Getting organized in the garden

When I was a beginning gardener my garden was often — maybe even usually — a mess. For me, youth and orderliness were poles apart. Once I couldn’t find my shovel because I had hung it up in the tool shed where it belonged. I didn’t know whether to be proud or embarrassed when I found it.

If I went to a nursery, I often came back with whatever caught my eye. Once I got home, it was about a fifty-fifty chance those plants would be forgotten until they were on the verge of death. Then the guilt would set in. There were times I felt unqualified to garden. But as a writer for the Seattle Weekly, writing garden columns was part of my paycheck, so I felt obliged to keep at it. Plus, on good days I loved it. And every day I was learning more.

My real problem was that my beginner’s vegetable garden was bigger than my capacity to cook, eat, can or freeze everything that grew in it. One year, I grew enough tomatoes to feed an army, navy and air force. I canned about a hundred jars of them. Then I made a lot of tomato juice. My dad said it made excellent bloody Marys. Then I made ketchup. It took years to consume it all.

That big garden also grew a lot of weeds. In the past, I had cleaned up the house before company came. Now I felt obliged to weed the garden before they came too. When I didn’t get it done, I felt inadequate. The next year I made the garden smaller. And the next year, smaller yet.

Then, just when I started to think I was becoming competent, fusarium wilt wrecked my tomatoes. Aphids invaded the cabbages, and worms ate their roots. Flea beetles cut tidy little holes in every potato leaf. Gardening became combat, and I was on the losing side.

It took several years to reconcile with all the little creatures that competed with me for food to eat. Sometimes they won; sometimes I did. Eventually I came to see we’re all just doing what our species do as we fly around in circles on this planet. (That’s a fact I’m reminded of by this week’s Artemis II mission around the moon.)

Now, finally, there’s equilibrium in my gardening life, not because I’m perfectly organized, but because I’ve accepted that I am not in charge. There will always be more weeds to pull; there will always be times when things get messy and out of control; there will always be both catastrophes and triumphs.

A smarter, saner gardener might have figured all this out in a year or two, but it took me a long time. The point is that even small failures in the garden can provoke feelings of inadequacy, incompetence, and inability to live in peace with the natural world.

Far too often, people tell me that “plants just don’t grow for me,” or “I just don’t have a green thumb.” That, of course, is balderdash. Plants are not cognitively equipped to have an opinion about you.

We, however, are cognitively equipped to quit criticizing ourselves. We can simply resolve to find guilt-free joy in everything that grows in our gardens.

Peace doesn’t mean perfection. It just means playing our part in the whole drama of seed to fruit, spring to fall, and winter to spring again. And again, and again and again.

Jill Severn writes from her home in Olympia, where she grows vegetables, flowers, and a small flock of chickens. She loves conversation among gardeners. Start one by emailing her at  jill@theJOLTnews.com.