Go with the flow this season
Finding a monarch caterpillar’s chrysalis in your garden is a triumph to savour. Waiting for your favourite flowers to bloom is a lesson in patience.
Do you hear that? It is the sound of gardeners celebrating the start of a new gardening season.
More than 80 per cent of Canadians say they engage in the world of plants.
That makes gardening the most popular outdoor leisure activity.
Many of us are gearing up for a spectacular season after a long, cold winter.
Often, our dreams of a great garden aren’t realized. Beginner gardeners always enter a new season with a warped sense of reality. Experienced gardeners — even Mark — can get carried away with plans for a garden that are not likely to materialize as imagined.
Take a moment to breathe deeply and let us help you manage your expectations.
There will be failures. We are not talking about catastrophic let downs, but the experiences that teach us something by their occurrence. A gardener who has never failed has failed to take necessary risks. Gardeners learn best by what they do wrong. It is liberating to fail in the garden as it is essentially harmless. The consequences of failure in many other parts of our lives can be difficult to bear, but a plant that didn’t grow is not a failure. It is a composting opportunity. Be prepared to fail. Embrace it.
There will be triumphs. And you will not see them coming. You might grow the largest or earliest tomato on the block, but don’t count on it. There are too many factors that will influence your success, like weather, insects, disease and did we mention weather? It is best not to begin the season with expectations of success. Much better to take it when it arrives and be surprised. A monarch caterpillar spins a cocoon on your milkweed, a hummingbird buzzes past your ear in the quiet of some morning while you are weeding, or the zucchini that you planted over-produces, providing an opportunity for you to be a big shot around the neighbourhood and give away fresh produce like there is nothing to it. You become the zucchini champion. Relish your successes.
Nature has her own ideas. You have a plan for the bestlooking or most-productive garden ever. We remind you that anything that occurs after you prepare the soil and plant has little to do with you. The gardener is merely a moderator. Mother nature is in charge and if she wants to change your plan, she has the power to do it. The apples in Mark’s 30-tree orchard were hit by hail a couple of years ago. A pictureperfect crop became “seconds” in seconds. No matter. They tasted just as good and made great sauce.
The No. 1 lesson is patience. Your garden is a classroom where you learn from your experiences. You can “want” your sunflowers to produce a bloom in June. Truth is, it takes at least 80 days for even the fastest sunflower seed to mature into a plant worth its keep. We plant bean and radish seeds with youngsters since they grow so fast. But even beans and radishes need a few weeks to perform. This is not like clicking on YouTube for a tutorial. Gardeners plan, prepare, plant, nurture and wait. That is our game. There is only one way to enjoy the satisfaction of winning and it takes patience.
It is yours. Finally, a reminder that your garden is yours. If you allow your lawn and garden to simply be controlled by nature, you will be very disappointed. A study at Olds College, in Olds, Alberta, proved that uncultivated land, left to the devices of nature, will produce over 75 per cent non-native invasive weeds. Indeed, there is only one way to squeeze the joy of the gardening experience into the palm of your hand and that is to take initiative and make it so.
Gardening is full of surprises. But most of them are fun and satisfying. A fiction writer could not imagine what you will experience this season in your own garden.
Which is why you need to manage your own expectations of it.