Hopefully, you followed Machaelle's wise advice and picked something simple for your first soil-less garden!

If you are still batting around ideas for your project, or you're not sure about how to state your DDP, we have included some examples below to help you along.

First, it's time to learn about the team you will be working with — your soil-less garden coning!

The word "coning" is used to describe the balanced vortex of conscious energy you create when you connect to your team members. You can think of a coning as the coolest conference call ever.

Your Soil-less Garden Coning

When you create a soil-less garden, you are choosing to work in conscious partnership with nature to achieve a goal in balance.

That balance starts with the coning structure — two parts nature intelligence and two parts human intelligence. Here, you'll learn the basics of a 4-point coning, and some of the differences between the team members.

• Watch Chapters 4, 5 and 6 of the DVD, Working with Nature in Soil-less Gardens. It's a little more than an hour of workshop. We suggest you break it into a few different viewings throughout the coming week. This talk is chock full of information and insight from Machaelle and you're going to want to pay attention!

• Open your Perelandra Soil-less Garden Companion and read pages 17-25, "SLG Four-Point Conings." Yes, it's more than a few pages. It's all of Chapter 2, but the coning is your foundation for this work. In addition to learning about the team, and how to open a coning, you will learn valuable points about how to keep yourself functioning within the coning as the leader of this project.

If you feel overwhelmed or confused, come back and read this:
You do not have to fully comprehend how a coning works in order to get started and be successful with a soil-less garden. This isn't an intellectual exercise. You are learning to think and function differently. And most of that learning will come while you're doing it.

We're in this together!

Soon you're going to put your new knowledge of conings to use by activating your first soil-less garden project! So if you're waffling on what your first project should be, you still have a little time to decide before our next post in this series.

We often hear from folks learning this process who feel like they're hanging out in unknown territory, all on their own. They wonder, "Are there really other people out there doing this?"

That's why we welcome you all to share your DDP with us, so we can share them (anonymously) with everyone following this series, and answer with a resounding, "Oh, yes there are!"

Examples of Good Beginner Projects

Thanks to those of you who bravely tell us your project DDPs! Our favorites are:

I want to learn to muscle test myself and surrogates easily, proficiently and accurately. I want to develop the ability to clearly discern when the circuit tests strong for "Yes" and weak for "No." I want to obtain true answers to my questions whether I like the answers or not.

And:

I'd like to bake 4 loaves of delicious French bread to bring to my friend's pot-luck dinner party next Saturday (in 10 days). At least one loaf needs to be gluten free.

Here are a bunch more fantastic project ideas for beginners:

• Restore an antique sewing machine
• Learning kinesiology, and how to test well
• Rearrange and redecorate the living room
• Plan and host a board-game night for myself and five friends
• Take an affordable, long-weekend mini-vacation
• Establish a composting system for my food scraps and biodegradable house-hold waste.
• Clean and organize my 10-year-old son's closet
• Help my 15-year-old daughter clean and organize her closet
• Transition all of the lights in my home to LED
• Build a new indoor habitat for my three adult painted turtles that will accommodate their needs and growth over the next five years
• Prepare for an exam

If you have no idea what this is about, but you're intrigued, start at the beginning of our Soil-less Garden Series here.

If you feel overwhelmed, get stuck or have questions about these instructions, call our Question Line. We enjoy helping you through blocks, and keeping the steps manageable and simple.

Question Hot Line
1-540-937-3679
Wednesdays, 10-8 ET

The Soil-less Garden Series