Why am I doing this? Not for the money.

I have to ask myself, why am I willing to risk ruining a personal passion by committing to posting about it? 

It's pretty clear to me that money will not be my motivator.  From an economic point of view, I am an unemployed housewife, and I have been for for almost twenty years. I stopped doing a job that paid a lot more than I can hope to make in this field. 

I garden and think about gardens all the time with no renumeration. I can't even say that my nice home garden has increased the value of my house because the maintenance would put off a lot of buyers.

"Gardener for hire" is a difficult career. It's a lot of very hard work and it can be lonely. Hiring and training a crew is not a good fit for me - some people are great bosses for a variety of workers, but I am not one of them. 

I think I would really enjoy helping gardeners select plants, but they would need to really care. Specialty nurseries close down all the time, and real plant people don't buy all that much because every plant is an investment or a long term experiment. I would also have a very hard time not encouraging my customers to propagate the plants they already have.

Designing gardens has potential, but its very sales intensive. I am not interested in changing my taste to coincide with whatever is selling. I really don't want to constantly explain why I am right (some people call it arguing). I am not interested in supplying "instant landscapes" and I don't care where someone wants their grill. I love to design and draw, but I think my real design skill is in creating the vignettes that don't photograph particularly well and that take a bit of time to appreciate, so they probably won't sell. I like to help my friends think through design tweaks, plant choices, composting, but that is a lot less work and commitment (on both sides) than offering a real design plan. 

A large part of the market is people who want a garden just to satisfy others, whether the others are sporty kids, demanding HOAs, snobby acquaintances, or the Joneses. They have plenty of resources available to them and they aren't going to suddenly start looking for a gardening blog. So the market is not going to motivate me to blog, podcast, or vlog.  

I hope that I will reach someone who sees a garden and wants to be involved. Whether this person is an absolute beginner or has been involved with gardens for years, I hope I can teach them something new, allow them to consider a different perspective, or even reject my point of view and further embrace their own. 

The only problem is that I will have to do this consistently for a long time without any idea if I am going to be successful.