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What a Garden Can Teach You

Suzie Durigon

Suzie Durigon

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I found this quote on Pinterest…

I love it.

Maybe it’s because I love to putter in the garden and I have realized over the past few years that it is quite therapeutic.  But it really got me thinking about what gardening has really taught me.

I am relatively new at this and I am always amazed at what comes from persistence and patience and old fashioned hard work.  But while I plan and dig and pray, I realized that the most important thing I have learned is that there is always a way.

If something doesn’t grow in a certain spot, maybe it needs more sun (so move it).  Or, maybe it doesn’t like the soil (so enhance it).  Or maybe the variety is too delicate to withstand our winters (so research it and either find a hardier variety or venture into cold framing).  There truly is always a way.

So I thought if I documented everything I tried to grow, it would help me move forward into the next season and become a better gardener.

I bought a farm journal.  It’s actually just a notebook with a cute picture on the front of it but, when I opened it, this is what was written:
I suck at knitting but everything else is true…a farmgirl at heart.  Like, I wanna be that little girl with the chicks in her lap…
I drew out my garden plot  and made notes about what I planted in each section.
Then I kept track of varieties and what grew well and what didn’t.  The bad part was that all of my garden tags flew away during a wind storm and I couldn’t tell which tomatoes were successful and which ones sucked…
Then I thought that if I looked like a gardener, I would act like a gardener.  I even bought a pair of fancy garden gloves (yes, most women buy shoes…I buy garden gloves).  I realized that “looking the part” isn’t going to help me at all (plus they were too pretty to get dirty).
So, what I learned in the end was what I knew in the beginning…if you are persistent, patient and willing to get down and dirty, you will figure it all out eventually.  It will take a few seasons to learn the basics and you will find out that talking to an old farmer at the farmers market is worth 100 times more than picking up a book at Chapters…
And like friendship and marriage and business, if you are persistent, patient and willing to work hard, there is always a way…

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