My Annual Holy-Crap-I-Need-To-Put-Plants-in-the-Ground Post
On panic gardening
Before you read on, just noting again that I’m working with MakeWith Hardware & Learning Center on virtual preparedness workshops that should hopefully launch in Fall 2025. And we want to hear from you to get a sense of what we should offer with this very quick survey. Thanks already to the people who responded already showing us that this IS something folks want. Stay tuned for more details soon!
It’s been awhile since I’ve talked about gardening. For a period of time in the early part of this project, it felt like that’s all I wrote and thought about in this project. Each summer I develop a new obsession around gardening and I attempt to love it. And now we’re back again in planting season for me to report that yet again, I failed to do anything fancy with gardening. What I mean is that I didn’t germinate my own seeds inside, sing beautiful love songs to them under a sunlamp, plan out a super cool amazing regenerative garden, and plant at just the right time for this region.
I did almost the same thing I always do: contemplate planning out a super cool amazing regenerative garden in February, promptly forget about said garden until the sun comes out for those unseasonably warm days in March, forget again about it until the sun comes back out in April and then panic-buy a bunch of stuff from our school’s plant sale and then when those plants arrive in May, I do a mad rush purchase of the very picked over seedlings at the garden center. The one change to past years is that I did not over-purchase and then mash a bunch of things into a too small space. I bought just enough.
I realize that I did meet the general deadline of Mother’s Day as the ideal time to plant. But I always, always feel behind when I see everyone in my neighborhood out in their garden digging and planting contentedly when I hadn’t even moved our tomato pots from the spot they’d been overwintering. I always marvel at the joy that people have when they’re working in their gardens. I don’t mind it. It even like it for a half-hour or so of that first planting day. But I just can’t muster up the full-fledged joy about it in the beginning of the season. It’s more a feeling of guilt for not following through with my becoming-a-super-gardener goal of this project.
Food and growing one’s own food holds such a large place in my mind around preparedness that I often feel like I’m falling short when it comes to gardening. Not that my tiny little yard and three garden boxes would feed us for a season (let alone a whole week), but there’s a sense of comfort knowing that if I had a good grasp of gardening, I could feasibly scale up. And also if I got good at gardening and it gave me as much joy as it does so many other people, I’d enjoy this task in the after-times. But the garden has always felt like a visible obligation to me. I love the idea of it, I love being able to grow my own veggies, but it never turns out how I hoped and I don’t get that daily joy of just being in my garden space as so many people do.
Then, of course, the garden does eventually get growing and the joy I get from the garden grows along with the leaves and the plants and the veggies that I put in the ground. I lauded my movement into becoming a gardener in 2023 and I was very proud of myself. But then I find myself in the same spot every spring where I feel like I’ve fallen behind. Yet, I still did it. I still put plants in the ground and I still get excited at each inch of growth.
I write all of this to say that if you’re like me and like the idea of gardening and even gardening on occasion, it does NOT mean you’re NOT a gardener. And it doesn’t mean failure. I don’t think I’ll be the food grower in whatever after-times commune I end up in. But at least I’ll be able to help out from time to time.
It feels so good to know I am not the only one who gardens this way! My husband and I are trying to push ourselves forward one small step at a time each year. Several years back we totally failed at trying to start seeds indoors and gave up on seeds altogether until last year, when we planted snap peas outside and they turned into actual food. This year, we started in early spring, again with seeds that could go directly in the ground, and we added beets and carrots. We got only one carrot sprout, but the beets seem OK. Given our ages, our slow growing of skill, and our seeming inability to do any of this in a more consistent or methodical way (which you're helping me see is likely about not loving it the way others do), I doubt we'll ever be able to really feed ourselves through out efforts. But like you, I also feel a thrill when we see things growing, and I have to believe that what skill we are building will not be wasted. Thanks so much for this. I loved it.
Finally got mine in this weekend too! Totally missed putting in sweet peas this year, which kinda breaks my heart—they’re my favorites. But hey, we did it!