Changes Update

I spent twenty-seven years farming the Sacramento Valley before I retired, and if there’s one thing that stays with you from that life, it’s a low tolerance for machinery that doesn’t earn its keep. So when I noticed part of my own writing routine had turned into exactly that, I got rid of it.

Some context if you’re new here: I write Gardener of Life, a little operation covering food, health, and technology from the vantage point of someone who spent most of his life growing things and paying attention. A few months in, I had enough real experience to see what was working and what wasn’t. So I made some changes.

The biggest one — I dropped a weekly recap post I’d built in called the Harvest Digest. It sounded sensible on paper: a tidy Sunday ledger of everything I’d written that week. But it wasn’t telling anyone anything they couldn’t already see by following along, and it was costing me a morning I’d rather spend on writing that actually mattered. Gone, not shelved.

I also cleaned up how things get republished elsewhere. This piece, and pieces like it, used to land on different days on different platforms with a Sunday post tying it all together. Now everything goes out the same day, off the same source material — but written separately for each place, not copy-pasted. You’re reading the version written close to the original. Elsewhere, it gets a full rewrite for someone who’s never come across me before.

There’s a personal, story-driven strand of what I write — the Sagewood stuff, old friendships, the parts of the farm that never made it into a nutrition post — and that’s found a steadier home now too, instead of getting swept into the recap I just cut.

I also retired the automated sign-off I’d been using at the bottom of each piece and started adding it by hand. Slower, but it means I look over each post one more time before it goes anywhere, which isn’t the worst habit for a man to pick up.

None of this changes what I’m writing about or why. It’s just less machinery between the thinking and the page — and in my experience, that’s usually the direction worth moving in.