The Process of Garden
My roommates and I moved into our house in Pensacola over 5 months ago. After a couple beautiful years living with friends and family, moving into my own space awakened many dreams of turning curated Pinterest and Instagram posts into my reality. With the house, we gained a white picket fenced yard, balcony, and two little porches! Nothing was stopping us from dreaming and planning all that we wanted our space to be and look like: vegetable gardens, flower filled landscapes, composting, wooden swing, a fire pit, seating for large gatherings, and intimate quiet corners for prayer and art and work.
Five months in...all we had acquired was a low sitting beach chair for the balcony and a compost bin we probably aren’t using correctly.
About two weeks ago, that all changed. What happened? I got tired of dreaming. Dreaming becomes pointless and a waste of time if you sit still in the comfortable yet deceiving “security” of excuses. So I decided to walk through the excuses and do what I wanted to do. I browsed Home Depot and took advantage of my ever faithful google machine. I discovered the Old Farmer’s Almanac website and a really cool garden planning tool that lowered the volume of the voice in my head calling me naive and incompetent. I did some more googling and tempering for the sake of budget (raised bed soil is expensive!). I recruited a friend visiting town, and we went to buy some stone, wood, dirt, and seeds. Then, we went home and started a garden.
Every day I walk out to check on the raised bed, which doesn’t look glamorous enough for Pinterest, knowing nothing is going to look different except the growing amount of leaves that continue to cover the dirt. It will likely be weeks before any signs will appear showing evidence that I, in fact, planted seeds and months before I will get to enjoy the harvest if there even is one. All I know is that vegetables mysteriously come from ridiculously tiny seeds put in dirt, so I put some seeds in the dirt trusting that what I don’t understand or know much about will somehow produce something because I made a decision to try.
I’m still dreaming about the rest of our outdoor space, but I am confident that saying yes to trying this one thing is giving me energy and courage to try the others...maybe not today all at once, but one day.