Gardening has become a new hobby ...and life mentor for many.
If you’re like me, and you’ve had some time over the last few months to invest into the outdoors, then maybe you’ve also learned a few new things about life and how much can be related to your every day life.
The pandemic has kept me home like many others, but it hasn’t kept me from being outside. I’m fortunate enough to have a small urban space outside to plant a few veggies and flowers. During the lockdown, I’ve spent way more time than I originally expected to on it.. and it’s not really a bad thing. I started working from home, and while work was notably more involved than I thought a WFH situation would be like, I did find time in-between schedules to tend to my little patch of dirt. I’m no longer working and started hunting for a new job, but I still manage my garden for the winter and I’m continuing to reap the profit from it.
Like all things, once you spent a good number of hours and days on it, you start seeing benefits and thinking about how it relates to the grand scheme of things (or maybe it’s just me). Here’s the top 7 things I learned while gardening and taking care of my plant children.
1. Always remember to water
Seems silly. They’re plants, it should be secondary nature to water them. But there’s been a few days where either work or just the overwhelming feeling of lockdown got to me. I let the wrong things take my time and I forget the basics. That applies to not just my garden, but to life in general. It’s easy to forget to address the basics and your plants (and life) suffers because of it. You can’t grow without the proper conditions, similarly you can’t expect life to progress without the proper conditions.
So take a break, drink some water and spend a few minutes a day addressing your basic needs.
This can come in the form of having a proper balanced meal, an extra nap throughout the day, or even catching up with friends (socially distanced, of course). As humans in the modern age, we have relatively few basic needs. The biological basics, shelter, food, water, air etc, are largely covered and sometimes it feels like asking too much to take care of other aspects of our health, whether it’s emotional or mental.
2. Sometimes a touch of fertilizer helps in a big way
Watering your plants does a great deal to keep them alive. But… being alive isn’t really the same as thriving. To have a successful garden, sometimes it requires a little more. Plants have the capacity to grow in the most absurd places. I’ve had stray plants come up between cracks and on bare rocks. Don’t even get me started on the weeds… They are some of the most persistent lifeforms on this planet.
But the truth is they are not what I would call thriving. To thrive is to reach a point where not just your needs are met, but you are able to give back to the environment. In the case of plants, this can be in the form of flowers, fruits, or more. For people, we need to have the right types of nourishment to reach a point where we can provide for the people around us.
This requires proper awareness of the things we intake. The type of physical, intellectual, and emotional fertilizer that allows us to reach a thriving state.
For my garden, I’ve been able to pick up some quality compost from the city, and I’ve been supplementing it with organic matter from our kitchen scraps. Occasionally, I also use an organic fertilizer to improve any component I might have missed. (I added an affiliate link to the one I specifically use!)
I’ll be the first to admit, I am still working on finding the right mix of nutrients to supplement my life. To allow myself to reach the potential and thrive accordingly.
3. Pruning and manually removing those suckers makes for better growth
We all hate to do it. Why? Because it feels wasteful. It feels unnecessary. It feels like we’re getting rid of the things we’re trying to grow! Picking off suckers? Why wouldn’t we want more branches, more leaves, more growth?
Well, Yes… but we want productive and meaningful growth. Suckers, or side shoots, might seem like a good idea at first, but when you think about the whole of the plant, it might not be beneficial in the long term. The plant can be seen as a simple creature. They have no idea what the grand scheme of things are. We want them to produce beautiful flowers or delicious produce — — to eat.
The plants themselves just want to grow and reproduce uninhibited. They don’t know the most efficient way to do things, so we as caretakers, have to guide them.
People are similar in this regard, they don’t always see the big picture or the goal of their current situation. The exception is we have much longer lifespans and we have the luxury of making our own choices, but we have to acknowledge and understand what needs to be pruned out of our lives. The unnecessary stress from that dead end job, that toxic relationship, or those unhealthy snacking habits. These are things we have to either realize through experience or through therapy, friends, or family. These are things that aren’t necessary for us to produce our own fruitful results.
4. Harvest your fruits frequently and at the right time
Plants have produce things at a steady pace, but that’s only if you harvest the fruits regularly and at the right time. This means that sometimes you pick the fruits earlier than you think. Take peppers, for example, in my experience, the first few peppers take forever to ripen and mature.
However, if you pick them sooner, they actually encourage more pepper production that’ll lead to larger yields later in the season.
This sort of tricks the plants to produce more to compensate and stay productive throughout the season. People are similar in that once they reach a few good products, they tend to slow down, unless you take away the products and force them to keep creating and producing. It leave us feeling a need to keep staying productive. We see this concept used a lot in marketing, where we just give enough to get you going and constantly wanting more, but in reality, we can use this idea for ourselves to keep our productive up.
5. Look below the leaf lines
A healthy plant is a plant that is healthy throughout. Twice this last season, I’ve made a mistake by not lookin beyond the leaf line. I didn’t bother looking below what looked like a healthy plant. Underneath the foliage, I would have seen mildew, or pests eating away the structure. As people, we have to take the time to look below the surface. This is especially true with our friends and families. We have to look beyond that surface level and look deep into the base and understand what problems might be hidden.
The truth is, in both plant care and people care, we very often are focus on ourselves so much that we miss out on things that are important for the health our relationships.
I hope, especially after the whole pandemic concludes, we’ll be able to be more human and care about each other more.
6. Letting go
Sometimes… things don’t work out well. I can attest to that 100% because heck, I had plans for 2020 to be far more successful and exciting. But with things ending the way they have… I have to learn to accept and let go. In the garden, sometimes things happen.
You can’t save every plant; you can try your best, and make sure to try to get as much out of your hard work as possible, but sometimes, thing happen.
Those extra days of rain that you didn’t expect, or that stray cat that got too curious. You have to learn to accept things and make the best of the situation.
7. Learning to save for the future
Things are never fully guaranteed so we should make plans for the future. One of the main things that all gardeners should consider is to see if you can seed save after every season. This is critical for 1. making sure you have your favorite plants year after year, and 2. maintaining your own seed lines for future generations.
Of course, this might change if you’re using seeds that hybridized or engineered to produce one specific breed. But to tell you the truth, even some of the commercial seeds can be saved and regrown year after year.
You might not get the perfect result each year, but after several generations, you can actually develop your own variety.
One of the first tomato seeds I’ve started with were gifted to me by a friendly neighbor. I took his fruit and advice to save the seeds and now I have a pretty unique variety that I grow every other year. Not only are the seeds extremely viable, but they produce some delicious fruit every time. I try to plant one or two every year, with an occasional gap year between each planting.
Life works pretty much the same way. When we are unsure about the future, we should and ought to save so that we may be more prepared to deal whatever may happen in the next few months.
This leads me to the next thing. Everyone’s who taken the time to read through everything so far, if you’re interested in gardening or having your own plant buddy, I’m opening up a quick signup list.
For everyone who subscribes and signs up to my blog, I want to send out seeds from my collection to help you start.
I know this isn’t a gardening blog per se, but I want others to get into gardening and getting outdoors more. I’ll start detailing a little about seed starting and indoors gardening in the next few months.
Just click through below to subscribe!
