5 Things You Didn’t Want to Know About Gardening

 

Gardening has largely been romanticized. Pictures of a lady in clean, designer clothing and well manicured nails standing next to a table or basket overflowing with flowers, or herbs, or vegetables is common. All of the produce is perfectly shaped, clean, and shiny, too. She is well-groomed and well-composed in a spotlessly clean kitchen or porch area.

Guess what? That scene is 100% staged. Fake, unrealistic, illogical, and rather silly. This is not how it works when you have a garden. Unless you’re hobby farming it and have a personal housekeeper, the scenario painted above is straight out of a fantasy.

The truth is, gardening is dirty, stinky, frustrating, and can make you question your sanity. While there are those who’re a glutton for punishment (like myself), gardening a food source is work and highly addictive (I bet they make a pill for that, too!). Besides all of that, here are 5 more things about gardening that you probably didn’t want to know.

1. Failure Rates – You.Will.Fail. The more you plant, the more chances you have for a crop to get pests or soil borne diseases. Some plants just don’t want to grow for you no matter what you do. Mother Nature decides she wants to ‘chill out’ for one crazy night 4 weeks before the traditional first frost and you lose all your lettuce in the process. The neighborhood dog decides that your raised bed is just a little too tall and helps you spread things out. No matter how you paint it, there are failures every year in the garden. If you manage to go through an entire season without one crop or set of plants giving you enough frustration to pull your hair out – you need to go buy a lottery ticket and fast! I’ve never heard of or met anyone who didn’t end up having something fail in the garden due to various issues. Sometimes the cause is just dumb luck but regardless of what the reason is, there are failures every year.
2. Dirty and Slimy – You are dealing with, handling, and mixing dirt. Not only that, you are dealing with manure or other sorts of fertilizer that stinks and gets slimy. If you compost, you deal with decaying material often. There is no way around it: Gardening is dirty and hard work! You will sweat, bleed, likely curse, and want to torch the whole thing before the end of the season. The fine lines in your hands never get fully clean, your nails are ruined, and those favorite jeans are now ‘gardening’ jeans. It happens.
3. Food Standards are Ruined – No, really. Once you have had fresh carrots from your own garden, store bought carrots are awful! Cans of green beans you have been buying and eating for 20 years are no longer ‘good enough.’ Your nose goes up in the air when looking at the cucumbers in the store: “Look at all that wax!” The produce at the grocery store starts to look like the mass produced food it is. Even the ‘organic’ stuff that is twice the cost of ‘normal’ produce isn’t good enough for you. You may start to wonder about how the food system is set up in the United States and question how we eat. YOU know, without any doubt, that the jars of carrots, potatoes, and green beans in your cupboard are 100% organic and chemical free. You may sigh when you run out of fresh, homegrown garlic and ‘settle’ for buying what passes for garlic at the store. You’ve been ruined, your standards are incredibly high, and you scoff at how much is charged for so-called ‘organic’ vegetables.
4. Gardening Leads to Other Projects – It started with a cold frame for me. Then another one. Then, the greenhouse, composter, and additions to the outside of the greenhouse. If we lived on property we actually owned, there would be the chicken coop, run, rabbit hutch, and all the fun side projects that go along with them. It is all part of a larger cycle and you tend to keep going without realizing it. The compost was a way to recycle scraps and whatnot and make our own soil and ‘compost tea’ for fertilizing. The overall plan was to use it to help us succeed in our crops and get larger harvests. The diehard truth about gardening brings us to the last thing you didn’t want to know about gardening.
5. You Will Never Be ‘Done’ – Oh sure, you may have a few weeks where you aren’t planting, sprouting seeds, harvesting, or processing your harvest. The reality is that it’s truthfully only a few weeks out of the whole year. Even during those few weeks, you are thinking about what needs to be done next, researching new stuff to plant, considering soil amendment, and of course…adding more projects for another greenhouse, or using pvc tubes to make some vertical growing area for strawberries (because the dag-gummed slugs ruined your crop last year!).

It never ends, you’ll never be done, and it’ll take up more mental real estate than you ever imagined! On a brighter note, failures in the garden are just challenges to overcome. It’s part of the learning curve and some years, the curve can be very sharply angled. Having other projects helps because you’ll slowly build up your area over time. That leads to increased, tangible productivity and a wealth of knowledge. I couldn’t imagine trying to walk in to a preset garden area as a newbie and just start tossing seeds in!

By taking your time, you will be able to focus on getting certain plants ‘right’ and then move on to something new. You’ll have the confidence and previous experience and knowledge to just handle the potatoes and squash efficiently so that you have more time to try something new. Did I mention, it is addictive? Here it is on Christmas Day and I am already thinking about getting the soil worked, what seeds planted where, and how I can increase and improve the crop.

And I can’t wait to get dirty and slimy doing it, too. 🙂