Big dreams vs. harsh realities hit me again as the summer heat… and pest pressure increased in my vegetable garden here in southeast GA. Being a Yankee at heart, GA summers wilt my spirits. Yes, I know summer hasn’t officially begun, but it sure feels like it has.
Some things grow well here, especially the bugs, so along with bug spray for my plants, I keep a can of deep woods bug spray for me handy too. Flowers and herbs are much easier to grow in my backyard, so this year I’ve planted more flowers, which will provide much needed boosts to my spirit as tomato and squash plant deaths inevitably increase. I’ve got cucumbers forming and so far every single one has small holes in them with worms. I’ve sprayed them several times with BT spray and since I’m not invested in the hoopla about all organic, I’m going to use Sevin spray next. I’m the same about fertilizers and I can guarantee I will not ever use the fish oil emulsion that I see mentioned online frequently, because I avoid all fish products after having an anaphylactic reaction to fish.
I’ve read gardening books and watched many online gardening experts trying to learn more. I learned about the difference between determinate and indeterminate tomatoes and I found a determinate type hybrid cherry tomato variety that does produce a lot of cherry tomatoes before eventually succumbing to the GA heat and plant diseases. I’m still trying to successfully grow larger tomatoes too. The same thing happens with summer squash. I picked a few yellow squash and one zucchini, but I’ve already lost a couple squash plants. I’ll try again in my fall garden effort.
The practical side of me realizes that if I kept track of how much I’ve spent on this container gardening effort I started three years ago, when I decided I wanted to get back to vegetable gardening, that this isn’t saving me any money. However, I am getting better at this container gardening and I love being out in my backyard garden.
Reality checks are important and unfortunately it’s easy to get carried away buying more and more supplies and gadgets or trying to imitate some picture perfect garden set-up you’ve seen in a magazine or online. I’ve seen amazing raised bed set-ups and beautiful greenhouses. I’ve seen all sorts of amazing trellis systems. irrigation systems and even sunshade systems. This year I purchased a better ground cover fabric and put together 4 small metal raised beds that I bought last year. It would take a lot of vegetable production to off-set the cost of even these purchases.
My gardening effort is mainly because I enjoy it. Embarking on backyard gardening with too high of expectations left me sadly disappointed many times over the years, so I’m working on learning to enjoy even the smallest wins. With the wormy cucumbers, I picked them and cut off the bad parts and found that a good bit of each cucumber was fine. I have a container of sliced cucumber in the fridge, ready for salads or snacking. I froze several gallons of blackberries from my blackberry bushes and dried a lot of herbs already, so those are wins. I’ve picked green beans several times. Peppers are producing. And this Burpee hybrid veranda tomato seed has come through again and I’ve got lots of cherry tomatoes ripening every day. The big tomatoes, well, out of ten plants, I’m down to two plants and I’m highly skeptical these will survive long enough to produce any usable tomatoes. There are a few tomatoes forming, but they don’t look promising.
Learning to be grateful for the small wins rather than fixating on the unfulfilled big expectations takes a conscious mind shift. All those big expectations are usually influenced by images I’ve seen online or seen someone else have and it’s really a form of coveting what other people have.
Gardening is like other hobbies. It’s easy to fall into the trap of believing if we buy all the right gadgets and gizmos, we’ll end up with picture perfect outcomes. Learning from the failures and gaining more experience usually leads to more success, but learning gratitude for even the small wins helps grow more resilience of my spirit, I think. No matter what garden tragedy occurs, I am deeply grateful I can come inside, sit in my kitchen where the AC keeps it cool and sip on a glass of iced tea. From my kitchen windows I can see my entire container garden, which wasn’t there until three years ago and that puts it into perspective – I’m making progress.
Growing my gratitude matters more than any of the vegetables I planted.
libertybelle diaries 