A Time for Reflection In The Garden

A Time for Reflection In The Garden

A repost from a couple of years ago:

Spring is almost here for us in Australia and this means that summer is almost over for my friends in America and the Northern Hemisphere in general. For me I am still sitting here and tossing up whether to put in even a small garden this year. I am really stuck as to doing anything until this cast comes off because I cannot even plant seeds in trays. For serious gardening I should have had seeds sown weeks ago and ready to plant out, but a broken foot and then to break my arm right after that caused a few hiccups in my plans.  So, as I will not have time now for the majority of it, for the plants to grow and mature before the severe heat hits again, I need to rethink my plans.

Never mind, as there will always be next year or just wait till after summer and plan for a fall/winter harvest instead.  This is a decision that I will need to make as soon as the cast comes off my arm.

How did everyone’s gardens fair this season, is a question that has been on my mind for some time now.

I know many of you got a late start even getting gardens in due to the prolonged wintery conditions.

Did this unusual weather patter  hamper your yields or did you manage to still harvest enough to get by on?

For those living in the hotter regions, how did your gardens fair with the heat?

Summer is almost over for you all so it is time to take stock of the gardens and see how they fared.

Will you try something different next time round?

What grew best with the conditions that you had?

What failed with the conditions that you had?

Were you able to save seed for next year?

What did you grow that you discovered that you want to grow more next time?

What gets crossed off your growing list for next time?

What else can I try growing next time?

These are the sorts of questions we need to ask ourselves to help us improve what we plant and how we grow the foods that we provide for our families.

Did we supply enough compost or do we need to add more the to soil foe next year?

Was our bug protection sufficient or were there issues that I need to address for next time?

Did I have adequate water to allow the plants to grow to their full potential or do we struggle in this are?

If we struggled then how can I improve on this for next time?

This is just the short list and I am sure that everyone will think of more questions to add to their own lists.

Gardening, like any other homesteading venture is an adventure and a basis for growing knowledge. We never stop learning and as the seasons change and the climate changes so do we need to change with it. If we don’t  then our gardens will fail and our cost of living will rise along with our health declining as we will be forced to buy the foods that we normally grow.

This is not a good place to be at all so to prevent that from happening then we need to evaluate what we did, how we did it and if there is room for improvement. There is always room for improvement, the key is where can we improve.

It saddens me greatly when I hear of folks giving up gardening because one year things failed. Things fail in our lives all the time and in many areas of our lives. How we react to those failures and deal with them is what really matters.

Do we just give up when a crop fails and go … oh well, that was a total waste of time and I won’t do that again. Or do we sit down and look at what went wrong and see what we can do to change it and make it better next time?

I know what I do and that is to find a solution to the problem, fix it if I can and advance on to the next part of my life because doing this works for every aspect of our lives and our homesteading journey. We need to take the failures with the successes, fix what we can and move onto the next stage of the journey.

It is true that sometimes we just cannot fix what goes wrong and if this is the case then we need not to dwell on these times but to learn from them so that we do not make the same mistakes and fail the same way again. Giving up is never the answer as we learning nothing from the experience but taking stock of what went wrong, fixing it is we can, or learning from the failure allows us not only to have a better chance to succeed next time but also allows us to grow as a person too.

I would love to read about how your gardens did. How you plan to improve on them and such so please add your input and see if we can help others solve problems that they may have had in their gardens. Who knows you might just find the answer you are seeking from the input of others too.

If you have a problem that you are finding hard to solve with your gardens then why not ask for some help. I may not always have the solutions but other might. It costs nothing to ask and in the end it could just save you a whole heap of money.

Autumn arrives in America, one of the prettiest seasons of all.

Happy Gardening and Happy Homesteading.