Lifestyle

Life Lessons Learned in the Garden

May 20, 2019

My favorite part of spring is the annual family trip to the Lowe’s garden section. What is meant to be a “quick trip” inevitably turns into us poring over every plant and bag of mulch as we decide what to take home. Although I am allergic to pretty much anything that grows outside, I have an obsession with gardening. I love nothing more than spending time in the backyard, tending to the beds, and harvesting what grows. My wife and son love it, too, and our family has learned a lot of life lessons from our backyard garden adventures.

Tend to the things you want to see grow.

What better lesson than this? Put a tomato plant in the ground and walk away, and in the right conditions it will likely survive. But we all know that surviving and thriving are not the same thing — and my son knows that too, even at his young age. He trims browning branches, uses Velcro to attach heavy stalks to a wire frame, and replaces the chicken wire assembled to (unsuccessfully) keep rabbits out of the broccoli. He waters, he trims, and he rearranges. Every plant requires work and needs something different to grow. And the rewards far outweigh the effort invested. This is easy to say in life but harder to remember.

Try planting strawberries again.

One year we managed to grow the most gorgeous, delicious strawberries in nothing more than the dangling plastic baskets they came in. We hung them from the railing by the kitchen door, and my 3-year-old son loved checking for a ripe one and popping it into his mouth. But after months of beautiful berries, it was as if some sort of siren call went out through the neighborhood’s squirrel population, and they all suddenly realized there were berries for the taking. My son was devastated, and so were we.

But we love strawberries, and so each year we’ve tried again, thinking that maybe this year would be the year we finally found a squirrel-proof spot. To be honest, four summers of failure have been a sad result. But that won’t stop us from trying again this summer with a new plan. Simply hoping the squirrels won’t return isn’t enough. We’ve learned that the things worth having and holding on to take hard work and perseverance. And so, we try again.

Just give up on the pumpkins, though.

But here’s the thing — you also have to know when to quit. We tore up a bed two years ago in order plant pumpkins. Sadly, the soil there is too sandy, and we don’t seem to attract enough bees for pollination. My wife tried one year to pollinate the flowers by hand with a paintbrush; I’ve tried soil additives. Nevertheless, all that hard work and effort simply hasn’t paid off. So we’ve cut our losses and invested our time in what will grow (and in trying to keep the squirrels out of the strawberries).

Might a better, more persistent gardener be able to make the pumpkins grow? Perhaps. But every minute I spent being frustrated by the pumpkins was a minute I didn’t spend appreciating how giant the cucumbers were that were growing in that same bed, their growth spurred on by the nutrients I’d added to the soil. And so we eat cucumbers, giving away just as many as we consume, and calling it a win, pumpkins or not. We’ve learned we can’t grow everything we might want to. Pumpkins are meant for other people’s gardens, and we are OK with that.

Be careful what you plant and where.

Mint is a weed. A delicious couldn’t-make-my-Mojitos-without-it weed, but a weed nevertheless. It grows so prolifically, paying no mind to anything else around it, that it can choke out other plants. I plant it anyway because I want it. But I am ever mindful of where I plant it, or how much of it I put into the ground, and of how it grows once I do so. Too much of a good thing can be just that — too much. The mint can’t help being mint, but I must control how it interacts with the rest of the garden. Planting mint has taught us that we must be careful, thoughtful, and focused on the long term as opposed to simply on the present.

Those flatbed rolling carts are super fun, so why not just let your kid ride on one?

I suppose this lesson comes more from the garden aisle at Lowes and less from the actual garden. Life is short, and before too long your kids won’t want to spend hours with you choosing just the right rosemary plant. Is that cart meant for kids? Nope. Will the world continue to turn while your kid rides on it anyway? Yes. Will the silly smile of your happy kindergartner as he rolls past the mulch make the world a little brighter? Absolutely. Ignore the judgment-filled face of the person next to you in line.

Friends, maybe you don’t have a backyard and instead only a porch or windowsill. That’s OK. You can grow a garden anywhere. It’s not the amount of space that counts, but how you use it and what you learn.