Sometimes I miss the early days of this blog and my life here at home playing with my own plants. With my bed nearby in the house I could crawl in and sleep, and my cats were always by my side. Back then I had little to no income, and my parents provided the monthly payments for the roof over our heads after my first husband and I married.

I wasn’t well and I was a mess.

I came into all of this with some serious privilege, but I was humiliated by it to the core of my being. I wanted nothing more than to be on my own and to be as strong as I could possibly be, and it is funny now to look back at how I got to feeling like this today. I’m proud of the journey and grateful for those I’ve met who’ve helped me.

But today, after 5 years, I’ve finally been released from physical therapy, and for me, this is a huge milestone. I will always deal with chronic ongoing pain from injuries sustained during two falls down stairs, but in a sense, this is yet another new beginning. I feel tonight like I get to try again at a few things.

But it is a struggle to earn a living doing what I do in the way that I do it. I have to do it this way because I’m still kind of handicapped although I don’t say that often. Nowadays my heart is filled with so much happiness and pleasure from being able to live as I need to live that I feel badly when I talk to friends and they’re feeling low.

My life though is always growing, changing, blooming, drying, being harvested, and germinated all over again. It keeps morphing into different things. I too am growing, changing, blooming, aging, and one day I will be gone like many of the thousands of plants that I’ve germinated.

Like my cats, I guess I needed routine.

My life revolves around seeds.

That’s pretty much the way it has been, is, and will be.

Last year I closed my online seed shop on a popular site. It hurt to do so, but the company had advertised my goods on a third party site and I was flooded with people who didn’t understand that many of my seeds were not easy to grow. I couldn’t weed out the difficult customers, they wasted my time by repeatedly telling me they wanted all of their money back after telling me again and again that they had not followed the directions.

Next time around my shop policies will be stronger and clearly stated.

NOT MY PROBLEM. No Returns. Read the descriptions AND the directions next time.

It was a time suck, and I’m not good at customer service when customers are NOT understanding that I’m a woman working hard, under unusual circumstances, to do what I do. I work more than full-time between the nurseries, seed sales, plants sales, and garden coaching/design work.

At the time that I closed the old shop, I knew I’d open a shop again, but it would be my own site. While I have not yet reached that goal, it will happen this fall. Once again, I will be selling seeds. They will be in small batches, but they will be fresh, harvested here at home, or they’ll be from gardens I know, or from friends’ gardens.

I really miss being a seed seller.

Observing, collecting, and cleaning, can be a lot of fun if you’re like me. It can also be tedious if you’re not like me. Potting up my babies, after seed batches have germinated and been grown on for a bit, is empowering. It’s a skill that comes to us from the center of our being.

Sure, I don’t grow lots of food from seed, but my skills come to me from my relatives who worked on their own farms, or whom toiled on leased land. I spend my days feeling connected to their lives, and to the rhythm of my own.

Moving forward I will continue to learn. I will continue to grow during ensuing seasons. Sometimes crops will fail, but it is life, and that is to be expected.

And while I don’t hybridize plants often, I’m learning from friends who do, and I intend to work harder at that since it’s not so difficult for me. I just need to try more often. And I intend to work harder to pollinate and collect seeds from rare and unusual plants in my own collection in an effort to better understand, share, and conserve them.

Seeds matter.

So let’s start the process all over again and stay on track.

Reap what you sow.