An Amateur Landscaper Talks Blogging

I was laying some new turf in my front yard and, as is often the case during long periods of brainless physical labor, I started thinking about my blogs.

Usually I spend time like that thinking ahead, strategizing, coming up with some content ideas.  But this time I found myself reflecting on my last few years of blogging.

There were two triggers for this.  First I was helping out a new blogger recently with some issues and they commented that they feel like there is so much for them to learn.  The other trigger was that laying the turf in my front yard brings me very close to finishing a long landscaping project.

Never Ending Projects

We moved into our new home in early 2009 and we’ve been doing the landscaping since then.  Its been a long time, nearly 18 months now, but we’re nearly at the end of it.

Even then it doesn’t really end.  Gardens need ongoing care and maintenance.  Sometimes things don’t work the way you planned them and you have to make some changes.  You definitely can’t just leave it to look after itself.

I run two blogs.  The oldest one is nearly 4  years old now.  As far as projects go a blog is often one with no end goal in site.  Sure some people start blogs with the specific goal of selling them off one day, but most of us just consider out blogs a thing that will be there alongside our business or personal lives forever.

The Hardest Part

I look forward to when my gardens just need a bit of maintenance here and there, and my lawn just needs mowing every couple of weeks.  Thats the easy part of having a nice garden around your house.

The hardest part is getting it to that stage.  We’ve been slogging it out nearly every weekend since we moved in.  I remember days where I would move dozens of wheelbarrow loads of dirt and when I stood back it looked like we’d made no progress at all.  Some days I wanted to throw down the shovel and go watch TV inside, but we persisted and eventually started to see the progress.

Its easy to feel that way as you work hard on your blog in those early days.  You put your head down and write, write, write and then when you look up nothing has changed.  Nobody is coming to read your blog.  We all went through it.  The ones who are still blogging years later are the ones that didn’t go watch TV instead.  They kept writing, promoting, networking, and eventually good things start to happen.

Sometimes it is Crappy Work

When the turf farmer cheerfully informs you that the rolls of grass you’re about to get up close and personal with were given a fresh load of chicken poo just 24 hours ago you know you’re in for an unpleasant experience.  When I finished laying that turf I was covered in dirt and mud and I stank.

I’ve dug as many holes in the searing heat as I have in the pouring rain, just trying to get this job done.  I remember digging all day long just to move a pipe a few inches and then filling the hole back in again. Blisters, splinters, cuts and bruises.  Every muscle in my body has been sore, sometimes all of them at once.

And blogging isn’t all nice, easy work either.  I took on paid blogging work to cover my business expenses.  I’ve ghost written articles and done some unglamorous tech support to bring in some money so I could afford the tools and training I need to do what I really want.  I put every skill I had out on the market, even the ones that give me little joy, just to make the things that do give me joy possible.

I Didn’t Know What I Was Doing

This is the first, and hopefully last, major landscaping project for me.  So going into it I had no idea what I was really doing.  I didn’t even own the right tools.

But luckily my father knows a fair bit about it from being a serial renovator.  Between his experience, a bit of online research, and asking the occasional expert we’ve achieved a lot of great results here. Ironically just as we’re nearly finished I now feel like I could just about anything landscaping related.

In my blogging story I talk about how I barely knew HTML when I started, and fumbled my way through several different CMS’s before settling on WordPress.  I definitely had never touched any PHP code or MySQL databases before then, and CSS was a complete mystery to me as well.

I knew I needed those skills, at least at a basic level, to get by as a blogger.  I started tinkering with free themes, checked out a few blogs and forums where people were swapping code samples, and one day it just sort of clicked for me.

Now I can code up the designs for my own sites, I wrote an ebook about connecting Twitter and your blog together, and I’ve been  able to earn some decent money doing interesting blog development for others.

Pushing Beyond Our Limits

Once in a while we found ourselves needing to make one huge effort to meet a deadline or milestone that we’d set for ourselves (finishing the back yard before my daughter was born was one of those).

This has meant some pretty long days in the yard.  It has even meant some nights.  On two separate occasions I’ve been outside on cold nights rolling turf.

Combining freelance blogging and development work with my own blogs has meant some long nights as well (sometimes after a long day in the yard too).  I don’t like to miss my own deadlines let alone those of my clients.  It is a fine line between “crushing it” and burnout though.  You can extend yourself for only so long before you need to put down the tools and take a break.

A Lot of Help

The landscaping has definitely been a group project.  Not just my wife and I but also our parents, siblings, cousins and friends have chipped in along the way.

You don’t need to go it alone.  I try to help out others by writing this blog and giving away free resources, and there are so many others who have been an enormous help to me even if they don’t know it.  I won’t start listing them because I don’t want anyone to think I’m a name dropper, but also because I don’t want to miss anyone out as well.

Besides it is not just the big names that you’re probably thinking of that have helped me.  You help me too every time you leave a comment, email me a question, or retweet a post.

One Day You’ll Look Back

Every time I walk outside my house I can remember everything that we had to do to get that garden bed looking the way it does, and everything we had to do to get that grass nice and level.  I remember how it all looked when we first started and see the difference today.

I’ve worked hard.  You’ve worked hard.  We’ll all keep on working hard.  And if you keep at it long enough then eventually you get to look back at all the hard work you’ve done, everything you’ve achieved so far, and how much closer you are to the next goals you set out achieve.

And the hard work will seem worth it.  And the work ahead of you will seem a bit easier.

And trust me, thats when it starts to pay off.

Image Credit: Flickr