I'm back, and I have some *strong opinions*

On: pigs, useless advice and how to extract maximum joy from your garden

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Hello hello!

I’m back. It turns out that term 4 started a week ago, so let’s say I’m fashionably late. (I could have sworn when I was writing my last email that Google said term 4 started on October 14th, but perhaps that was my brain’s way of telling me that I really needed an extra week’s break). At any rate, the holiday is over, we’re grinding back into gear and this term I am supposedly going to be writing to the theme: The Desert.

Only, here’s the thing: I can’t write to a theme.

Oh my GOD I cannot write to a theme. I have looked for quotes about the desert, I have read up on projects to create permaculture gardens in sand dunes, and initiatives to plant a green wall of trees that borders the Sahara to limit its spread. I even contemplated watching the bloody English patient (at which point I was reminded of a particular scene from Seinfeld where Elaine Benes, sitting in a packed cinema, finally screams ‘Quit telling your stupid story about the stupid desert, and just die already! DIE!’)

I’ve decided it’s entirely possible that, were I to attempt to wax lyrical about the desert for the next 9 weeks, you might begin to develop similar sentiments to Elaine.

And anyway, I just can’t do it. Know thyself and all that. I never stick to plans, I change my mind daily, nothing saps me of ALL CREATIVITY like saying I’m going to do something and then actually having to follow through, and the whole point of this *pausing my newsletter over the school holidays* thing came about because I wanted to give myself a little break. Well, I did have a little break, for like, a minute. And then I spent the rest of the time freaking out about what on earth I was going to write about the frigging desert.

So the desert is out. And chaos is back in. Henceforth, I will continue to write about whatever happens to be on my mind when I open up the notes app in my phone. And today that is: pigs.

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Notes:

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Pigs, perfectionism and boring-ass garden advice

This morning, as I watched my husband carry our food scraps out to our FOGO bin in a neat little green (apparently) compostable bag, I started thinking about pigs. About how it wasn’t thaaat long ago that people just flung their food scraps into the local pig pen. The pigs ate the food, made a tonne of pig manure for the veggie patch, got nice and fat and then everyone ate the pig. Admittedly, it wasn’t such a good set-up for the pig, but you can’t deny it was a lot less convoluted. So many things about the way we live now are just so convoluted. There are so many moving parts, so many ‘should’s, so many instruction booklets and guides, and I don’t know about you but I think it’s deadly dull. I think this is why people don’t grow gardens, or, if they do grow gardens, why they routinely stress out about the gardens they’re trying to grow.

I have to admit that I don’t really read gardening books very often, or listen to garden podcasts, it’s even been a while since I watched an episode of Gardener’s World. The way I usually learn about gardening is by chucking stuff in the ground and seeing what sticks. (This is, incidentally, the way I think everyone should learn about gardening, so feel free to abandon this newsletter right now and just go fling some seeds at your soil).

But every now and then, I decide to dip into the world of garden media, just to see what everyone else is reading/listening to/being told to do.

And holyyyyy shit it’s boring.

And it’s complicated! It’s so complicated that if I actually pretend that I’m going to take any of the advice that is being proffered I instantly start to feel bored and overwhelmed myself. Seed sowing schedules, fertigation systems, repeat applications of liquid feeds at bi-weekly intervals, shifting tiny plants between progressively larger pots over a series of weeks and fear mongering about pests.

When did gardening stop being about just… making stuff grow? You know, for fun.

For every piece of ‘expert garden advice’ I’ve come across lately, there is a much simpler, much lazier, and much more enjoyable way to achieve a result that, I swear, has to be at least 90% as good. And I really think 90% is good enough.

You don’t need to painstakingly sow your seeds in tiny trays and then pot them into incrementally larger pots. Instead, throw the seeds into the soil of your garden and accept that some of them will never germinate. And some will. You are running a fast-paced, survival of the fittest breeding program; the seeds that germinate and thrive are by definition the ones that sow readily and grow easily in your garden next time. Just keep growing these.

You don’t need to have complex fertilising schedules to keep your plants healthy and robust. In fact, sometimes over-fertilising does more harm than good and leads to plants that might look good for a time but are ultimately weaker, like those beefed up gym bros who inject cement into their biceps, but then the cement turns their muscles necrotic because cement is not actually supposed to exist inside the human body.

I’m sorry but how could I mention this without sharing an image. Also WTF!!!!!

Arms are no place for cement and, as far as I’m concerned, gardens are no place for complex regimes that will fall apart as soon as your life becomes even a tiny bit busy. I rarely manage to wash my hair on time these days, there is no earthly way I am regularly applying liquid fertiliser to anything.

At any rate, it’s much better to add a heap of manure to your garden each season - it will break down and feed the microbial and insect life in your soil, and it will help your soil hold onto more moisture - something that liquid feeds can’t really do.

I could go on, there are so many examples where the fun is stripped out of gardening and replaced with mundane, repetitive, overly-exacting tasks. If you like to be exacting and you enjoy that sort of stuff, more power to you. But this newsletter is for anyone who, like me, switches off as soon as someone starts telling you how many parts of sand to perlite to coco coir you need for the perfect potting mix. I tried making potting mix once. It was very bad. Probably because I didn’t actually follow the recipe. I can’t follow recipes and I can't write to a predetermined newsletter theme.

Here’s what I can do. I can tell you about the incredible plants that are bursting into life in our garden this spring, and everything that is getting me excited to garden this summer.

The antidote to perfectionism and to the slow creep of boring, product-placement-fuelled, overly prescriptive garden advice is simple: joy. Maybe that is all the next 9 weeks need to be about. And probably the 9 after that. Ways, both small and large, to eke more joy out of your garden. For now, here are four.