your way here, would you please post a comment and say hi? I love hearing from other gardeners. Thanks for reading.