#3 - Garden like a mother
Garden journal series
We’re quickly approaching the end of May and I am desperately behind in my garden. Not like the kind of behind every gardener feels when the season starts, but actually legitimately haven’t even done the basics yet. I did not start any seeds this year. My vegetable garden is still mostly covered in weeds or the tarps I put down last summer to suppress the weeds and grass…. my flower beds are already filled with weeds.
I had big plans for my gardening season this year. After closing up my vegetable garden last year (short version: I was too pregnant), I was sure I would be able to hit the ground running this year…. but it’s been almost five years since I’ve been in the throes of babyhood and it seems I’ve forgotten what it was actually like to try and function on little to no sleep. Most days I am lucky if I have the energy to stand in the shower. Just like my first kiddo, baby #2 is not a sleeper. Pure velcro baby, contact or car naps only. Heavy duty gardening just isn’t going to be in the cards for me this year.
At first, I will admit to feeling incredibly resentful. Why do I have to give up my beloved hobby?! Why can’t this baby just please.take.a.nap! Mama just wants to spend a few hours in the garden- ALONE. Gardening, after all, is one of the things that has had the most positive impact on my mental health. Who needs a little mental health pick-me-up more than a mom in the throes of postpartum mom life?
But, instead of circling around that way of thinking and making myself more and more frustrated, I’m choosing to be positive. I’m looking at this as a chance to slow down with my garden plans (which is very hard for me) and rethink some of my design ideas, research a little more before making any big changes and giving the soil in my annual veggie beds a chance to recover from 10 straight years of planting.
So, for this gardening season some of the things I will be working on and/or researching are:
Designing/Planning a perennial fruit orchard in my veggie patch.
This area will one day include strawberries, blueberries, blackberries and raspberries. For this year I’m reading and learning as much as I can about growing berries and starting the ground work for prepping the soil and area around where the berries will go. As this mostly involves a lot of reading and designing using my garden planner, I feel like I should be able to reasonably stick to working on this with some consistency. I will include booklists and reviews of the gardening books I use.Slowly plucking away at weeding my perennial flower beds.
2 of my 3 beds are up against my house, so nice and close. I won’t be able to dedicate long stretches to weeding sessions, but I can reasonably pick at weeds here and there when my toddler is playing outside and my baby is in the stroller napping.
General clean up around the veggie garden.
Things have gotten a tad out of control and messy due to neglect and procrastination. Grabbing piles of weeds, fallen branches, etc. and tossing them on the campfire (convienently located next to the veggie garden) is manageable in small bursts when we’re all playing in the backyard.
Read as much as I can.
Books about gardening, soil health, garden design, all of it.
This will include physical books and audio books. Long car rides when the baby won’t nap have become one of the best times for me to listen to audiobooks. Reviews and audiobook lists will also be included here in the newsletter.Document my slow progress in my garden.
The plan is to show up here and document what I worked on in this garden journal series. Anticipated posts for this series will be every Sunday. I am challenging myself to show up and write about the previous week in the garden, no matter what it looked like. If I completed a task, procrastinated, exceeded expectations, got frustrated, all of it.
That’s it. That’s realistically all I will probably be able to manage this summer and fall. I love to be in my garden, but some days I have to prioritize napping when the baby naps (ooooouu, how I hate it when people tell me to do that, but sometimes it is necessary).
Keeping my to do list short and not placing crazy demands on myself in the garden is what I hope will prevent me from burning out. You can absolutely get burnt out from your hobbies and doing the things you love and I don’t want that to happen for me and my garden.
For now, I leave you with a photo from one of the earlier seasons in my garden, when I had endless amounts of free time and slept 9+ hours a night!
Until next Sunday,
Jess.