Lifelong learning
My brother-in-law has just moved into a new house that has some garden beds.
He and his wife are professionals, highly skilled at their jobs but in the garden they’re the first to acknowledge that they’re complete novices.
They plant cucumber seedlings, strawberries, a blueberry bush and a lemon – small acts of faith on a journey that begins with hope but also the acceptance that things may not initially work out.
Heartbreak lurks in our gardens – in the shock of a zucchini seedling stump strewn with silvery snail slime, in the inevitable slow creeping death of a tomato infected with Fusarium Wilt, in the arrival of a flock of rainbow lorikeets the week before apples ripen.
Gardening and farming are activities defined by failure.
Last month’s forty degree plus days cooked crops of salad green and baby spinach in the ground, up in the Mallee wheat farmers accept that one out three years will be losses, while Victorian cherry growers depend on having one good season in four!
And yet in the midst of all this heartbreak we come back to our gardens and farms season after season.
Plants desperately want to grow and we are desperate for them to succeed.
Mostly what plants need from us is our attention, our presence.
And so we talk to them, we weed and water them, we fertilise their soil, we pick the caterpillars off the undersides of their tender leaves and when it’s time we eat them and they become part of us.
It is as intimate a relationship as any we have.
In our first gardens our plants often grow in spite of us. Like finding a new friend there are plants we just click with – somehow we’re just good together.
A little success can spur us on to grow other plants well, it gets us up out of bed in the morning to check if our zucchini has flowered or see if there are any new snow peas ready to munch on.
The exhilaration of growing something substantial, like a big snowy white cauliflower, a Halloween-grade pumpkin or a “too many to eat all ourselves” crop of tomatoes can be the trigger to lifelong gardening addiction.
Well into his retirement, farmer Joe Garita would still come down to the market garden that now bears his name to “scratch around” a bit.
My wife’s grandmother, who liked plants better than people, wobbled outside and crawled on her knees tending her beloved flower beds into her nineties.
And that’s the thing – no matter how long you do it there is always something to learn, to see, to smile at in a garden.
If you’re a plant beginner or a hopeless addict, come hang at Joe’s Market Garden on a Friday or Saturday or spend some time with the plants at the incredible CERES’ Nursery and meet people who love gardening as much as you.
Have a great week
Chris
