IT WAS 10 years ago that I hit the button on the first version of A Way to Garden dot com, its oddball mission to disseminate “horticultural how-to and woo-woo.” Something like 1,800 blog posts and tens of millions of page views later, I continue to type. Thank you for listening (and for your 110,000 comments or so).

This next week I’ll recap some best-of highlights of the website, and the public-radio show and podcast that came a few years later, and who knows what else of a celebratory nature (like maybe some giveaways). But for now just this:

Scroll all the way down to the bottom of this page to say hello in the comments and tell me something you’ve enjoyed in that time, or some subject you’d like more of. Tell me how long you’ve been reading, if you like.

a little background

THOSE OF YOU who didn’t know me then might not know that starting the website was actually a selfish act—a way for me to (hopefully) rekindle my former garden-writing career. There hadn’t been much time for writing stories in my later corporate years, something I missed when increasing managerial responsibilities at Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, where I was EVP, Editorial Director for internet, books and magazines, took me farther and farther from hands-on creativity. (My About page tells the whole story of my sordid past.)

Against the advice of most sane people, in late 2007 I was dropping out of “success,” and starting fresh. I was moving from a city of skyscrapers—my office faced the Empire State Building and beyond it the entire New York skyline—to Nowheresville, as I like to call my true home here in the Hudson Valley/Berkshires region on the NY-MA-CT border. I was downshifting from managing a team of 180 people to a team of one (if you include me).

Moving, finally fulltime (oh thank you, thank you), to live in the garden I’d been making on weekends for about 20 years then, and longing for the other five days of each week.

a little secret

BESIDES THE blog posts, since I got here I wrote a whole book about making a fresh start (“And I Shall Have Some Peace There”) and another about the garden and its lessons, both practical and philosophical (“The Backyard Parables”).

Don’t tell my publisher I told you so, but last month I handed in what will be the 21st anniversary edition of my very first book, “A Way to Garden,” to come out in March 2019, new photos and vastly updated text and all. But that’s a secret, and again: You didn’t hear it from me.

Anyhow: Won’t you offer some feedback in the comments about what you’ve enjoyed here, or what you’d like more of?—and maybe how long you’ve been visiting. Meanwhile, happy 10th anniversary to us.