Here lately I find myself compulsively walking the perimeter of my garden space. I have invested a lot into this little patch of ground. Months have gone by from when we first envisioned what this hopeful spot would be, and now we are beginning to see the fruits from it.

This isn’t my first garden, but I'm still fairly new to the practice. I didn’t grow up with it. I didn’t naturally have a green thumb. I have failed more at gardening than I’ve been successful. But I guess that’s what makes this garden this year different...I am taking those failures and growing through them. 

I make my rounds in the early morning and later evening, avoiding the times when the sun has gotten too high and the air too hot. Arkansas summers are notoriously torturous. The air can be so hot and muggy that a breeze feels more like being blasted with a hot blow dryer. The mosquito swarms have been known to lift whole humans off the ground, never to be seen again (true story). And don’t get me started on the other bugs you’ll be battling. Chiggers, ticks, fleas, those little green worms that love cabbage and will ninja-style decimate the entire row.

For all of the reasons listed above my garden usually starts failing me about this time of the year. It gets too hot. Too many other things going on. Too many weeds and bugs and hassles happen and I get overwhelmed. And then I quit it. I may pull off a tomato here and there that has survived my neglect. But I have found myself, year after year, disappointed with the harvest of my efforts. It feels like a reflection of myself when I see things wither on the vine. I take it as my own personal failure. And so many seasons have ended with disappointment and frustration.  

My garden over the years had become representative of bigger things gone wrong in my life. There was a pattern I kept repeating. Things I can look back on now and see so clearly, that were not nearly so clear back then. The end of winter would bring the seed catalog and with it all the hopes for what that year’s garden would be.  I would start out all gung-ho. Buy all the plants and seeds. Layout where everything would go. I would get out when it was still early spring and cold and joyfully turn the ground...glad to get out of the house as winter left the land and spring replaced it. Laying the groundwork was a joy. It was the follow-through that got me.

It took me a long time, but I realized my pitfall was something that I always considered a positive about myself. I am a hopeful person. I have lived my life on hope. Hopes that it’ll all work out in the end how it’s supposed to...whether I do the work or not. Hopes for how I thought other people would be in my life...whether they showed those capabilities or not. Hopes for this and hopes for that. Some hopes were good things and got me by. But other hopes were wishful thinking with no action.

Hope was one of my ‘holes’, or pitfalls, that I often found myself in. Being an optimist can be a good thing. But optimism without action is useless, and this mindset caused me quite a bit of grief over many years. I always banked on there being this time, later on, that things would come together like I hoped for.

But later never came.

I know there are others like me out there right? The dreamers and thinkers and romantics. Thinking up all the things that will be one day...but then life doesn’t quite work out that way. And often it doesn’t work out that way because when it comes time to put in the hard work it’s just...hard. And other things take priority. And pretty soon you have years of To Do lists that never got To Done.

And a garden full of bramble and weeds.

I’m tired of living that way. I’m tired of feeling disappointed with my garden, spiritually and physically.

So I started the hard work.

I guess it’s an accumulative effect of tending to things over the different seasons and learning what works for me, and what really doesn’t. I am no master gardener. The above paragraphs have made that abundantly clear. Everything I know about gardening has only been learned over the past decade of my life…and usually learned because I failed so spectacularly at it. I knew this year that I wanted my garden to grow well...in my yard and in my heart too.  I wanted to take the successes and failures of all my past gardens and use them to grow something better.  Each season brought me lessons. Some hard lessons that tasted bitter. 

But this season, I’ve found myself blessed with abundance and fruit from my efforts... and that tastes sweet.