🌓 when your garden makes you feel like a failure 🌗

plus garden club aug 1st @ 7pm est

Housekeeping: Tomorrow, August 1st, is Virtual Garden Club! At 7pm EST we will hang out for an hour and talk about fall gardens and also more about failure. A good place to come learn what how to have a small fall garden, OR go bigger than you have before — and hear that you aren’t the only one who has felt disappointed in the garden this year. Please note that this is available to paid subscribers and I would be honored to have you give a few dollars each month to support the research, education, and encouragement I work to bring. <3

Here are some the things that have gone wrong in my garden this year:

• I still did not finish setting up irrigation in one of my beds so my dill and parsley bolted immediately literally for the fifth year in a row what is wrong with me

• I got squash vine borers on my zucchini again I love how long this growing season is but my god North Carolina can you give me a break

• I did not put netting in one of my cut flower beds early enough so instead of a 4x8 box jam packed with flowers I have a messy pile of yarrow, feverfew, snapdragons, and weeds

• My cabbage did not head properly because I planted them too late I thought they might anyway lol @ me

• I started 70 Thai Basil seedlings and literally never transplanted them to a bed so they just died in their tray even though it was one of the things I was most excited to grow this year and it was especially to help out some friends which has doubled the guilt

• My chickens ate 3 of my 4 muskmelon seedlings so I still have not gotten a single fruit and honestly I was too tired to care to replant

FAILURE JOURNEY

The first year I began gardening again as an adult, it was like meeting a savior that brought me back to life. The practice was alive, exciting, and I felt hope again. I remember it feeling so innocent. I had a new home, I was finally safe, my tomatoes grew. I made silly mistakes, I diagnosed with google, and laughed at my blind optimism of doing things spontaneously with nothing but intuition.

The second year, it was an intellectual and physical challenge. I wanted to know everything. I wanted to spread my wings and see just how much I could do. It was my escape, my motivation, my way of dealing with existential threats and wondering if I had any valuable skills that I could do with my own two hands. Little failures were scientific experiments I was glad to learn from.

The third year, I started to see all of my mistakes. Novelty wore off from some tasks. I wondered if anything I was doing mattered. I knew so much, and often it felt like none of it mattered. The earth killed what it wanted to kill and I had little to do with it. I felt surely, like all things in my life, this was a phase and I would move on. Then winter came, and by January I learned the difference between being tired and being hopeless. I had just been tired.

The fourth year, I decided I would reinvent my life. Again. The garden, the natural world, would be my way forward. I spent the winter reading and learning about my place in it. The outdoors has always been like poetry to me, but so private. I read and read and read some more and started to see myself as one small but important thread of a very big fabric that needed to continue to be woven. Failures made me less sad, because I knew their inevitability, but instead they caused me self doubt, which felt worse. This was the first year I knew I’d do this forever. This was not a thing I did but a part of who I was, and I got less and less attached to the outcomes.

This year, my failures are less for lack of knowledge, but more for lack of discipline. The garden is my mirror for how well I care for myself. I have learned to be at peace with its wildness, and to ‘plant enough to share.’ I no longer feel anger when the birds eat my berries, or heartbroken when the heavy rains break my foxgloves. I see my own progress in what thrives now after struggling for years, and I let things die more easily without any fanfare. I can see now that the garden was not a malicious test of my ability, but a gift that weaves in and out and back in again, and it will be here every year for me. Yes, I get sad, but there is always another joy quickly. Sometimes it’s just a bad year, and sometimes, I just couldn’t do a task.

As an oldest daughter, an enneagram 5, and an escapee of many Highly Critical Environments, I think about failure and my relationship to it all of the time. I literally never do not think about it. It is exhausting.

And so, some unsolicited advice, with love:

When something dies, send gratitude to your local farmer. When you forget to water on a hot day, be glad you will look back on your life and remember when the very hot summers started. When flea beetles eat holes in all your prettiest kale, realize you are learning for the first time how pesticides have been on all the kale you’ve bought. When you’ve failed three years in a row at growing the same thing, know that the universe is not against you and that you have something real and beautiful and vulnerable and honest to talk about over dinner with a friend that’s about you. Not work or your family - but you.

The feeling of failure changes depends on your idea of success. To earn a harvest, it feels like loss and hopelessness. To achieve a new skill, like stupidity. For the ‘gram, like unworthiness or even anger. To feel escapism, like loneliness. To be self sustaining, like panic. These are just my feelings. Your pairings will be different.

Get the closest piece of paper and make a list of everything you have learned. Progress will never feel like progress unless you look backward.

Study your failure. And look for peace in the little act of caring for living things, regardless of what they are able to give back, because they always will.

See you tomorrow at Club, or in the next newsletter -

Lauren xo

PS. If Club isn’t your jam but you just need to immediately see what your Fall garden schedule is/should be, my dynamic calendar is here.

Rise free from care before the dawn, and seek adventures. Let the noon find thee by other lakes, and the night overtake thee everywhere at home. There are no larger fields than these, no worthier games than may here be played. Grow wild according to thy nature, like these sedges and brakes, which will never become English hay. Let the thunder rumble; what if it threaten ruin to farmers’ crops? That is not its errand to thee. Take shelter under the cloud, while they flee to carts and sheds. Let not to get a living be thy trade, but thy sport. Enjoy the land but own it not. Through want of enterprise and faith men are where they are, buying and selling, and spending their lives like serfs. - Walden