My “Garden”
Last year, when I decided to plant a few herbs in my backyard, I was a bit unsuccessful. I had a basil plant that did well, but I had to pick the parsley in the first week because it had a fungus on it. The lavender and rosemary neither grew nor died, they just stayed the same for months on end. The rosemary wasn’t such a big deal because I could just pick some of its leaves whenever I needed them, but the lavender never flowered, rendering it useless.
Last year, I just had one container, and filled it with potting soil. This time around I have another two containers. In the one, I planted three basil plants. My mutt ate two of them when I brought the containers in before it froze one night. The other container has a rosemary, which is doing insanely well this year, and two onion that are probably not going to make it much longer. The third box had three carrots, three parsley and a tomato plant. All of which grew immensely. The tomato plant, which I was too ignorant to know that you are supposed to stake, eventually grew to heavy and half of it broke off. The half that still exists though has about 25 cherry sized tomatoes on it. On a whim my wife and I picked the carrots last week. It turns out that carrots can be a lot smaller than they look from above (see the picture below), and this early on they were still very tiny. The lavender, again, is neither growing or dieing.
Here’s the thing about me and gardening, I find it insanely relaxing and rewarding, probably because I have so few plants and don’t really do anything but pour water on them every day. But another reason I find the process comforting is that I genuninely don’t care about the outcome. I’ve been a terrible gardener, and I absolutely refuse to do more than even the basic amount of research about gowing these plants. I enjoy screwing up and learning that way far more than doing things absolutely right the first time, even if it means having an abysmal “crop” for the year. Gardening makes me wonder if the buddhists are correct when they focus more on the journey than the goal. Granted the goal of the buddhist “journey” is to realize that all experiences, even the ones you enjoy, cause suffering and your only hope is to detach from everything including your own existence while the Christian’s task is to find the sacred and cling to it even with your dieing breathe. I can’t help but wonder if this a good example of both.
