Back in 2009 when I started my first blog OneHundredDollarsAMonth.com, it was a simple diary. For myself. A personal chronicle of my garden experiences in my own backyard. A few months earlier we had moved from a .25 acre lot in downtown Puyallup, Washington to a 1.25 acre lot in Gig Harbor, Washington. The second Tacoma Narrows bridge was still under construction and Gig Harbor seemed like a waterfront utopia with properties hidden along the waterfront and winding country roads.

2009 was also the year I discovered the internet could be used for things besides answering emails and selling the my occasional hooked rug on eBay. Up until that point, I really didn’t use our home computer that much.

I happened upon the blogging world for the first time and thought it was incredibly weird that people were writing about their lives AND sharing pictures of themselves and their families online. I mean, ANYONE with computer access could see this right? What a bunch of weirdos.

Eventually I found some blogs I was interested in and starting leaving comments. I was SHOCKED when they replied. Over the course of a few months I met some really cool people with interests similar to my own, and thought what the heck… I might as well start a blog of my own. Which, in hindsight was totally weird thing to do for someone who is a MAJOR introvert.

Fast forward to late 2010. I discovered extreme couponing and went a little off the deep end snatching up every possible box of preservatives I could get my hands on for free. The focus of my blogging stories started to switch from growing food to the insane deals I was scoring for next to nothing at the supermarkets. And it was fun… for a while. Until I realized I missed eating fresh vegetables from my garden every single day. Yes, I was saving boatloads of money, but I was also feeding my family boatloads of garbage. So while I liked saving my family money, after about 2 years of playing the extreme couponing game, I pretty much stopped cold turkey.

I switched gears again. Instead of sharing epic couponing hauls on my blog One Hundred Dollars a Month, I started to write about other things. And well, one thing let to another and over the course of a few years I went from having about 2,500 blog visitors a month to having well over a half million people stop by One Hundred Dollars a Month on a monthly basis. It was nuts.

But it was also awesome. As I interacted with these new readers {that’s you!}, I got requests to do all sorts of different DIY, recipe and tutorial posts. With the increased interest came increased content variety. Suddenly, my simple little diary grew up into a full-blown blog {they grow up so fast, don’t they?!}. I was blogging about everything from foods waste to chickens to money saving tips; Christmas crafts to DIY remodeling projects to bento boxes. And everything in between. And I was loving every second of it.

But, I wanted to get back to basics. I wanted my garden journal back. But I didn’t want to abandon One Hundred Dollars a Month, not in the slightest so….

In 2013, an idea was hatched and Dig for Your Dinner was born. But then senior year came along. And we were considering selling our big house {and obviously the 1.25 acre garden as well} so I put Dig For Your Dinner on hold.

2014 was a year of major change in our household. Our daughter went off to college, we bought a vacation home on the East Coast, we sold our McMansion in the suburbs and downsized by about a third. I wanted to go smaller… way smaller, but with only 28 days to find a house, and a husband who didn’t want to rent while we I found just what we were looking for, we bought the house we currently live in now. Which is fine. I don’t love it by any stretch of the imagination but in the whole scheme of things, it’s probably a perfect fit for this period in our lives.

Our son, who I refer to as Monkey Boy, still lives at home with us {he graduated from high school last summer and now works full-time doing something he LOVES}. Our daughter, The Girl Who Thinks She’s a Bird attends college on the east coast full time. And so here we are, in that awkward in-between stage. The not quite empty nesters, not quite ready to retire part of lives.

So I’m making the most of.

I LOVE gardening. And I want to get back to the day to day garden writing I used to do before blogging became a full time job {which I LOVE by the way}.

I wanted a sort of second home for all the little things that don’t really fit into what One Hundred Dollars a Month has become. But mostly gardening. I was really missing that gardening aspect, so much so that I gathered all of the gardening knowledge I’ve acquired through the years and packed it into 11 monthly {and awesome I might add} gardening eBooks. An eBook for every month of the year, with month-specific planting guides, gardening projects and chores and of course, seasonal recipes.

If you’re looking for all of my very best gardening content in one convenient spot, those monthly gardening eBooks are a must.

Once you’ve read them, stop back here for daily gardening content. I’d love to have you join me on this journey. And I hope you’ll stick around until Dig For Your Dinner becomes a blog about the garden in our forever home. Which, if I have any say {AND I DO} will be a small little cottage on the east coast. Stick with me as I navigate my garden until that cottage garden becomes reality. As it always is, I can promise it will be a sometimes hilarious, sometimes educational, but always awesome adventure as we get our hands dirty, watch those gardens grow and then dig for our dinner.

~Mavis