Brunette Gardens over four springs
With evidence of my many imperfections.
An insightful reader made me think about how our online personas might not jibe with who we are on the inside: As someone with a loud inner critic and a legacy of self-loathing, I’m so busy trying to show the world how “good” I am that I forget the unworthiness I see in spades might not appear at all to others.
Kathryn’s layered, complex compliment sent me searching around in the archive, and what I found over the past four years is a writer who’s slooooowly opened up to sharing more of her imperfections since launching this newsletter back in the fall of ‘22. Not just imperfections, but this winter when I came out as a victim of childhood rape and sexual assault, that required dredging around in deeply rooted shame, not at all fair for me to feel since I was the victim, but there all the same.
I offer the below as evidence of this evolution, plus it’s a roundup of hopefully helpful spring posts for those of you who are still gardening, or just like to read about it! 😉
One of my most popular posts is about the tiny triumphs and hefty travails of attempting to homestead in the city—during the pandemic, the George Floyd riots, and an uptick in crime, including not one but several drive-by shootings.
The first of your baby greens might be shooting up out of the soil now, so maybe you feel like eating some salad. With this post, I wanted to empower you toward developing your own mad skills instead of relying on recipes from food influencers, after I got burned out comparing myself to elite food influencers, including a bad interaction with an orange-check salad bully on this very platform.
When you click on the above link, you’ll also see how you can grow more celery using the remnant of a supermarket stalk. That’s a cool trick to show your friends!
HOWEVER, if even growing and making your own salad sounds like too much work, you’re not alone.
You’ve never been alone in that regard, not here at Brunette Gardens.
Check out this post from two years ago for further evidence that I’ve never been perfect…
…unless being a perfect mess counts…
This is what my closet looks like right now. It’s been this way since last May.
Yeah, we’ve been literally living out of boxes for nearly a year now.
We bought the house thinking we’d take this odd, windowless former man cave at the back of the basement and make it into a walk-in closet. Unfortunately, the bids we’ve received from contractors put the cost of customized shelving between $12,000-$23,000. For a closet!
So, IKEA it is.
For more on the subject of my past imperfections, I give you this post from last March, which covers everything you ever wanted to know about trying and failing to free-range a small flock of hens in the city.
A lot of homesteaders these days are bringing in much-needed side income by selling their lifestyle to others online. There’s nothing wrong with that; more power to them; but the vast majority of their audiences simply cannot replicate their model.
I got sucked into Justin Rhodes’ chickshaw design when I was looking for a mobile coop I wouldn’t have to bend over to move and literally googled “mobile coop with high center of gravity” and got his.
I fell in love with it at first sight, but I was seriously deluded: It turned out to be a terrible option. You can read the gory details in that “folly” post.
Since writing “folly” and then moving to a rural area, I’ve befriended a local farmer who uses the chickshaw with electric fencing, just as I tried to do, and it’s successful for her. The differences are: She has a barn she can wheel the whole thing into on very cold nights, her homestead is much bigger than my 1/4-acre, so she can rotate the flock around to fresh forage, and she also has a separate henhouse. So she’s using it as a daytime-only pasture shelter, which as I’ve said is the only legitimate use for the chickshaw, something I finally figured out after three years of trial and error.
Compare “folly” to the first time I mentioned diving into animal husbandry, back in this post from spring 2023, where you can also see the chickshaw, brand spankin’ new.
By the way, I buried the lede on that post, a mistake I have often made over the four years I’ve been writing on Substack. I should have led with the chickens, right? Maybe that’s why this newsletter has always cost me money rather than made any?
Also, I must be obsessed with witch hazel, or else out of original ideas, since I used it for my slug photo both in 2023 and 2024.
Hindsight is of course 20/20, and I have that well-oiled machine for self-criticism, so let’s shift gears… and thereby retrain our brains! One thing I’ve done well over the past four years is spread the love by bringing on plenty of other voices, whether interview, guest post, or podcast convo. I’ll close this post with two of my favorites, just right for spring.
In what ways does who YOU are on the inside not match up with how others perceive you?