The less-neurotic gardener

(I hope)

For the past three summers, I’ve grown a few dahlias in some pretty crummy soil above a boulder retaining wall, where I had ripped out some big old shrubs. The first year, the dahlias did really well, growing bushy and full of colorful flowers.

This past year, not so much. Three out of nine, brand new, didn’t even come up. The six that grew — three new, three second-year — didn’t flower very much. I realized I had not given them any fertilizer since late spring. At least I kept them watered.

By the end of this summer I was saying I need to put a few inches of compost on those beds this fall as well as next spring. The soil is loose enough to grow things in, it just isn’t very nutritious, I think. Fall started passing by and it rained and I realized I’d been procrastinating on the compost. Then I said I’d do it on Thanksgiving weekend. And I did! Yay me. Now when (I hope) this winter gets soggy, I’ll feel like I’m improving the soil for my plants. Maybe the dahlias will do better in 2024, and if they don’t, I’ll plant something different the following year.

This blog post sounds exactly like ones I wrote circa 2002 on the blog I had then. We lived then in a tiny house on a double-sized city yard. When we’d moved in in 1998, the whole yard was nothing but grass, with a short slope of blackberry and bindweed up by the back fence. Over the seventeen years we lived there, we installed two patios, and we built a shed. I dug loads of big planting beds and paths. 

At some point around 2002, after doing tiny garden projects for four years in that house, I realized with a friend’s help that I could and should work on a lot bigger scale with a yard that size. So I got far too carried away. It must have had more psychology behind it than just “this yard is a blank canvas and I can make it look nice.” The work was too much for me to handle by myself, and too much for me and Tom together given his limited free time. (I usually worked part time.)

Nevertheless, having started, I grew more and more invested in creating beautiful planting beds of flowers and shrubs and bulbs and a few trees. I did and do love yard work. I love being outdoors, I love weather, I love strenuous physical work, I love plants and nature and playing with nature.

But I could not keep up. Everywhere I looked, instead of seeing the beautiful results of work I had done, I saw work I had not done. Pulling weeds here, I saw the weeds over there, times ten. Looking out at the yard, sometimes, I felt mostly frantic and full of self judgment. A hobby I really loved had turned into a source of more and more stress.

Then I opened a business! (A CrossFit gym, a mile from home.) There were times when I came home from teaching classes in the gym and without even going in the house, started working on the yard. I eventually noticed I had no free time at all and still wasn’t keeping up. I had done too much with the yard, and it was going to turn into a mess of a jungle.

So one spring, early in the year, I put in a burst of maintenance energy, so that in February when the grass was green and things were starting to sprout and green up, it looked as pretty as a picture. And we sold the house.

We have a lot smaller yard now.  

I think the old yard felt like a reflection of the person I wanted to be. I was so wrapped up in it and had no perspective on why. If I had it to do over, I’d start with “what is the minimum that it needs?” Instead I looked at other people’s long-established gardens and wanted that kind of beauty for myself. 

It’s one more arena in which I’ve had to learn not to compare myself to other people. They’re not me, and I’m not them. And they knew more about gardening than I did by the time they had those picturesque yards I coveted.

Here’s a photo of our back yard in early 2015 when we sold the house. I think it’s looking pretty jungly now. Not my problem.