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.
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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- Written by: Norman Smit
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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. Even if you are stupidly rich and can buy large trees, an instantly-landscaped garden cannot replicate a garden that's been developed year after year, season after season. But even with time, a garden that's been around a while won't amount to much unless the gardener has given it some forethought. In my front yard are five flats rooting cuttings that will this Fall become a hedge. In 15 years' time, those little cuttings will be a solid, beautiful line of shrubbery standing resolute along the edge of my property, branches poking through the fence, an impenetrable barrier to wandering dogs, deer, and nosy neighbours. Similarly, a life without forethought is likely to yield mixed results. Some planning is required, and then sustained effort to implement the plan is needed.
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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 days are getting shorter and the switch to daylight saving time seems to have hastened how soon the darkness arrives in the yard. This summer, I struggled with similar shadows. I'd be in the garden, watering the cuttings that had rooted, and I'd feel great sorrow at the loss of my partner and that she wasn't with me to enjoy the new growth and the promise it held. It reached a point where it was physically painful. And then the next day, I'd find myself unable to be sufficiently interested in starting the day. I'd turn over and try to go back to sleep. Or I'd force myself up, eat breakfast, go to work and grind out the day. By lunchtime, I'd be exhausted. In the afternoon, as hard as I'd try, nothing seemed worth doing.
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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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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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Gardening teaches us to choose, if we'll take the lessons of the garden and apply them to our lives. 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. We choose where to locate plants. And each season, we compost annuals. Maintenance calls us to cut back the roses and other bushes and shrubs. We do so to keep them healthy and so that they will grow to be more beautiful.
The lesson of pruning is also needed in our lives.
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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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