Garden planting is underway, and I found myself doing the mental hamster wheel after the day’s work was done. Did I water in the starters well enough? Did I space properly? Am I going to have to move the cantaloupe after all, because it will get too hot where it is?
The last time I planted out a garden, I pretty much did it with wild abandon. I planted pumpkins and zucchini too close together and they cross-bred, producing long orange squash and round green zuke-ish pumpkins. I called them pumkini and zumpkins and didn’t try to eat or make jack-o-lanterns of the results. The results were unexpected but not catastrophic. And all the cats in the neighborhood ate the catnip to the ground and birds got all the strawberries and the tomatoes got out of control. I was okay with all of that. I didn’t take it too seriously. It was just a garden and there was always next year to do things differently.
Then came small children and special needs and life became very different. Everything became really damn serious and had to be done right the first time Or Else, and there was no time or energy for a veggie garden, although I did plant flowers which pretty much just needed to be stuck in the ground.
This is the first real garden after kids, and it’s kind of amazing to me how that serious attitude has filtered into everything and changed my perspective. I very carefully planned the lay-out so that no squash variety would unwittingly crossbreed with another. I measured the space between the blueberry bushes and
I hauled a wheelbarrow load of pine needles to mulch around them. There are stakes running up and down the rows with string marking them for straight planting, and much thought went into how to lay out soaker hoses between rows for easy and efficient watering.
Part of the seriousness is because this garden is intended to be food-producing. In our efforts to live a more sustainable life and to be healthier, it makes sense to grow our own produce. But I had to remind myself this morning, as I fought the urge to run out at dawn and measure my spacing in case I’d miscalculated and left some things too crowded, that it’s not life or death. It’s a garden, and there’s always next year. Some of the varieties I’m experimenting with will do well and others won’t and it’s all a learning experience that I can build on next year.
This is true for books, too. Books suffer from overplanning and constant digging up and transplanting scenes and paragraphs lest the initial placement turn out to be wrong. Books are organic and they grow as part of the process. Things change. Unexpected cross-pollinations happen and while the results might be surprising, they aren’t the end of the world. Different than expected doesn’t mean bad or wrong.
When you are dealing with things that have a life of their own, whether a book or a child or a garden, taking it too seriously and trying to impose too much control is a “serious” problem that can be solved by just lightening up a little. Books get done and do well or do not and writers go on to write new ones. Kids manage to survive their parenting and go on to have their own kids who they hopefully don’t stand over with a yardstick to see if they’re measuring up. Gardens grow and there will be weeds and pests and birds to contend with and possibly potato blight but in the end, there will still be harvest season and covering it over with mulch and winter and spring where it all starts up again.
It’s all the miracle of life, which is much too short and amazing to waste running on mental hamster wheels, second-guessing every damn thing.
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