Almost exactly a year ago, I wrote a post on how much gardening envy had taken over my life — and while the post closed with me saying, “I guess I’ll keep reading stuff and looking at stuff when I can and maybe next year…? No, definitely next year,” I didn’t really believe it.

I said it because it sounded better than admitting I would probably forget all about it or just go through the same garden envy/lust combo again the next year (and probably for years to come, for all I knew).

I did not —I could not — imagine that within a year I would be presenting a workshop on how to gain access to land for community gardening, which is exactly what I was doing this past Saturday at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s annual Making Brooklyn Bloom conference.

It was fun and frankly exhausting. For an introvert like me, meeting dozens of new people and giving a presentation and answering questions to a roomful of people is on a par with… maybe not a marathon, but at least a 10K run.

But I did it — and I still got up the next day, went to the garden and hauled wheelbarrows full of topsoil around, finally filling in my garden plot and getting it ready to plant.