365 Days
Gardens can provide so much: space to refresh ourselves, grow food and herbs, be a refuge against the busy world, and a way for us to support the natural world in which we live. 365 Days is a series of short posts to inspire contemplation of our gardens. While many of the date-stamps of posts will reflect Northern hemisphere seasons and some of the gardening typical in USDA zone 8, for Southern hemisphere gardeners, advancing the time-frame six months will provide greater synchronicity. But this is not a blog about how to garden, there are YouTube channels for that kind of thing. Rather it is about how stewardship of the soil can feed both ourselves and the space in which we live.
If it touches a chord in you, please let us know in the comments below each post. We enjoy hearing your thoughts.
365 days is not yet complete. It is, however, being steadily added to. Eventually, like planting a hedge, all 365 days will be represented.
Our gardens can be a place of toil or beauty. When we step outside, how we choose to see the garden affects us.
The weeds are present regardless. So too are fresh buds, the myriad colours of green, the sound of wind in trees, the feel of a breeze on our skin, the warmth of the sun touching our bodies. It is the same garden. Yet how we live in it changes our lives, our freedom to be.
We will still need to pull those weeds. But it can be an act of toil, or it can be an act in which we create space for new planting and growth. In both instances, we may be tired when we are done. But in one we can look upon the freshly turned soil and biomass in the compost pile and smile. In the other, we will just be hot and bothered.
Choose the beauty each time you step outside. It is the same garden, but we are richer for our choice.
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- Written by: Norman Smit
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St Patrick's day falls on March 17. The green cloverleaf associated with St Patrick is thought to be lucky. Gardeners should embrace it for what clover brings.
As a green mulch in your beds, it fixes nitrogen in your soil for the summer. It will survive in shade where other ground covers won't grow easily. Clover flowers earlier than many other plants, providing early season pollen and continues for much of the year, which is why it is favoured by beekeepers.
Science has shown clover has complex anti-inflammatory compounds that include salicylic acid in the flowers and herbalists in many cultures include clover in their compendium of anti-cancer agents. Genistein, a phytochemical in clover, has anti-tumour properties, along with other isoflavones that fight cancer. Gardeners will know that it is wonderful, mild addition to a cup of green tea.
So on St Patrick's day, gardeners, toast the green clover. Its usefulness to our health and to our soil is why it's lucky.
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Take the time in your garden to look and listen to it. To be in it.
Discover the ways in which sunlight plays on the leaves as they move. Listen to the sound of tree branches as the breeze moves through the trees. The sighing and easing and quiet. Even if there are cars in the street and the sounds of neighbours, listening and seeing the nature in your garden is possible. Often they are the smaller sounds, but they are there, and once found, provide a peaceful refreshment to our souls.
Small gardens with just a few rows of tomatoes, herbs and marigolds can offer respite. Each day as the sun and clouds shift and the leaves strengthen, beauty is on offer.
Being in our gardens and working in our garden is not the same. The one is an act of nurturing, servicing our plants. The other is letting the garden nurture us.
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The Spring Equinox is celebrated in almost every culture as a sign of emergence from winter. The ground may still be cold or even covered in snow and there may be still be periods of cold to come, but the days are set to get longer and emerging flowers remind us that renewal is always possible. In the garden, we see daffodils begin to flower, a bright flash of colour against an otherwise drab winter palette. Other perennials may be starting to emerge. In our lives, winter can take many forms - financial loss, death, breaking up with a loved one, addiction, illness, changing difficult habits.
The season of spring shows that no matter how difficult the winter of our lives may be, there is a time to flower again. Spring calls to us, and with the yellow daffodils standing bright, reminds us that when we emerge, our rebirth will be beautiful.
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On social media, people's lives are often perfectly curated. It appears as if everyone gets it right first time.
Gardeners will know a lot of failure. These experiences teach that very little is as simple as it appears. Good outcomes often take more effort than is apparent, or multiple attempts, season after season. The stepping stones to success are often a series of failures.
And that’s OK. Life is where we live it, not what it appears to be. In the same way as plants root themselves, we must choose to root our lives in the present, in reality, in our yards – not on social media. To live a grounded life is to be open to the possibility of failure.
We may lose plants when we garden. But a garden may still beautiful, even when it's unkempt. It’s home to birds and earthworms, blossoms and produce. Each season we get to try again. Enjoy your garden, whatever happens, season after season.
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Abundance is a curious thing. It is simple. A garden has a limit against which light, soil, care and the plants we grow will reach their natural lushness, the amount of fruit they will produce. That is their abundance. For the gardener, abundance is having had enough to enjoy.
From the first shoots we see after we have planted seeds, life in itself is abundant. It is a miracle. How we see our garden is in itself as important as what it produces. The herbs we dry as the season progresses will feed us no matter whether we match last season or not.
The garden is different to the world which is driven to sell us more. More is not abundance, it is just another consumable. The garden is a quiet space, offering enough, and if we have the wisdom and gratitude to see it, enough is abundance.
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Life will find a way. As gardeners, we are stewards to the spaces we have. These can be small spaces, lush spaces, even a concrete apron at a home we rent. All of these spaces can be transformed with pots, plantings, and fostering that space to allow for life to thrive.
By holding space for life, we create space for life to take root. In turn, that life will hold space for us. When the flowers bloom, it gives us colour to feed our souls even as it feeds the pollinators that will go on to produce honey, new fruit, and produce in our garden and elsewhere.
The few pots in a corner of a balcony may not seem like much compared to carefully curated pictures on social media. But each new bud that emerges is yours to enjoy, to marvel at. The smells from the blossoms, the fluttering of butterflies, all these are real, present, and a reminder that even small beauties are a satisfying wonder.
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Make peace with what you achieve each day in the garden. There will always be more compost to turn, a branch to clip, a weed poking its head out. And each day, the gardener will have only so much time and energy. The garden will be waiting tomorrow.
With a season stretching ahead of us, it may seem as if there is time enough to do everything. But gardeners should choose to do only those things to do that will support the life of their garden each day. It is easy to get lost being busy. Take a moment to decide what will make a real difference.
At any moment, we are faced with so many options and choices, most of which have no lasting impact. Choose to spend time only on those that are important. By hewing to this rule, even if each day not everything is accomplished, by the end of the season, transformation occurs.
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Anxiety is a leading mental health issue affecting modern humanity. It floods our bodies with flight, freeze, or fight stress responses. Over time, it affects our physical health. Research has shown that getting exercise, being in nature, mindfulness, grounding techniques, and practicing awareness and gratitude reduce these fear-based responses within us.
The garden offers all of these solutions - stepping outside, sitting in the shade, making time to watch the birds splash in the birdbath, harvesting a tomato, watching the bees. Bending and moving to dig a bed, turn some compost, prune a rosebush into shape, is exercise with no pressure. Seeing new life, colour in our beds teaches hope and joy, if we'll let it.
A daily dose of time in the garden provides a safe space to rest, move, and use the tools it offers that ground us and heal us.
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Frailty affects us all. It is usually considered an affliction of age, but it can happen any time. For the young and healthy, it is an unconsidered world. But unforeseen accidents, unexpected illness, and ill luck can rob anyone of the vitality.
It is during these dark diversions that gardens offer help. Neuroscience research has shown what our bodies already know. Gardens and green spaces change our bodies. The beauty of plants, fragrances, and sounds of nature allow overworked and stressed attention systems to find respite and recover. Physically, too, moving in the garden provides moderate aerobic exercise that can be sustained over extended periods.
But it is the life of the garden that offers greatest promise as we recover from frailty. It reminds us of the resilience within us all, evident in new buds starting alongside old injuries. It reminds us that life surrounds us and we are part of it.
Frailty may be inevitable for us all, but our gardens will still offer us beauty during these times.
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Gardens can provide a safe, restorative space to us as individual gardeners.
But to be fully human, people need to be connected to themselves; to the earth; to others; and to God or a higher purpose that provides meaning to their lives. Using a garden to create and build community allows the gardener to build bridges that strengthen all who are touched by the garden.
Space for shared community beds are best known. Groups working together begin to solve problems not just found in the garden, but common to that community. The garden becomes a venue for interaction.
In the same way hunter-gatherer humans of old moved through their environment together gathering herbs, roots and berries, gardens today can be similar places of engagement. And even a small raised bed or a few pots can provide enough herbs to dry to keep a family cooking tasty meals for a season.
Sharing your garden may provide a way to meet all four needs to be fully human.
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It is in difficult times that we are reminded most to be the gardeners of our hearts and lives.
We must keep planting for tomorrow. We must keep weeding our personal spaces, the places from which we get information, the clutter on our desks, or the weeds will overwhelm. We must compost our skills and experience, turning them over along with our network of friends and contacts, to feed the beds in which we will grow our next venture, or sustain the work we do today. We must nurture the life we have, the people we love, watering when times are dry. We should dig swales and plant rain gardens when there is some spare cash to set aside, lest the runoff when it rains is lost to the gutter.
We should spend time in the garden, and rest our eyes on the life and the beauty within it, not letting to-do lists intrude. Enjoy the beauty of the moment. The tasks will keep, but that moment of life and beauty will not. Let your garden refresh your soul.
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Spring is a season of hope after winter. But it also blows hot and cold.
We can plan to re-invent ourselves after a time of difficulty or because our lives require it, but no matter how careful our plan, the winds of life are fickle. While blossoms may be lost in a cold snap, the tree perseveres; similarly, the new foliage that emerges on roses in the spring may burn at the edges, but the rose bush goes on to flower.
Re-invention requires us to hope for a different future. It asks us to chart a new path. It can be difficult to find the courage to keep walking the new road. On sunny days, the vistas are endless; on days when winter returns, lashing us with a passing storm, it may seem as if our new life is too fragile to survive and it may be hard to sustain hope.
Remember that the force of life within you will keep seeking the sun and trust your strength. The storm or cold will pass and you will have time during the summer to re-establish yourself ahead of future winters.
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Gardening gives men a place to discover how to nurture.
It requires gentleness planting sprouts in the soil and holding back the tender leaves to spread mulch beneath their fragile stems. It teaches how to restrain strength, and that careless handling kills. It calls first for observation - seeing the little plant and the life it embodies, and treating it with respect and kindness. When gardeners practice this observation and active gentleness in the garden, they have a method to call upon for encounters in their lives.
There is little that is soft about toiling in the heat of an early summer planting, kneeling and bending, digging and moving, with rows of beds to be filled. When we are tired, gardeners must still excercise the same care as when we were fresh. We give care because care is needed, not because we expect a return. The little plants that die from rough handling speak to this truth.
Care is first seeing the needs of the sprout, and then gently giving it what it needs to thrive. So too, our treatment of others.
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Severe weather is becoming more commonplace every year. Rain has become storms, storms have become supercells or tornadoes or hurricanes. Droughts have produced tinder for fires. Snows have become drifts, and cold snaps, deep freezes. Gardens have been devastated everywhere there are gardens.
Many people too, will have experienced devastation in their lives; loss upon loss upon loss.
Nature is the force behind the life we see in gardens, even if we as gardeners attempt to channel that life into veggies and herbs, trees and hedges, flowers and berries. It is the seed that roots in the tarmac, the flowers that burst forth in the desert after years of drought.
There is nothing easy about loss. It leaves lives permanently scarred, bearing a burden of grief. But if we find a way to tap into that force for life that is always present, we too can begin to re-emerge after the passing storm.
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The gardener who starts a hedge should expect it to take time. It is an exercise in patience. Rewards will take five to ten years. Little wonder homeowners build fences.
Hedges with berries will feed birds, and the row will provide them with a place to nest. Those birds keep pests at bay.
Generations since the 1980s grew up with the personal computer. Computer chips have grown more powerful and sped up everything. It is habit forming. A hedge teaches long-term thinking, planning, and implementation. The slow pacing of getting from hundreds of three-inch cuttings to a tall, impenetrable hedgerow has a rhythm that forces patience and care, week on week, month on month, year on year. This is the patience needed to start a savings account for retirement, paying off debt, changing habits like eating and fitness, and perfecting a craft or skill.
In an age of instant answers to queries, gardeners need to grow a hedge to remind them of nature's time.
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Summer is the time of year for gardeners when it seems everthing should be easily flourishing. With care to prepare the garden for the heat and humidity, afternoon thunderstorms, and even severe weather, it can.
It is a time for morning joy and afternoon and evening maintenance. It is a time when the lawn is productive and clippings can be stockpiled stacked for compost. It is a time for mulch to safeguard moisture and simplify weeding.
It is a time to sit beneath the shade of a tree and enjoy the vibrant colours of the flowers being visited by pollinators while the birds scatter water in the birdbath and shout noisily at each other.
In the rhythm of our lives, we come to expect certain periods to give us some respite and to offer light for our souls. Summertime is when we store the light in our souls for when nights are long and winter winds blow.
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Popular culture calls the height of summer, idyllic. Heat loving plants are thriving, but weaker plants will fail in the brutal temperatures and humidity. The weather instructs gardeners to work with nature. Not to struggle in the heat or while thunderstorms are lashing, but to use mornings and evenings productively.
In our lives, like the plants that fail in the heat, the heat of summer exposes what needs attention.
Clear out what's failing so productive areas are also not infected. This may mean dealing with baggage. For others, it may mean cutting out soda. Gardeners want their healthy plants putting energy into blooming and fruit. But failing plants invite disease that compromise the entire row.
The idyll of summer is enjoying the dappled light on the leaves, the rich variety of life. The birds able to find food easily, the sounds of frogs ribbiting in the undergrowth. It also means working with nature to strengthen life so that it may thrive.
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You arrive in the garden one morning and discover that a tomato plant is missing leaves and stalks are chewed. Before you seize the hornworm to squash it, you notice white sacs on its back. So you leave it, sacrificing a vine for the row. Those are the eggs of a Braconid wasp infecting the hornworm and which will produce more wasps. That hornworm is feeding a beneficial predator that protects your tomatoes.
We add sacrificial plants to divert pests and protect our crops in the garden, set aside planting space for marigolds to serve as companion plants and to attract pollinators. Sacrifice makes our garden richer.
As gardeners, we should practice the same in our lives. Take time to walk each day to give the eyes a different horizon. And, and to move. Join a book club or group for activity and conversation. None of these things directly benefit our jobs or titles, but, like our garden, these sacrifices are necessary and enriching.
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The September Equinox is when day and night lengths are equal once again, but heading towards winter. It is a good time for harvesting and taking stock of what we have planted since the April, Spring Equinox. This is true for the garden as well as our daily lives. The Fall Equinox is a good time to pause for reflection.
Like the crops in the garden, the goals and intentions we planted earlier in the year are likely to be bearing fruit, as long as they were fed and watered during the hot, productive, long summer days in the months since planting.
Consider where you were in the Spring, the goals you had back then, and the fruit you're seeing now. How has your garden grown? What setbacks have occurred? In the same way as we water in nematodes to eat overwintering grubs in our beds, perhaps safeguards in our lives are needed, too: consider that certificate for better professional positioning, or paying down existing debt.
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Gardening provides natural points on the calendar like the September Equinox in which the plants and the soil are in equilibrium, balanced against the arc of the sun and the length of the day. Do have enough harvested for the coming lengthening shadows? While households no longer tie their survival through winter to the output from their garden, the existential point remains the same.
Without reflection, we cannot appreciate our health and all the blessings that bring us joy. And pausing is equally necessary when we are striving to stay ahead of bills and misfortune. Endurance alone will not keep summer plants from succumbing to winter.
What can we do each day to take back our power? How can we position ourselves for more freedom? Without pausing, we remain where we are while the Earth and sky move on, a recipe for hunger.
At the Equinox, take some time to breathe. On this day in which the calendar is balanced, claim it as neutral ground to use wisely.
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Gardens, like lives, take years to reach maturity. But a garden - like a life without forethought - is likely to yield mixed results. Planning is required. But plans without sustained implementation is simply time lost.
This vision of the garden should include where to place new beds and plants while older beds need servicing, compost, and care. Which parts should be set aside for food, for pollinators, for biomass for compost, screening from traffic, trees for shade plants, and which parts are for the eyes and the heart and the soul.
Gardeners should view the landscape of their lives and their gardens with imagination and envision how it will look in the years to come.
By working with the forces of life in the soil and the contours of our lives, we can plant in the depth needed to survive the challenges that life will bring. With plants suited to each area, we will feed ourselves, our souls, and create harmony we can visit every day.
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During times of change, the burden of uncertainty can feel overwhelming. It can feel as if whatever we choose will be insufficient. It can be paralysing.
So much about gardening is about tomorrow. In the garden, we plant and weed and prune, all for tomorrow. Sometimes, bugs feast on our plants and they don't produce a harvest. Or a storm blows through, knocking flat plants, supports, even trees.
And yet, the garden endures. It may look different, but it endures.
There is never a guarantee when we sow our small seeds or tend our plants. And yet, showing up each day, clearing a weed here and touching a blossom there, feeds us in those moments. We are a part of that life, and tending to it, it is part of ours. We can do little things without fear. Planting. Weeding. Pruning. Do enough little things and that will be sufficient for the day. Tomorrow's storms will be dealt with tomorrow.
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Halloween - or Samhaim - as it was originally known, is a Pagan holiday that celebrates the harvest before the long nights of winter. It is said to be the time when the veil between the living and the dead is the thinnest.
For those of us who have lost a loved one, it can be a time of special poignance, and bittersweet. While we celebrate the life in the harvest, we also acknowledge the darkness ahead.
The dying don't always get to see their dreams fulfilled, so this moment when the veil is at it's thinnest is a reminder to us, the living, to live our lives with as much tender beauty as we are able, while we are able. Life is, after all, ephemeral.
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Death and life are mirrored in the garden during Samhain. As we harvest our final fruits of the growing season, we also harvest the tattered leaves and vegetation. In the compost pile, those vines and spent leaves will provide black gold by spring. The harvest, food for the kitchen.
Like the trees, we should shed our leaves for the winter and set our roots deeper in the truth of life.
The season lets us weigh the ephemeral moments of our day-to-day lives against the great weight of infinity. How should we be spending our time? What is important? What are our dreams for tomorrow? What regrowth is needed to make real the wisdom obtained from experience, or pain, or satisfaction?
Samhain should be a contemplative celebration of life. It is a simple thing, to breathe, to be alive. Use the season to be fully alive and ready for the rebirth that the long nights of winter can prepare us for.
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Saving seed from our garden is a ritual of faith, a slow-rhythm practice in a world running on instant reward. When we set aside seed from the best plants of our harvest for the next season, we make a covenant with our future selves.
The life of the garden is a gift echoed in the acts of selecting, drying, sorting, and keeping the seeds safe over winter. Just as a gardener quietly banks seed from the strongest plants, so too we can save the insights, the quiet victories, the good habits, that bear fruit in our inner life.
Season after season, the saved seeds become more attuned to our garden. In parallel, our character deepens: when we consistently nurture small things — kindness, reflection, discipline — they root and yield in our lives. Seed-saving reminds us that tomorrow is grown from today’s intention.
When next spring comes, the seeds remember, the soil remembers, and so do we. We are stewards not just of the garden, but of the life within.
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The approach of winter provides the garden with fallen leaves. As our perennial plants die back, the trees shed their leaves. This is a gift. Pine needles form a carpet on the grass. Raking it into rows and then the rows into piles, soon we end up with a blanket to overwinter our perennials.
In sections of the garden where deciduous trees shed, it comes at a time where there is still some green in the lawn, topped with fallen leaves. Mowing before the lawn goes dormant provides a last top-up of the compost bays. The combination of fallen leaves and green grass will soon start to break down. With turning, by spring this last mow will have turned to black gold, ready to refresh the raised beds.
The change of season, the approaching darkness, can still provide bounty. Instead of looking to the sky, see the leaves that will safeguard your plants and feed the soil when spring returns.
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In his work after WWII, Nazi concentration camp survivor Viktor Frankl observed that men without hope die. He wrote that among his fellow inmates, those who were able to connect with a purpose in life were more likely to be among the survivors.
Where do we find something to sustain us when all seems lost? When life becomes barren? When destruction seems imminent? When work is a grind?
Without trivialising these questions, gardening can help sustain the soul. It can remind us of the resilience of life. Seeds sprout in concrete cracks, and barren soil needs only compost and water - and a little loosening - to recover. On our knees, turning the soil can feed more than our bellies. The life it brings can feed our hearts, too.
The small acts of nurturing our garden, of choosing to foster the tiny signs of life emerging and then growing, holds space for hope in our lives.
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There are times of year that afford some breathing space. Thanksgiving in the United States is one of them, in the southern hemisphere, around Easter. Both are holidays for the people who get to take them, but if your year falls a little differently, take advantage of these spaces. In the United States, Thanksgiving Weekend includes Black Friday, which heralds the moment when shops can morph their Black Friday week into Christmas Shopping!!! Inboxes are filled with spam, each sales email more breathy than the next. Gardeners are not immune, and it can be a good time to pick up and end of season plant that would have cost triple the amount in the spring or summer. These breathing spaces are the times of year when the garden has gone largely quiet as frosts have taken their toll and vegetable patches mainly comprise winter hardy greens or garlic and onion snuggling down into their beds to overwinter.
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First freeze is seldom a surprise. It happens around similar times each year. Depending on your location, the first visit of the coming winter is only overnight, with weather allowing for the last stretch of summer growing. Gardeners everywhere have adapted to this time of year. Some harvest early and plant for fall growing, the cold-hardy plants enjoying the cooler weather. Others use covers to protect their plants until the season is truly over.
In the raised beds in my garden, I use old aluminum single-pane windows steepled over the beds, recovered from a home energy efficiency renovation. Foresight often seems like wisdom, but gardeners learn to look ahead at the cycle of time, and set aside resources. Recovered windows are winter-proofing; old coffee containers are saved from the bin and turned into pots for growing.
How are we translating the foresight of the garden into preparation in the other areas of our lives?
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