Gardening as Play
It's Thursday and I'm sick again and I've got so much to do in the garden. I am trying not to let it stress me out, though. It slows me down. I have more time to think, to plan, to walk the garden paths, and imagine the possiblities.
When we moved in 3 months ago, there were already several raised garden beds. The one I'm working on now is the largest, and the most well-made. The walls are all of the same sized wood, tidily squared-up and well bolted together (more than I can say for the other raised beds). In fact I am only working on the North-West side of this bed, the sunniest aspect. It is one meter by three meters, and it is my best bet for veggie gardening in the existing garden beds. I plan on making it my main veggie bed this year.
This is what it looked like before I set to work on it:
As soon as I began weeding this bed, I started muttering curses under my breath. This is a nice raised bed; someone put some care into its construction. It was clearly used for veggies, given the siverbeet I've been pulling out of the paths and the volunteer parsley. This is the sort of thing one has to fill with soil once it's built, and that usually means buying it. Even cheap topsoil has a good, balanced soil composition. But the dense, hard-packed clay soil I found myself trying to drive a spade through is the same miserable soil found in the ground in this area - exactly the thing one is generally trying to escape when building a raised bed.
I was expecting better. Better than hard, compacted clay all the way through. Where did they even get this stuff from? (I have a theory, actually, but more on that later). This is the first time I've encountered an old veggie garden bed that didn't have at least a little good soil on the top - at least 15 cm - thanks to the routine practice of adding compost and mulch.
Other than the old dead roots of a rose bush, this particular garden bed was supposed to be the easy one. Well. Time to adjust my expectations. I have to accept the current situation, before I can start coming up with solutions.
For days I was fussing about, trying one thing, fretting about it, then trying another. The thing is, I was second guessing myself. I didn't grow up watching parents or anyone close to me engaged in gardening, and I had never so much as sewn a seed in the ground until shortly after my son was born, which would make it about seven years ago. Aside from that one night class, I am self-taught from reading books, watching YouTube tutorials, and googling things. I've learned a lot, but one thing about learning a lot is that you start to discover how little you actually know.
The thing I love about gardening, though, is that there are nearly as many ways to do a thing as there are gardeners in the world, and the best lessons are learned by trial and error. I tried a thing, I applied my collection of know-how and intuition, and the best thing to do now is stop fretting about it, get on with the planting, and see how it goes. I momentarily forgot that most of what I know about gardening is through seeing how it goes.
This is what makes a thing play: simultaneously feeling a strong inner drive to do the best you can, and knowing that the stakes are actually really low. And this is what makes play so powerful: it creates a fertile environment for trying things, for taking risks, when the stakes are low enough that you can afford to. That is an excellent combination for learning and for gaining confidence. Confience in yourself, yes, but also an understanding that things can go wrong and it's not the end of the world. If you let it, the failures can be the greatest opportunites for growth. *
For me, gardening is a form of play. This is part of why gardening, for me, is such a valuable tool in managing my anxiety.
This is what the garden bed looks like right now:
It is what it is and I can't wait to see what it can do. That's my three little sunflower seedlings in the foreground on the left. I popped them in the ground yesterday - a fairly low-energy activity that made me feel heaps better. They are getting on very well out there today. I like to imagine they are breathing a sigh of relief, and slowly stretching out their cramped roots.
* Most of my understanding of what play is comes from the fantastic book Play by Steward M. Brown and Christopher Vaughan.
When we moved in 3 months ago, there were already several raised garden beds. The one I'm working on now is the largest, and the most well-made. The walls are all of the same sized wood, tidily squared-up and well bolted together (more than I can say for the other raised beds). In fact I am only working on the North-West side of this bed, the sunniest aspect. It is one meter by three meters, and it is my best bet for veggie gardening in the existing garden beds. I plan on making it my main veggie bed this year.
This is what it looked like before I set to work on it:
As soon as I began weeding this bed, I started muttering curses under my breath. This is a nice raised bed; someone put some care into its construction. It was clearly used for veggies, given the siverbeet I've been pulling out of the paths and the volunteer parsley. This is the sort of thing one has to fill with soil once it's built, and that usually means buying it. Even cheap topsoil has a good, balanced soil composition. But the dense, hard-packed clay soil I found myself trying to drive a spade through is the same miserable soil found in the ground in this area - exactly the thing one is generally trying to escape when building a raised bed.
I was expecting better. Better than hard, compacted clay all the way through. Where did they even get this stuff from? (I have a theory, actually, but more on that later). This is the first time I've encountered an old veggie garden bed that didn't have at least a little good soil on the top - at least 15 cm - thanks to the routine practice of adding compost and mulch.
Other than the old dead roots of a rose bush, this particular garden bed was supposed to be the easy one. Well. Time to adjust my expectations. I have to accept the current situation, before I can start coming up with solutions.
For days I was fussing about, trying one thing, fretting about it, then trying another. The thing is, I was second guessing myself. I didn't grow up watching parents or anyone close to me engaged in gardening, and I had never so much as sewn a seed in the ground until shortly after my son was born, which would make it about seven years ago. Aside from that one night class, I am self-taught from reading books, watching YouTube tutorials, and googling things. I've learned a lot, but one thing about learning a lot is that you start to discover how little you actually know.
The thing I love about gardening, though, is that there are nearly as many ways to do a thing as there are gardeners in the world, and the best lessons are learned by trial and error. I tried a thing, I applied my collection of know-how and intuition, and the best thing to do now is stop fretting about it, get on with the planting, and see how it goes. I momentarily forgot that most of what I know about gardening is through seeing how it goes.
This is what makes a thing play: simultaneously feeling a strong inner drive to do the best you can, and knowing that the stakes are actually really low. And this is what makes play so powerful: it creates a fertile environment for trying things, for taking risks, when the stakes are low enough that you can afford to. That is an excellent combination for learning and for gaining confidence. Confience in yourself, yes, but also an understanding that things can go wrong and it's not the end of the world. If you let it, the failures can be the greatest opportunites for growth. *
For me, gardening is a form of play. This is part of why gardening, for me, is such a valuable tool in managing my anxiety.
This is what the garden bed looks like right now:
It is what it is and I can't wait to see what it can do. That's my three little sunflower seedlings in the foreground on the left. I popped them in the ground yesterday - a fairly low-energy activity that made me feel heaps better. They are getting on very well out there today. I like to imagine they are breathing a sigh of relief, and slowly stretching out their cramped roots.
* Most of my understanding of what play is comes from the fantastic book Play by Steward M. Brown and Christopher Vaughan.
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