First, find an interesting picture.

Second, decide what kind of story it’s going to tell.

This particular picture has several possible stories in it.

Front and center is the story of my second children’s book, The Halloween Hare, which is coming up on its one-year anniversary. Book-aversary? Is that what they call it?

I’m doing a little bit to promote it this fall because when you write a book around a holiday, people will generally buy it around that holiday.

My tagline this year is “No ghosts, ghouls, or goblins…” because many of us don’t go in for the scare-yourself-sick kind of Halloween. For us, it’s about the candy! And the garden! And a sweet little bunny who has found his calling in… well… I don’t want to give away the story completely.

I could add to this blog post at this point that the book won a first-place award for children’s books from the Woman’s Press Club of Indiana and then an honorable mention from the National Federation of Press Women but that’s not really the story today.

Another story in this picture could be about chrysanthemums. If you don’t see mums for sale everywhere, you aren’t looking. Dee and I just talked about mums in (on?) this week’s podcast episode of The Gardenangelists.

(If you aren’t sure how to listen to a gardening podcast on your smartphone, I wrote a post with instructions you might want to check out. Let me know if it was helpful.)

(We also send out a newsletter for every podcast episode. You should subscribe to it even if you don’t listen to podcasts because we try to make it interesting all on its own.)

(And as a bonus for this week’s podcast episode, we uploaded a segment of the recording on YouTube.)

A third story might be about where I buy my mums.

I buy them at the same place where I buy all my pansies and violas! (Court’sYard and Greenhouse)

See what I did there? I switched flowers from mums to pansies and violas, which gave me the perfect opportunity to add another picture.

And that’s how you write a gardening blog post. One picture leads to a story, leads to another story, which suggests the need for another photo, and on it goes.

Thanks for reading to the end!

(By the way, as of the time I am posting this, Amazon is showing a price of $13.99 on the hardback edition of The Halloween Hare. It’s normally $16.99. As per usual, “your mileage may vary.” I don’t know what price you’ll see!)