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A Gift of Radicchio
I think a lot about vegetables lately – because I need quite a bit, and they are expensive in Wyoming. I am often surprised at how the Lord answers prayers, and try to make the most of it even when the answer isn’t what I really wanted.
I went out this morning to check to see if the strawberries we planted last summer were greening up yet – a friend said theirs were, and I was surprised because it is early for Wyoming. We had a mild winter though, even finding spinach plants that had managed to winter over – quite a few, in fact, and discovering more every day. The grass and dandelions are already making a comeback in the garden – the weeds grow long after the edible greens die, and they come back sooner in the spring too. So weeding starts before the ground is even fully thawed it seems.
Today, in last summer’s lettuce beds, I found some red heads poking up from the dirt. A plant that had grown leafy last summer was forming small tight heads – distinctly red with white veins. Close inspection and a nibble on a leaf proved it to be Radicchio.
I hate Radicchio. But I had prayed for vegetables, and here was Radicchio – something I had not intentionally planted, would have pulled if I had seen it last summer, and certainly did not ask for now. Our mesclun mix has 6 things I like, and three that I do not like. I do not like curly endive either, but it is distinctive enough to yank out the minute the leaves start to frill, and the arugula that makes me gag is also easily recognizable early on, and therefore erradicated without hesitation. The Radicchio had been green and red last summer, and had disguised itself as red lettuce, thereby escaping extermination.
Now I knew it for what it was. It is early spring. It will be many months before we have vegetables in the garden. It will be weeks before the plants in my indoor hydroponic system bear anything worth mention. Here was this vegetable, volunteering to grow NOW. Pickable and eatable, NOW. It demanded respect… and it plead for me to acknowledge that I had asked, and had been given.
I do not like Broccoli Raab really either. But it grows fast, and produces well out here. I find I can tolerate it, even come to enjoy it, if it is steamed, rinsed, and then sauteed in garlic butter. It has a similar flavor to Radicchio – sharp, bitter. If Broccoli Raab, then why not Radicchio?
So I searched out recipes – many of which made me want to cook more! One of which I have the ingredients for (important when many call for items I’ve never even seen in the local grocery stores), and which I can actually eat (many call for cured meats or cheeses that I cannot have), and which I think I can whip up and enjoy with dinner.
So I am heading to the garden to harvest some of the unexpected Radicchio, hoping I can like the gift I have been given. Trying my best to make lemonade of lemons.
There Are No Fireflies in Wyoming
In the book, the family crossed Wyoming, and stopped to camp one night and caught fireflies. The author could not have known… It was obvious she had never been here, or if she had, she had not noticed that one thing. Because Wyoming has no fireflies. Plenty of mosquitoes… none of which have lights on the end. Of course, if you grew up where fireflies were a common thing, you might never realize that someplace else did not have them!
It is details like that which only those who DO know will notice. But when they do, you lose all credibility!
This is pretty important if you write for a living. But I think there is a broader application also. We often make assumptions based on our own background and experience, and never realize that they may not be accurate for other situations.
We may make assumptions that are incorrect in client negotiations, in assessing an unfamiliar target market, or in networking situations. They can be embarrassing, or even disastrous for our business.
Sometimes we make those assumptions about our own skills or expertise, due to lack of experience, and end up muffing the job. That is REALLY embarrassing.
The most important thing that experience teaches us in this regard, is to not assume things, to research more carefully, so we don’t try to catch fireflies in Wyoming.
Why Would ANYONE Judge VALUE Based on Hourly Pricing Alone?
About a week ago an overseas outsourcing company contacted me through a venue that I frequent. Since I was looking for a coder for a specific database conversion project, I asked them for a quote – they had told me that it could be done for $10 per hour. I send them the two databases, along with instructions about what needed to be done. I knew it would take me about 5-6 hours to do it. It was not work I liked doing, so I was interested in outsourcing it.
Their quote came back for 24 hours of work, at $360. Hmmm. That isn’t $10 per hour…. And it is more than triple the maximum amount of time that I’d allote to the project.
I then contacted a regional coder – she charges $85 per hour. Ouch! That is a LOT compared to $10 per hour! Or even $15!
But, she could do the work in 2-3 hours. Hmmm…. $170 to $255, instead of $360! Which one is the real bargain? Especially when you consider language, cultural, time zone, and legal recourse limitations.
Even when you are comparing local with local, hourly rates are just NOT a reasonable basis of comparison. The best way to judge, is to ask for a list of included services, and a flat rate, or at least a firm estimate. Any experienced professional can give that, and a newbie can still offer reasonable guarantees that it won’t go over a certain amount.
Often, higher hourly rates pay for the following:
1. Reduced legal recourse risk. It is easier to recover from people who are within the same country as you, or who are in a country that has reciprocal agreements with your country.
2. Easier communication – time zones, language and cultural differences, or inexperience on the part of the technician in communicating with clients can all cause communication barriers, which equate to lost time or poorly done work.
3. Better tools – Better tools mean better quality output, and faster work speeds. The right tools can shave hours off many kinds of tasks, so hourly rates become meaningless when you are trying to compare the cost of one service that is done manually, and one that is done with better tools to do it more efficiently.
4. More experience – this means both faster output speeds, AND better quality. But it also means that an experienced professional has knowledge of “gotchas” that might bite you if you work with someone who is less experienced. For example, in our industry, there are certain things that municipalities or non-profits of certain types have to do with their sites, or which they cannot do on their sites, which are different than the standards required by small businesses. Experience protects those entities from potential lawsuits.
5. More Accurate Applicable Charges – One company may charge for research time, if they lack experience in a certain area, another may not. One company may charge for negotiation time, another may not.
6. Less Lost Time – Higher quality and accuracy can be worth paying a higher hourly rate for, because it saves you in the long run. If a lower hourly rate means work has to be redone, it costs you even if you don’t have to pay for it directly.
7. Attention to Different Kinds of Details – Often higher hourly rates are charged for higher risk projects because there are more details to attend to. Simple projects do not require this, but complex ones may. Often, as a business grows, so do their risks, so a service level that was appropriate for a startup may not be appropriate for a larger faster growing business. Higher risks almost always mean higher hourly rates, but they also result in more protection for the client.
There are MANY good companies who charge low rates. There are MANY new businseses and service providers who can do a very good job at a fair price. This is not in any way a condemnation of lower priced companies.
Rather, it is an encouragement to actually compare the REAL price, and the REAL VALUE rather than making a knee-jerk reaction based on the appearance of price, by using a number which is actually meaningless.
It would be like saying “A car that gets 35 MPG is better than a car that gets 12 MPG” without comparing anything else, like the reliability of the car, the size, the intended purpose, or even the side the steering wheel was located on!
Judge price and value based on factors that really matter, and you’ll find that what appears to be the lower price, often isn’t!
A Rant About Grants
Who spends $3000 to get information on getting grants, but will not invest that much into their business instead?
We’ve been getting grant applications lately from people who are TOTALLY unprepared to operate a business, and completely uncommitted to their business! How do we know? Because they have NOT done what is OBVIOUS to even TRY to start their business!
Instead, they have come to our website, filled out our grant application, and tried to persuade us that they are deserving of a business grant, when they have not done anything to even start their business. Not all of our applicants, but many of them.
Here is the reason I am so frustrated over this:
They are not even READING what the grant IS!
We are getting people who are asking for MONEY, even though our site clearly says, in many places, NO MONEY IS AWARDED.
Most of them do NOT need a website! Don’t even WANT a website, but since they did not read the grant information, they are clueless about what they are even applying for!
So these people, who want an offline business, which they could bootstrap if they were smart about it, are sitting there talking about their dream, applying for grants so someone else will give them their business. Most of them could get started if they’d just start doing something. Start small. Start bit by bit and work toward it. Do SOMETHING productive other than just running around looking for someone to fund it for you.
The great irony is that some of them have PAID MONEY (often a GREAT DEAL of money) for information on getting grants. In some cases, it was enough money that they could have started their business if they had been smart about what they spent it on.
It is peculiar to me that they will spend money on a supposed shortcut, but they will not spend the same amount of money on a more sure way of doing it.
So I’m puzzled at human nature today. If you just stick your hand out and expect it to be filled, no one will ever consider you to be deserving. You’ve gotta do what you are capable of doing. I am going to have to find a polite way of communicating to these people that they got taken on the grant information, and help them to understand what it takes to REALLY have a business.
‘Cause I ain’t going to hand you money. And I’m only gonna hand you a website if you’ve worked hard already and can indicate to me that you will actually do something worthwhile with it.
Answering My Associate’s Question
She’s launching a new service (quite a good one actually). She wanted to know if she should set a cap on how many she would take on. Each client pays $25 per month for a specific service. This was my answer to her:
No, do not set a cap, but do some planning instead:
It is good to figure out how many you can handle, BUT… beyond that, your task is not to LIMIT it, but to figure out what would be needed at the next level.
- At what point would you need help?
- What things could you systemize to speed up and thereby increase the workload? This is the first resort usually because it is free, just takes smarts.
- What things could you automate? This is the second option if it costs to do it, first if it can be done without additional cost.
- What would you outsource? This entails a breakdown of the tasks involved in the whole service, and figuring out which ones you WANT to do, which ones you COULD outsource easily, etc. Remember, outsourcing is the THIRD choice!
- Whom would you outsource to?
- How much could you afford to pay them per task, and still profit?
It is good to do some calculations on that now, so that you know what your direction is when you get there, and so that you can start laying groundwork for this as you get 10, then 20, then 30 clients.
If you want to grow your business, as my associate does, then planning when you outline a new service, can help you know where it can go, and help you avoid overwhelming yourself at a later point. You’ll know when you need to adjust, and HOW you need to adjust, so that growth happens more smoothly and service delivery continues consistently.
Norwex Sites Go Public
This past fall, a delightful lady from Canada contacted us about creating “replicated websites” for her downline. We told her we could do much better than that, and provide them with a site they could make changes to themselves, so they’d get indexed by the search engines. We moved forward, and have since sold several of the sites to her downline.
The sites are now going public – so anybody can purchase one if they are a Norwex rep. We provide custom design and help with the most technical parts of the site personalization, so we don’t do as much for the sites as we do for a full site build. That keeps the pricing lower than our normal websites.
We’ve felt pretty good about this, because it was an opportunity to do something we’d known we could do for a long time, but finding the right client was difficult. Our programmer is finishing the auto-install script for them, which will make the process even faster for us, and keep the pricing stable for the site owners.
This has been one of those pivotal contracts for our business. One that has opened all kinds of doors, and has caused me to think about business differently. It laid the groundwork for our Kit websites, and for our franchise. Before this, I didn’t really have a good concept in my head of the kind of value and training we coudl provide with our franchise, or whether we could offer work referrals. With this project rolling forward, all of those things became clear, and possible.
It has also got me thinking differently about coding our own solutions, and customizing existing solutions. There are more possiblities now, and they are more affordable because our resources are more fluid.
Often, when an opportunity presents, we don’t see at the time where it can take us. This one felt like a good thing, and I knew it was a key to growth. But I could not have predicted the way in which it would open my mind, and how it would change our business to open up more possibilities that I had not yet thought of, or thought possible. Thing is, I had this kind of contract partially thought out three years ago. Then I put the final pieces together about a year ago. It took time after that for it to bear fruit, but when it did, the payoff was well worth the wait. I find that many things that we do are that way. It takes a good deal of time to bring them to a point where they pay, but it is worth it when they do. Often the benefits are broad spread and unexpectedly good.
From that, I encourage you to stick to it. Keep working on the details until you get it right. Move on to other things, but keep it open and alive in the background if it does not yield results right away. Often some things just take time to “ferment”, and when they do, the results are incredible.
Details about the sites are in the sidebar, under the Downline Sites website link.
What it REALLY Means to Think Outside the Box
There is some misunderstanding of this concept. Recently I have heard two people condemn the phrase, one calling it “silly”, another calling it “dangerous”. These people will never be innovators or true entrepreneurs, because they have completely missed the point, and changed the meaning from what it really is.
When you think outside the box, it does not mean you do not apply common sense, or that you do not abide by necessary limitations that affect safety or legality.
It simply means that you do not let preconceived ideas, or the “rules” imposed by other people, which do NOT apply, constrain you from thinking creatively.
We do that… We assume that because 90% of people in the US send their kids to public school, and because we have done it that way for generations, that somehow it must be better. We assume that if the SBA teaches people to start a business and tells them that they have to have heaps of money to do it, and that they must have a business plan that conforms to bank requirements in order to get that funding, that this is how it must be done. We think that if we have been taught to do things a certain way, that we must do it that way, even when that way may not make sense for our particular situation.
Innovators and true entrepreneurs are not held back by limitations that do NOT affect safety or legality. They are able to see beyond the preconceived ideas and methods that others are constrained by.
In the web world, things are done on an enterprise scale, and taught for that scale, and nobody ever really stops to think that they simply do not scale well for small business, or how different the needs might be. They assume that you must do this, you must do that, and if you do not, that your website won’t perform. They do not stop to think that on a micro-scale, the things they require won’t make ANY difference at all, but will increase costs, and that perhaps they should be done at a later time when it WILL matter. Our “out of the box” thinking was to simply analyze those factors, and make decisions based on reality instead of assumption or dogma.
That is all it means to Think Outside the Box. To approach things from a new direction, and to consider new ideas in a productive way.
If you intend to go somewhere new, you can’t do it by following other people. You take the wisdom of others and learn from it, then you formulate a new plan that still fits the wisdom, but which does not incorporate the ideas that do not apply just because everyone else does it that way. If you want to LEAD, you have to get out ahead and try something nobody else is doing. If you want to succeed at it, you cannot compromise known safety or legality factors, the things you risk are just yourself.
It isn’t silly, and it isn’t dangerous. It is bold, and the path to true success.
Communication Deal Breakers
We’ve had very few dissatisfied clients. That isn’t bragging, just a fact. We’ve had three that have come to a point of non-workability. In every case, the same issue was at the heart of the dissatisfaction. I felt them going south long before the client complained.
The issue was poor communication. Many of our clients are not really good at emailing, but they’ll at least give us enough info to go forward with, and the job gets done. These three could not communicate at all.
- If we asked for information, they would not give it until we had asked multiple times, if at all.
- If we asked for an opinion on a design, they’d say, “oh, that isn’t right.” And they’d offer nothing more helpful than that, leaving us stabbing in the dark for a new direction in spite of pointed questions which were never answered.
- When instructions or explanations of processes were given to them, they were simply ignored. Explanations would be given in simple terms one day, and complaints lodged the following day about the same thing that was explained the day before.
- They typically wanted things in a hurry, but did not want to communicate the needed information until the deadline had passed, and then they’d wonder why we didn’t have it done within hours of when they turned in days worth of work. Explanations of how much time things took were misinterpreted or ignored.
I’ve learned to recognize some of them ahead of time, but sometimes I fail to spot them until we are a few tasks in. By that time we have enough invested that we have to try to at least make it work until the initial contract is done. Somewhere along in there you can see it coming though, the meltdown from which there is no recovery.
I’ve also learned that when things reach a certain point, a quick refund is the best solution. Fault ceases to mean anything, and it is worth letting it go just to move on and not have to worry about which thing will go wrong next because of inadequate info or lack of clarity in instructions.
There are other types of problem clients – some waste your time, some do not know what they want, others expect far more than they have paid for. But I’d take any one of them and make it work before I’ll knowingly choose to work with a client who refuses to communicate required information and then blames for not getting what they want.
It always leaves me feeling down. I always look for something I could have done better, something I should have done to prevent it. I’ve made a lot of mistakes as a webmaster, and apologized to a lot of clients. These three are the ones that I gave more than could have ever been reasonably expected, and still could not rescuse from disaster. I think it is because I gave so much that I felt so discouraged when it did not help. And while I am on the alert for this kind of client, and prefer to avoid them now, I would do the same again if I discover that I’m in the middle of another – I’d still give everything I felt I could to try to salvage it, even knowing it probably would not work.
Because the one thing worse than having a client leave through no fault of your own, is having a client leave while you wonder whether there was something more you could have done. I get past it a lot faster when I know that I did my absolute best.
How to Make People Think You Are a Coding Genius
A friend of ours is a Perl coder. He said that much of the time, he gets calls when something isn’t working, and the person on the other end of the line says, “There’s an error, it says there is a problem on line (number) in file (filepath)”. He goes in, fixes the problem that the error message told him to fix, and they think he is brilliant.
I’ve run into the same thing. Problem is, I am NOT a coder. I’m not even close! But I have learned that there are some simple rules that can make me do a lot of things in code. I just pay attention to a few things:
1. Patterns. Code is like a puzzle, and there are patterns to it. If something doesn’t fit a pattern, it may be the source of a problem.
2. Error messages often state exactly what the problem is, and where it is. Ok, so some error messages are a bit cryptic, but usually, if you look around, and apply the pattern rule, you can find something out of whack. Browser error messages often tell you precisely where to look for the problem also, but sometimes you have to load it in a different browser to see a helpful message – different browsers spit out different messages when they encounter a problem, and some are more useful than others.
3. Spelling errors count. Code likes things a certain way. Misspellings in either the code language, or in file names, will make things not work.
The funny thing is, if I tell someone I’m not a coding genius, and they come to me with a problem, and I fix it, they think I am. I can’t write code to save my life. But I can run software pretty well.
Troubleshooting anything is like that. Once you understand the patterns of normality, you can recognize what isn’t normal, and fix it. People who like solving puzzles or mysteries are sometimes very good at troubleshooting because the elements are the same – look for what doesn’t fit, and follow the trail until you find the origination of the problem.
I used to think you had to be a genius for people to appreciate your skills. Not so. You just have to be able to get results. You don’t have to know everything to get results. You just have to know enough to track down the problem, and return it to the state it was in before the problem occurred.
But I must confess, having people think you are a genius is sort of fun!
A New Concept in Social Networking – Pay to Spam
They asked their members what they needed to do to make the venue better. Many ideas were submitted. Many of them had to do with the high amount of spam on the network. A “report this user” button was requested. Complaints flew about private messages that contained nothing but ads, profile posts that had ads in them, and comments that were nothing but ads.
A few weeks later, the company responded with a plan. They said they’d been listening to the community and here was their solution: Free members could not put links into profile posts, and could not email all of the members of the network. Paid members could spam to their heart’s content. If you paid, you could put ads on comments, profiles, and send them to all of the members in an email blast too!
This, they called “listening”. Too much spam, said the members. Instead of taking reasonable and logical steps to reduce the spam, they just decided to charge members to do it. The age old internet marketing answer to everything. Let them do whatever they want, just charge them for it. It is bad if they do it for free, but it is ok if the site owners are profiting from it. Profit again becomes the arbiter of right and wrong.
Google sets a marvelous example of this – penalizing people for paying for traffic, unless they are paying for it from Google. Restricting content on publisher’s sites if they want to put AdSense on their sites, but allowing Advertisers to break the rules. The almighty dollar rules.
The network in question (which will remain nameless in this post) goes on my ever lengthening list of useless time wasters. My account will be canceled as soon as I finish this post. A sad thing, because the network did have some potential. There were opportunities to interact, and ways to participate. But unfortunately, all so bloated with spam that it was an unpleasant place to be. Instead of addressing the problem, the company has decided to institute it as policy, that the problem is acceptable as long as people are paying to make it so. A paying few will drive away the heart and soul of the networking community. The best networkers will run at the sight of it, because they know that networking and advertising are two different things, and they are turned right off by blatant spam.
Not for me. I’ll go where I can associate with smarter people.
The Long Tail, the Ah-Ha Factor, and Saying What No One Else Says
A client asked me today, how to get the long tail search engine traffic. Good question, and a good goal. Getting it has always seemed easy for me, but when I actually started to analyze why so many people fail to get it, and why some people just easily do so, I learned a few things.
First, it is important to understand WHY long tail traffic is so important. Think of a very big fish that dies on the beach, and all the seagulls swarm to it, fighting over that one fish. Hundreds of seagulls, and one fish that happens to look bigger than all the rest.
Meanwhile, all around, there are other fish. Smaller ones to be sure, but still enough. Maybe you have to go catch a few, and that takes a bit of work, but it certainly takes no more work than fighting your way to the front of the crowd to get one measly bite of the big fish.
Personally, I choose not to be a squabling gull. Recent research suggests that less than 6% of traffic comes from the top 10 keywords in a given industry. If you increase that to the top 100 keywords, it still accounts for only 20% of the traffic. So everybody and their dog are fighting over that 20% while the other 80% is pretty easy pickings.
There is a trick to it though. Common marketing instructions say to get it by having lots of content. They leave out some important information though. Because content alone is not enough.
- If it is reprinted content, it will lack the power. Good long tail content is ALWAYS unique.
- If it is the same thing everyone else is saying, it won’t work. Good long tail content is interesting… it gives people information they can’t get elsewhere. It has the “ah-ha” factor.
- If it is egotistical it is as much a waste of your time as the content is a waste of the visitor’s time. It has to speak to the needs of the individual who might want what you have, and it has to do so in a way that other marketers are overlooking.
Everyone who tries to go after the long tail tries to take shortcuts. So it doesn’t work. You have to be thoughtful, and you have to know your customers to get it.
Every VA in the world knows that if they write articles, they can market with them. So every VA in the world writes the same articles – “How a VA can save you money”, “Grow your business with a VA”. BORING! There are 200,000 copies of that same article, written by 200,000 different people, and not one of them says anything that a real prospective client wants to read.
If you want to grab the long tail, and profit from content writing, you have to start thinking out of the box. What are the real concerns of your customers? What are they really searching for online that they can’t easily find?
Forget keywords. Seriously. Long tail keywords happen naturally as a result of good writing, you simply do not have to think about them. If you start thinking about them, you destroy your ability to get them, because the power is in the variety – the happenchance that occurs with good writing.
Think about needs.
If I am considering surgery, I want statistics on morbity rates, but I also want personal stories. In fact, with that target market, personal stories may be the most powerful writing.
If I want a website, and I don’t know much about the technology behind it, I want someone to explain things in simple terms.
If I am looking for insurance, I may want to know what effect my health history may have on rates or ability to get insurance. I may want to know whether there is a medical exam, who does it, and who pays for it and how.
Listen to your customers. What are they asking over and over? What are they most concerned with? Answer those questions in ways no one else is doing. And make sure you give some information in there that gives them a key, or a grain of understanding that they can’t get somewhere else – that is the “ah-ha” factor. The meat in the article that makes them think, “Oh, NOW I get it!”.
The combination of those things – original content, stuff that is interesting and informative to your audience, unique writing with the “ah-ha” factor (that tells them something no one else is saying in quite that way), will bring in traffic and people who are already pre-sold. When you give them something they can’t get from just anyone, you’ll be pulling in people who want to work with you, specifically. And you’ll be astonished at how they found you – it will be something you could not predict.
Unpredictability is part of the power of the long tail. It is what makes it easy to just write, without worrying about doing anything other than creating good writing, and it is what brings them in to you rather than to your competitors who are just aiming at the top spots.
It’s been working marvelously for us – and by getting power in the long tail keywords, we eventually start moving up in the top ones. But I’d be happy if we never did that, simply because those long tail keywords are so powerful, we really don’t even NEED the top ones.
Let the other mindless gulls squawk and squabble. I’m content fishing on the fringes.
AWOL, With Good Cause
Ok, so I haven’t been blogging much lately. And I haven’t been doing much on FaceBook. And I haven’t been posting much on Ryze. Our newsletter has been late once, and completely missed once. A few friends with whom I regularly converse even emailed to ask if I was ok!
I’m just BUSY! Too busy to do anything more than just gasp for breath now and again, and to write a little when I need a break.
We have a major project just going live, one that we have to announce sometime in December, one more rolling out before the first of the year, and the project to end all projects that we are building around the other ones. We have decided to franchise.
That has been a long time coming. I’ve sort of known it was where I needed to go, but I had no idea how to make it work with our unique business structure, and the broad marketing region that we serve. I’ve finally figured out the details – well… not so much figured them out, as realized that all the other bits and pieces of events in our business over the last six months have sort of solved most of the execution problems for me! Suddenly I looked at it in a new way and KNEW how all of the bits needed to come together into one big comprehensive whole.
Pretty awesome. But a big thing. The great thing is, that in all the other things we are doing, if we just polish them off, we’ll have all but a few of the parts we need for the franchise. It takes the Trade Association, the Training Courses, the Kit Websites, and all of those things and pulls it together. It helps us to solve some of our long term staffing problems while also achieving our goal of spreading our skills to other small webmasters.
It is still daunting. Because the number of things which we have to do hasn’t decreased. There still seems like more than I can ever do. But it is also something that can be rolled out in stages. And so we will.
There’s a lesson in it too. You don’t have to know all the details about how to get somewhere. You do have to know how to get to the next bend in the road, and then you have to be willing to survey the landscape there, choose the next route based on the best opportunities, and let your vision expand as you go.
I’ve had an idea of some large goals to begin with. I didn’t know quite how we’d do them all – I still do not. But every few months, new possibilities unfold, and I go back and measure them up against my dreams. If they fit, we seize them and magnify them. If they don’t, we ignore them and keep going until the right ones do present themselves.
Just because you can’t see it all right now, doesn’t mean you can’t do it!
Gardening doesn't have to be that hard! No matter where you live, no matter how difficult your circumstances, you CAN grow a successful garden.
Life from the Garden: Grow Your Own Food Anywhere Practical and low cost options for container gardening, sprouting, small yards, edible landscaping, winter gardening, shady yards, and help for people who are getting started too late. Plenty of tips to simplify, save on work and expense.
