Hello, my name is Katie and I am a bad gardener. Okay maybe not bad, but somewhat inattentive to varying degrees. Lately, I have been an ambivalent gardener, in that I mostly put in a garden this year because I was pulling the weeds that grew up in the mulch around our house so I decided that I might as well pull the weeds in the garden while I was at it. And since I pulled the weeds, why don’t I push the easy button and get some pre-grown tomato and pepper plants to put in. Also, since we have some seeds in drawers, why don’t I plant some peas because I don’t even need to buy them. Also, I have been occasionally fertilizing on occasion because I bought some Miracle-Gro a few years ago so I might as well use it. But I don’t know if I have been gardening with any passion.
I have been tending to a vegetable garden on and off since 2017 and you would think that I would have gotten more attentive to it by now by now, but I haven’t. It is a little sad too because I started off with so much gardening excitement!
Cue the way back machine. . .The scene opens . . .
Image a youngish couple (35 is young!) moving into a new house. This couple they dream about all the “house-y” things that they can do in their new place. Maybe some day they will paint the walls. They will hang interesting pictures. They look at this big backyard and decide they should definitely put in a garden. But they don’t want their parents’ idea of garden (and have zero idea where to buy a rotary tiller, which they think is called a rototiller (one word said quickly)). So, they decide not to garden the way their parents and their grandparents did.
The husband builds two raised beds from plans they find online. They lovingly pick out boards together at the big-box hardware store. It’s summer when this happens so maybe it is too late to put in a garden that year. Plus, they have a baby on the way, and it is also fun to think about cribs and clothes for their future baby. Also, where would they even get the soil to put inside the boards to have a raised bed garden?
So, they let the newly (half) constructed raised beds sit in the backyard shed for another year or so while they tend to their baby. Then it is the fall of 2016, and their baby is a year old. They have much more free time! The baby is now so grown-up! He eats some solid foods and he only naps once a day (most days). They can start thinking about other projects. That’s right, they were going to build a garden. They bought boards and nailed some of them together! They located plans online. The project is almost ready!
Perhaps, it is the excitement over the idea of gardening that seized within their hearts (but more likely, it is the guilt of having started a project and having abandoned it to the backyard shed) in any case, it’s go-time for re-visiting garden replanning. The husband’s mother gifts him seeds and a gardening book for Christmas. Then she gifts of a decoy owl. There is no turning back now.
A few months later, in spring 2017, the wife figures how to get topsoil and compost delivered to fill the wooden frame that the husband builds. They are really doing it! By summer they have distrusted the soil in the beds. The couple decide what to grow, and they plant everything in the ground directly from the gift seeds.
They are excited. They make a drawing of what seeds were planted where. They make every decision regarding the garden together. So cute. But toddlers are more work than they realize and the garden never gets properly tended too. Weeding falls by the wayside as does fertilizing. They probably never think of watering the garden, isn’t the rainwater enough? The couple doesn’t know enough to protect their garden from rabbits and deer. It’s also possible that they planted their garden too late in the season. Also put seeds in the ground and didn’t start with plants grown in the house first or bought at garden store.
By late September (September 28th) they have a few cherry tomatoes that aren’t quite ripe and need some sunlight from the windowsill and two bell peppers that won’t reach redness before the first frost. They pick those and call their first garden a success.
And CUT Scene. . .
Didn’t we seem enthusiastic? And eager? But also, once we had a garden, we really didn’t tend to it much. That was probably partially out of circumstance. We had a toddler and we learned that summer that we had another baby on the way.
Once we had two little boys, I would sporadically try to resurrect the garden. I looked through the photos saved to my phone to see what years we had planted a garden.
This photo fact checking was insightful for me because it helped me to realize that maybe things were different than I remembered in that putting in vegetable garden is a more recent development than I thought it was. I was surprised to learn the years that we had a garden were: 2017, 2023, 2024, and this year 2026. I could have sworn I did it in 2019 or 2022 or something.
This probably doesn’t matter to you, but to me it feels like I have been gardening on and off for a long time. I feel like I am always pulling out the beginnings of bushes with the other bramble at the beginning of the season. In my mind, I have been blaming this on the fact that I haven’t been gardening consistently every year, so trees have time to put in roots, which is probably true. But I thought that I have been on this treadmill of planting one year then leave the ground fallow the next year for longer than I have actually been.
Also, besides that, first year, gardening has mostly been my project. We even call it my garden these days. I am fine with that and so is my is my husband. I am the grownup in our family who seems to be more driven to do gardening. Mr. Katie’s parents didn’t have a garden when he was child, but my parents often had a small vegetable garden in the backyard. I remember occasionally watering it and eating green beans and peas right out of the garden in a positive way. The boys like to occasionally help, probably like I did. In my mind, I was a big help to my parents with the garden, but I was probably just like my boys. Eating something and sporadically being interested.
What I like about gardening are the connections that I have made with people because of gardening. There is a nice but shy woman at the swimming pool who I have wanted to get to know, and she works at a gardening store, so I feel like we have an easy topic talk about now. Gardening has probably been directly responsible for my improved relationships with my neighbors. My next-door neighbors live for gardening and for relaying information so me being a bad gardener is like music to their ears. They have helped me tremendously, especially with constructing barriers to keep pests out. (It must be said however, that they might be at least partially responsible for the deer that had been eating my plants as they feed the deer about 15 feet away from my garden). I also had a friend volunteer to help me to weed my garden one morning last fall in preparation for this season. Other family members give me garlic and seeds to plant.
I also like eating the products of my labor. In 2023 or 2024, I made some great homemade tomato sauce that I was even able to freeze from the yield in my garden. I hope that my boys pick up on the fact that food doesn’t just come from a supermarket, you can grow it in your backyard.
What I don’t like about gardening is the near constant weeding. Maybe I am doing raised bed gardening wrong, but I feel like I am constantly out there pulling weeds. I didn’t put in a garden last year, but I did do a bang-up job with a friend of weeding in the fall. Then I had to do a lot of weeding to put my garden together in early June and I am still doing weeding probably weekly.
Is this what life is, constant weeding? Is the point of gardening that you are never really done, that you need to be making constant small adjustments? Do I need to learn to “love the word of weeding?
Is gardening actually a metaphor for life?
Mind blown.
So in conclusion, I don’t know if I will take the garden out after this season. Probably not. I think that I would feel too guilty about giving up on this project and it has brought a lot of good in my life. I think that I am just going through an ambivalent gardening season of life.
