Usually the problems I faced were related to neglect.  Such as, but hardly limited to:

• Forgetting to open the shades.
• Forgetting to water the plant.
• Watering the plant too much.
• Putting a tropical plant beneath an air-conditioning vent, in summer.

So, the only logical thing to do was to plant a garden!

Hah, I kid, I kid.

In these times, even before the major financial trouble, it helps to keep a garden.  The price of food is insane today, when you can easily grow the very same vegetable in your garden.  Now, I’m no vegetarian, but I’m not going to raise my own animals.  But plants?  Bring it on!

That, and when talking with my parents, we all agreed that it would be nice to have some level of self-sufficiency.  And fresh produce is always nice; it is fresher to pick it, than to go to the store and buy it.

Being a programmer and designer–yes, I am one of those folks who wear both hats–the first thing I did was look for references.  I looked around for books that explain gardening, how to do it better, and so on and so forth.  In the end I bought several books: Square-foot Gardening, Weedless Gardening, and Carrots Love Tomatoes.  From the library I got a book on harvesting vegetables all year.  And so I read and learned from them.

Later I bought heirloom seeds, I’ll talk about GMO and hybrid problems another time, for a small garden.  Given how much time I can give this, plus how much experience I’ve got, I didn’t want to get overwhelmed.  There won’t be huge, plentiful yields or anything–but next year I should have the knowledge I need to double my garden’s size at least.

I’ll get around to posting pictures and articles about what I’m doing (and more importantly, why I’m doing this) weekly.

So there you have it, the green-thumb-less geek has gone to wreak havoc by starting a garden.