3 Lessons from a Shitty Gardener

I started gardening recently (mostly as a result of a bad deal I made with my landlord) and it’s turned out to be a surprisingly fruitful way to spend my time.

This summer has been incredibly challenging for me with multiple work, self, and family issues all imploding simultaneously. Having this nurturing activity with (relatively) short feedback loops and visual reward indicators might genuinely be the only thing holding my mental health together right now.

Gardening is a forcing function to be reflective, improve my understanding of the world around me, breathe unfiltered air, untether from my devices, get a little dirty, experiment with physical space, and take in some sun all at the same time.

I now viscerally understand why the Call to Agriculture is such a trope.

Not only do I really appreciate the tactile aspect of it (which the military man in me misses now that I’m a full time computer man), but it also highlights personal patterns of behavior that I (with the benefit of hindsight) clearly understood intellectually, but not practically.

I’m trying to accept that it’s really tough to process the narrative beats of your life while actively living them.

Life seems to move too quickly, but also somehow too slowly for us to notice when it’s going wrong.

Gardening lets me direct and watch my soap opera at the same time.

And in the garden, my weaknesses show up with embarrassing clarity.

1. Pruning is Care

I don’t like to hurt things.

As a former barrel-chested freedom fighter, I have a weird relationship with violence.

I am fundamentally very comfortable with it and yet very uncomfortable with my body’s somatic indifference to a thing from which most people recoil.

As a result, I have a tendency to intentionally, preemptively (dare I say pathologically) avoid doing actions that may hurt or inconvenience anyone.

When I started gardening, I started to squint at this behavior and how it might not be serving me.

Plants need pruning.

Without pruning, plants often grow paradoxically worse.

They waste energy sending nutrients to diseased, dead, or damaged portions of themselves. They grow into “natural”, but perhaps more brittle or crowded shapes which weaken the plant. They usually yield less fruit or flowers. Their leaves compete with different parts of themselves for sun and other resources.

Over-pruning weakens the plant, of course, but under-pruning can set the plant up for failure.

In a way, every cut is a choice that tells the plant “put your limited resources here, not there”.

It’s hard not to find the metaphor in that.

When I look at all the little things I let myself do and accumulate and hold as I spread every bit of myself across the infinite and myriad internet and beyond, I see the plant with fading blooms that I didn’t snip off today because they were pretty yesterday and it makes me sad that they’re not what I remember them to be anymore.

Cutting off the dead or old or no-longer-serving-you stuff is the best way to focus your finite energy on the stuff you truly want and need.

It’s not violence to remove those unhelpful pieces of yourself that you carry.

Pruning is care.

2. Even the Same Things Grow at Different Rates

I’m impatient.

I want my successes to happen now and I want them to happen without any work.

Fortunately, I already know this about myself and I still exert effort despite the tragedy of returns requiring cost.

Unfortunately, the inconsistent reality of outputs given consistent inputs still grinds my gears to no end.

It’s annoying as hell that the same seeds from the same seed packet in the same soil won’t grow at the same rate.

No matter how diligent you are about cross-checking water levels and sunlight exposure and fertilizer nutrients and everything else, the same plants right next to each other will behave slightly differently as they germinate and grow and bloom.

It was rigged from before you were even born.

The seeds came from different parents and have different genetic potentials. Or maybe they were the similar but something crunched one in the packet at the store. Or maybe all was well, but a squirrel stepped on its little stalk overnight and you never noticed.

Or maybe a thousand something else’s.

The why only matters as much as you need it to. Sometimes you need it to matter because there’s a pattern that can help you in the long run. Sometimes you don’t need it to matter because it’s just a manifestation of the minutiae of the randomness of life’s process.

That’s how your days work too if you’re paying attention.

The same breakfast hits different from morning to morning. Sometimes your dependable sleep routine will fail you. Every 60 minute focus block includes a roll of the cosmic dice of productivity, peace, and progress.

Stochasticity always gets a vote.

This means that the all-important inputs you painstakingly (or not so painstakingly) try to control aren’t all-powerful.

Even under perfect conditions, everything grows at different rates. Even if it’s the same thing done over and over and over again.

3. Water Daily, Dummy

This might be the most annoyingly overpublished idea on the internet, but there’s a reason everybody keeps writing about it.

Habitual progress dominates bursty effort 69 times out of 100. Perhaps even 420 times.

That’s not novel or interesting, but it is important.

The interesting thing is what happens when you do manage to water your plants daily.

You start to notice better. You pause and reflect and hold the garden in your thoughts more easily. You create space to see and turn the images in your mind’s eye and you eventually recognize the microcosms within the macrocosms.

You elevate the act of watering into something much closer to the act of contemplation.

Eventually, a routine becomes the meditative transition into focused reverence of the Thing.

And this reverence helps you realize that some critter dug up a corner of your flowerbed when you weren’t looking. Or that some of your plants don’t actually need water every day. Or that you should’ve removed the bit of thatch completely instead of just breaking it up before you planted some seed.

Watering daily isn’t about the watering.

It’s about all of the stuff around the watering that your brain picks up by the quiet parsing of repeated patterns.

You know this. I know this. Yet here we are conveniently forgetting to water the things we care about.

No matter what your Thing is, watering it daily will uncover a facet of it that no other action except repetition can reveal.

So remember to water daily, dummy.

Thanks for hanging out for a little while.

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