Five resolutions for people who hate resolutions
PLUS - my Wild Gardening Club is now open! Here's how to join...
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This year, I am adding a new *premium* tier to my Substack! It’s called the Wild Garden Club, and it comes with a whole bunch of garden goodies (member-only emails, video guides, recipes, podcast episodes, Q&As and more)
Basically, it’s a place for imperfect gardeners (like me!) to get inspired, discover new plants to grow, techniques to try, recipes to cook, and join a community of people who are getting outside, getting happier and finding peace and fulfilment in their gardens
If you’d like to join The Wild Garden club and receive all that juicy gardening content through 2024, click the button below, and you’ll be taken to a page that says ‘manage your subscription’. Click the ‘change’ button and select the ‘Wild Garden Club member’ option.
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Hello and welcome to 2024.
It’s hot (but actually not too hot - yay!), all the boys have mullets and all the girls look like Debbie from The Wild Thornberrys, which - honestly - I’m struggling with, because I kind of really want to wear crop tops and baggy jeans too, but I’m not sure that’s allowed if you’re old enough to have actually watched The Wild Thornberrys.
According to chat GPT, 2024 is set to be ‘a year marked by unprecedented advancements and societal transformations’ with ‘cutting-edge technologies [that] continue to redefine our daily lives’ and a ‘spirit of innovation and connectivity guiding us towards a future that promises to be both remarkable and promising’.
But it would say that, wouldn’t it. Smug-ass boring machine.
If you - like me - are tiring of reading the beige bilge of autogenerated text that is increasingly populating the internet and wondering if it was written by an AI or just a really dull human, stick around.
Because I don’t know whether we are careening towards a dystopian meta verse filled with sweaty days and nights illuminated by the hollow blue lights of our intoxicating screens, or if, in fact, the spirit of innovation and connectivity really IS guiding us towards a future that promises to be both remarkable and promising.
But I do know that what you’ll read right here this year will be just me, usually sitting in bed, typing one-handed with a sore coccyx bone and a baby asleep in one arm. Barely filtered, human-generated content, that I hope will be informative, funny, relatable and interesting, and will help guide you towards a future that promises to be both remarkable and promising.
Wait, what?
Let’s talk gardening.
A new year in the garden
I said I’d be back in your inbox in ‘late January’ but evidently I’m addicted to the intoxicating buzz that comes from delivering opinionated plant rants to your inbox on the regular. I will probably be emailing a little less frequently through January because I really should take some time off to, I dunno, relax a little? But we’ll see. For today, at least, I’m back blathering at you because its January 2nd and (if you haven’t already) it’s time to make some New Years resolutions.
If a perfectly ripe new year is good for one thing, it is the fresh start, clean slate feeling that fills the air through January. The fug of Christmas has been washed away, like dust knocked out of the sky by a good summer storm. It is a time to take stock, to pause for thought, make some plans, get excited.
That said, nothing strips the fun from a new year faster than a long list of aspirational resolutions made on January 1st and abandoned by January 19th (statistically speaking, Jan 19th is the day when most people give up on their New Years resolutions; a trend so common the day has become known as ‘quitters day’). To be fair, that’s probably because most resolutions are both punitive and boring. Who wants to uphold a rigorous gym schedule or stop eating hot chips?
So, here is a list of resolutions for your garden. If you hate the idea of New Years resolutions, I think you’ll still find these palatable. They are small, achievable and fun. Do one, do them all. Or, do none of them, and instead resolve to do the only truly important thing out there: enjoy yourself.
Plant a tree
I like this goal because it’s not an ongoing habit you have to doggedly maintain all year. It’s just one thing and you have a whole year to do it. Plant a tree. Big or small, deciduous or evergreen, native or exotic, a tree will improve your garden in so many ways.
If you want to grow your own fruit and you have space for a big tree, go for a mulberry or a mango. If you’ve got less space, try a citrus, feijoa, dwarf apple or pear. For edible leaves to use in your cooking, try a bay tree or curry leaf.
For a fast growing edible tree, try a papaya, banana or fig.
If you’re keen on ornamentals, try a gingko biloba. For flowers, go with a crepe myrtle, or - in shadier areas - a night scented jessamine or a cape wedding tree.
If you’d like to add a small(ish) native tree (the birds will thank you), you could try a banksia, a paperbark, a grevillea or a WA Red Flowering Gum.
There are so many other trees you could try - these are just some that I grow or love. Pick your tree this summer, choose its location, and wait until the first cool days of autumn to plant it. It will bring structure and beauty to your garden and will help encourage more wildlife to visit your patch.
Watch one of your plants die
Now you’ve planted your tree, your next goal for 2024 is to watch one of your plants die.
Yes, really.
I don’t mean you should go out and aim to kill one of your plants. But I know there are a bunch of you out there who spend days, weeks, months stressing over your plants’ health. I know, because I used to do the same thing myself.
As the years marched on, I learned to stress less. Now, I usually adopt more of a position of stoic acceptance. Sometimes plants just die. And, if the ultimate goal for this year is to enjoy our gardens, we are falling at the first hurdle if we spend all our time scared that we’re gonna kill something.
The best way to overcome this particular fear? Meet it head on. Don’t hide from your sickly plants. Don’t turf their sad, wilted bodies prematurely in the green waste. If you hold onto your sick plants a while you might find they recover more often than you expect. If they don’t recover, you might learn something by watching the final vestiges of life slip away from them. And, most important of all, you’ll be forced to confront the singular, incontrovertible fact of gardening: we all kill plants. The way to become a successful gardener isn’t to somehow ensure that nothing ever dies on your watch. It’s to never let a mysterious plant death deter you. Kill your plants and keep on gardening, simple as that.
Sow your out of date seeds
I have about 200 guilty little secrets. Stored in little paper pouches, tucked away, out of sight, in a small wooden chest of drawers. And they’re not illicit drugs (although that would be kinda fun) - they’re seeds!
Alllllll the seeds I have bought over the last three years, in fits of unbridled enthusiasm and filled with the conviction that they will arrive on my doorstep and instantly make it into the ground.
It’s been three years and they are still waiting to be sown. Poor buggers.
My resolution for this year is to sow them. Seeds in packets stuffed in drawers are not doing anyone any good. And the truth is that the longer you wait to plant your seeds the fewer of them will germinate. Seeds lose viability lying around, especially when they are not kept in perfectly cold, dark and static environments.
So in 2024 I am refusing to let perfection be the enemy of the good. Even if I don’t have the perfect location planned, or popsicle sticks to label what I’m sowing, even if I scatter them to the earth and promptly forget what I’ve planted, I am going to get those seeds into the ground. And, if you have a dirty little seed-stuffed store cupboard secret like me, I suggest you do too.
Grow a spring bulb
If you want to find a simple, fast and surprisingly effective way to cultivate a sense of hope that will linger in your chilled winter heart like a warm ember all through 2024, plant a spring bulb. It sounds like a small thing to do. It is a small thing to do. But so often the small things we do have surprisingly large ripple effects in our lives.
It’s nearly time to sow spring bulbs (they go in in autumn), and I beg you, if you do one thing on this list, plant a spring bulb. You can plant it in a pot (hyacinths, tulips, crocuses, grape hyacinths and anemones work well in pots, as do Chinese ground orchids) or stick it straight in your garden beds (daffodils, jonquils, ranunculi and freesias work well in garden beds, and if your soil is fairly sandy and free draining like mine, you won’t need to lift them - they’ll come up year after year).
As the days grow shorter and colder and winter descends over us like a heavy, glum blanket, these spring bulbs will be busy working their magic under the soil. Hidden away down there, their first green shoots will begin to emerge from the soil sometime in June or July - the purest beacon of hope on a grey day. A sign that spring is coming, that the bees will return, that warm weather is on the wing and that, before too long, your garden will be filled with blooms once more.
They also happen to be ridiculously easy to grow and beyond beautiful. Plant some!
Have breakfast in the garden
Finally, here is one of my big resolutions for 2024. Not big because it is hard to accomplish. Big because I know just what an impact it will have on my days, and just how important it is to do.
Having breakfast in the garden (or even just a cup of coffee in the sunshine each morning) has such a bizarrely and disproportionately profound effect on how the rest of the day unfolds. I always feel like my mood is shaped by the first thirty or so minutes of the day. An annoying email read - too early - in bed, burned toast, grey skies, all seem to cut much deeper when they are experienced right after waking.
Starting the day in the garden seems to have a protective effect in this respect. It’s like a quiet message you send yourself: look, there is the sun, glimmering off the leaves in the pecan tree. There is a bee harvesting pollen from the fennel blossoms. There is a bird flitting between mulberry branches. This will be a good day.
Afterwards, you can look at your phone, you can argue with your coworkers, you can pay your electricity bill, you can file your tax return. The few minutes you spent in your garden will linger on, like some kind of green, blooming talisman; a buffer against whatever life throws your way. This will be a good day.
Thank you for reading! See you next time for more Lo fi life!
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My favourite part of this is the point to watch a plant die. It’s a little permission slip for the perfect imperfection that is life
I’m in the uk so it’s mid winter here albeit a mild one. My best days start with a little walk in the garden in my Pjs, dressing gown and wellies. I say hi to the hens and have a look at what’s new in all the beds. I’m looking at the patches of soil which the rhubarb will burst through with the keenest of interest. I’m secretly waiting for last year’s amazing dessert experiment - rhubarb and custard bread and butter pudding - it was delicious! Such a lovely time of year knowing things are just going to burst through the soil soon. The winter veg are doing us proud, so much babbington leeks popping up all over the place! Yep a morning with a little garden tour in my dressing gown lead to the best days!