Beginner's Angst

The new year is here and with it comes a barrage of seed catalogues.  I suppose there are many seasoned gardeners who look forward to curling up with a hot cup of tea to thumb -- or green thumb -- their ways through stacks of mail order possibilities. I imagine these confident and experienced amateur landscapers having well established gardens worthy of photo spreads in Sunset magazine. They look forward to a good spring workout and muse over the idea of having a fun little experiment with succulents as they calmly sip their tea and confidently dog ear pages.

I, on the other hand, am completely stressed out. It has taken me four nerve wracking days to research, plot, and calendar my garden activities. One entire day was spent ordering seeds from websites that might have been designed in the paleozoic era of e-commerce. I still haven't begun to research the irrigation system or to plan construction of the trellises. Sipping tea is for the pros. I need a glass of red wine and a hot bath just to get over thinking about gardening.

Don't despair for me.  I am not giving up. In my exhaustion I am allowing the anxiety that comes with being aware of one's ignorance to wash over me before I forge ahead. I know that I don't know anything about gardening; hence the hours of research, drawing diagrams, creating spreadsheets and creating calendar ticklers. I also know that no amount of planning repels aphids or warms a cold, rainy June. Knowledge is the only real tool when there is so much beyond one's control.

Certainly, I learned a lot last year. I spent most of last summer leafing through books trying to identify the disease, pest, malnutrition issue of the day for plants that should have been thriving according to my calculations. Sun scald was my first surprise, which I answered with shade covers. Then a cold and rainy summer introduced all manner of funghi to the garden. Neem oil fixed that, but also exacerbated the sun scald; it seems neem oil also repels clouds and intensifies sunlight. There was a month of good growth, until the return of the relentless rain depleted the soil and a calcium deficiency became apparent in the harvest. I kept waiting for a plague of locusts that never came, so it must be that I am no more cursed than any neophyte gardener.

I shouldn't let you think that all of my gardening experience from last year was without benefit, indeed I learned the most from my trials. Then there were the mysteriously thriving plants that grew with the enthusiasm of kudzu despite my ineptitude. These were the most troubling. There were plants deemed delicate and sensitive by gardening guides that I couldn't even harm with neglect.  They just grew in hot or cold or wet or dry weather. They sprang back from funghal attacks or somehow never succumbed at all.  Insects shunned them. There were experiments that no guide recommended that thrived.  I have no idea why they did so well, so I'm going to try them again to see if I can antagonize them somehow this year.

The garden is also expanding this summer with additional planters and unfamiliar -- to me -- plants. I'm sure it will be another summer of agonizing education and serendipitous harvests.

I have read that gardeners never stop learning new things from Mother Nature, which is simultaneously reassuring and discouraging. On the one hand I feel less inept knowing that tea sipping seed catalogue perusers are as common as unicorns. On the other hand, this dashes my aspirations of actually being one of those self-assured gardeners who know what to do because it is January. This is my mother, by the way, who plans nothing, but appears mud-covered in her kitchen one evening every May to announce that she has planted the garden that day. I have no idea how she does this, but she makes it look very easy. Perhaps I won't always have to invest hours in researching how to care for plants with which I am unfamiliar, but I don't see the charts, maps and calendars going away. Simply put, I'm not a natural at this gardening hobby.

Indeed, there is no sense in worrying now about whether I will be a master gardener someday, when I have this year's garden with which to concern myself. Despite all of the reading, plotting and intricate cross-referencing, I have survived the planning stage with no more damage than stiff muscles and a semi-permanent furrow in my brow. The seeds are on there way. Tonight I'll take a hot bath and a drink a glass of wine in acknowlegement of this mind boggling achievement. Tomorrow, with the construction of the new planters and the fashioning of seedling pots from newspaper, the gardening begins.

#farmdiva