Gardening is about the journey, not the destination … which is good because mine is going nowhere fast. Photo: Hayley Nicholls.
Thank goodness no one expects ROI reports on my hours spent gardening.
Any analyst worth their weight in soil would immediately recommend we pave over my entire veggie patch and turn it into something more functional, like a parking lot.
Worm farms, compost heaps and sophisticated irrigation systems have thus far yielded only the occasional strawberry, entirely too much parsley, an unruly mint invasion and the occasional temper tantrum.
Oh, and zucchinis for days. But that’s entry-level stuff. Those hardy buggers will flourish, unsupervised and unloved, from a disused pile of pavers.
The fact is that most of my horticultural success stories have grown from a lack of effort, whereas seedlings I’ve treated like my own children have bitterly disappointed me (hopefully not like my own children).
Little sprouts lovingly tucked into their handmade egg boxes and milk carton beds along my windowsill, grown under the warm glow of my love and hydrated by hand, have – time and time again – raised my hopes daily only to die senselessly the second my back is turned.
Whereas, amongst the wilderness of my cottage garden, chicken enclosure or compost pile, several self-seeding baddies continue to pop up unbidden with all the familiarity and reliability of a multi-generational family living next door.
Each summer, without warning, festive shoots of amaranth burst into bloom like fireworks, turning my backyard into a curious landscape from Dr Seuss.
Seemingly at random, I find myself tripping over a robust asparagus stalk which has taken hold in an unlikely place. Seriously, are those things concreted in? If we do convert the plot, they’d make excellent parking bollards.
And of course, mint continues to darken my doorstep ever since I “propagated” a single sprig into a distant garden bed over 10 years ago. Ah, the naivety of gardening youth.
My chooks even appear to be more accomplished green thumbs (claws?) than I. Their seasonal patch of sprawling pumpkin plants and what must by now qualify as “heirloom” tomatoes taunt me.
I threw table scraps to my feathered friends, and this is how they repay me – rubbing their farm-to-table prowess in my face!
Anyway, none of that matters, which is why I just wrote 400 bitter words about it.
What matters is the practice of gardening.
The toil, trouble, peace and quiet. The satisfaction of weeding. The joy of prowling the garden centre for inspiration (or at least a new gnome). The validation of turning over a patch of soil you’ve been painstakingly improving, to find it rich and teeming with life. The strategy and planning as you lay adorable traps for tiny pests.
For example, did you know you can protect seedlings from snails and slugs by encircling them in crushed eggshells? It’s true. These precious pests don’t want to hurt their slimy little feet.
If you’d rather not risk injuring an innocent mollusc, you can repurpose recycled materials, like old yoghurt tubs, to construct walls that are intimidating enough to deter the most determined defoliator.
I get a mischievous sense of joy from laying such traps, giggling to myself as I punch the air like Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone.
At other times of year, I may be found bumbling around in the dark with my head torch on, constructing a haphazard shelter from a fitted sheet and old fence posts to protect prematurely planted seedlings against a late-season frost.
That’s a wholesome feeling.
Of course, the seedlings eventually die later anyway, thanks to birds, bugs, underwatering, overwatering, performance anxiety – honestly, who knows. But at least they knew they were loved.
Ultimately – even if it never produces a single edible growth – the mental, physical and creative benefits I get from tending my pointless little garden are enough to keep the bulldozers at bay.
No right-minded spreadsheet would ever favour the returns I get from my garden, but it’s still one of my best investments.
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