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.
There comes a time when Fall turns to winter, when temperatures kill the leaves of perennials, their dying a signal of their intent to hibernate for the coming extended cold. The leaves slump on the ground, looking mushy and going brown. The garden looks untidy, unfinished, even ugly.
But this dormancy gives us a chance to feed and protect our garden for the coming heat of summer and the possibility of drought. When the garden appears at its lowest, this is when to layer on the mulch. Unseen, soil organisms will feed on the mulch in darkness, adding goodness and tilth to the soil.
It is a lesson to consider: how do we feed our souls when things are bleak? What are we using to blanket ourselves against the winters we will face, giving us a space to feed our spirits until the spring? We know winter will come. Let us not look at it as a time of bleakness, but as a time to hold space to grow stronger for the spring.
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- Written by: Norman Smit
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Gardening teaches us to choose. We choose the plants that will do well in our gardens. We choose flowers and species that will feed the bees and other pollinators. We choose grasses and undergrowth to provide a safe space for nature to take shelter.
When we prune our bushes and shrubs, we choose the branches to keep so they will grow more beautiful, sturdier.
The lesson of pruning is also needed in our lives.
Like our gardens, which may take on more and more plants it becomes overgrown, we take on new responsibilities, cram in more activities. Our bed times get pushed back an hour. We wake up earlier. We take on that additional responsibility.
Do not fear the negative space. The single tall rock in a Zen garden is striking and beautiful because it is so solitary. Like your roses, pruning regularly opens up your daily routine. Each year, cut back the overgrowth so that your life may retain only what truly feeds you, leaving the essential and beautiful.
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- Written by: Norman Smit
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Our garden can teach us a lot about failure. But it also provides lessons on thriving.
All gardeners fail at growing at some point. We kill plants because of too much water, too little, too much shade, too much sun. The ground is too hard, or the hole too deep. Because we went away on holiday, or to hospital. Disease and insects. Bunnies and squirrels.
Gardens are also a lot like lives - they have boundaries and are located in climates that set limitations. We face limitations through birth, family money, education, disposition, health circumstances, life events, and a variety of structural and other impacts.
And yet there are gardens everywhere that are full of richness and that feed the souls of the people living there. Regardless of the space we have, it is possible to be intentional about what we grow and to thrive despite limitations. Gardens reward our stewardship. Spaces can be transformed into places of beauty with time and stewardship. In turn, this stewardship transforms us.
We can be beautiful, despite circumstances.
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- Written by: Norman Smit
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