Motherhood, mulch & mediocrity

A few thoughts on being just *good enough*

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When I was at uni, most of my friends were studying law; a profession I knew I would be laughably bad at. But the arts library was cold, the science library was eternally under construction, and the law library had the most windows and natural lighting, so I routinely crashed my friends’ study sessions and read about psychopathy and neurons while they memorised unfathomably complicated legislature.

I learned nothing about the law in this time. What I did manage to absorb was a singular maxim, muttered religiously by undergrads every semester when exams swung back around: Ps get degrees.

Ps get degrees, Ps get degrees, it was almost a chant, a way of greeting, a vocal talisman they’d take into each assessment along with their lumbering piles of incomprehensible, oversized tomes (Ps get degrees - and besides, it’s an open book exam anyway).

Did I take this ethos and apply it to my own studies? Hell no! I used felt tip pens to draw giant, multi-coloured diagrams of deep brain structures, spinal columns and cranial nerves (don’t ask me about any of them I have completely forgotten everything). I attended basically all of my 9am lectures and I bashed my head against the mathematical hellscape known as SPSS (the Statistical Package for Social Sciences). I told myself “if a job’s worth doing it’s worth doing well”. And so I really tried to get good grades. I grimaced at my credits and was aghast at the passes. (I later discovered that undergrad psychology is graded to a 70% average, which, for the most part, helped me maintain my illusions of academic grandeur).

I’ve been thinking about that period of my life a lot lately. Our baby just turned one, and something about that milestone has me mentally revisiting my twenties more often than usual. There was a jittery lightness to them that I only see now - an unbridled sort of open-endedness. On New Years eve, I walked past two 20-year-old girls standing on a balcony in their bikinis. My hair was in a bun that I’d slept in for five nights straight, our baby was strapped to me in a carrier, I was wearing the same black singlet I wear 9 days out of every 10. As I passed them, I heard the cork pop from a champagne bottle. I was in bed by 10pm.

I miss the lightness, but I don’t miss the jitters. In the marketplace of motherhood a particular kind of barter seems ubiquitous - our freedom is exchanged for the kind of mental clarity that only follows a rapid, painful recalibration of what’s actually possible, how much is really achievable and what truly matters. What have I learned? That there is no such thing as a perfect score. There are no high distinctions to be gained and you can’t just guts your way into perfect parenthood because perfection doesn’t exist. What we can be is ‘good enough’. Maybe this is what my uni friends meant all along. In life, as in law, maybe Ps really do get degrees.

Turns out, when you have minimal hours in the day to achieve all you want to get done, the ‘Ps get degrees’ ethos can be applied conveniently to everything. Especially the garden.

And so, in honour of our beautiful little 1 year old and his unique ability to teach me the valuable life lessons that I had hitherto refused to absorb, here is my guide to being a ‘good enough’ gardener, perfect for those with hectic lives, full schedules and 0-to-12-month-olds in tow.

What’s the goal of your garden

Let’s talk about the reason we’re gardening in the first place.

Because if you think you’re growing a garden ‘to feed your family healthy, homegrown meals’, ‘to wander outside and pick a bouquet of flowers for the table’ or ‘to create a natural space that is beautiful to be in all year round’ then I have news for you. These are high distinction goals, and while they are perfectly achievable, they are beyond the scope of today’s newsletter.

Today’s newsletter is not about attaining the lofty heights of gardening perfection.

Today we are too busy.

Today we are chasing small humans around and trying to stop them eating fistfuls of animal manure, or we’re working two jobs, or we’re finishing uni, we’re looking after a sick family member, or we’re recovering from an illness, or depression, or an injury.

Today is not about excelling. Today is about passing. Because actually, the point of growing a garden isn’t the perfect harvests and blooms, it’s being in your garden, doing something (anything!) out there, and enjoying it.

A note about soil

I don’t know how much time you have for your garden right now, but for the purposes of today’s newsletter I’m gonna assume it’s not much. Which means we need to talk about soil. In a garden with crappy soil, many plants will struggle to grow. And soil improvement takes time. It is HARD to do when you don’t have many hours to get stuck in, and it is even harder if a baby might interrupt you at any second, because shovelling loads of animal manure into your garden beds is not exactly a clean activity.

I really struggled to keep our soil healthy over the last year, and all credit for its current health goes to my husband who took on the task of spreading the buttloads of mulch and manure I kept getting delivered to our driveway.

The best way to grow a really healthy and successful garden is to invest your time, energy and money into the soil it grows in. But, if you are in a busy phase of life there are workarounds. The following tips don’t require you to overhaul the soil in your whole garden, save that for when you have time.

For now, try these five tips.

Plant trees

If you plant nothing else this year, plant trees. So often, I come across people who want to grow edible gardens struggling to maintain veggie patches when they have no real time to put into their care. Veggies are high maintenance plants! Trees are not.

You don’t need to improve the soil in your entire garden if you only add trees to start with. Just improve the ~1 cubic meter of soil where you’ll plant the tree. Plant it in mid-to-late autumn so it can establish itself over winter, and make sure it is watered regularly. That’s it. That’s all you have to do.

What I love about trees is that they will gradually improve your garden for you - in so many ways - while you’re busy doing other stuff. The will begin to add structure and dappled shade. They will attract birds and cool the space. Their roots will improve your garden’s ability to capture and hold rainwater in the soil over winter. And, if you grow productive trees, they will give you a low maintenance way to start an edible garden.

Over our son’s first year of life, when I grew next-to-no vegetables, I harvested produce from so many of our edible trees. Bananas, mangos, mulberries, papayas, oranges, bay leaves, curry leaves, lemons and limes all came out of the garden with zero effort from me.

Mangoes!

The only catch is that you need to be patient. I’m still waiting on fruit from a heap of immature trees; a sunrise lime, strawberry guava, red-fleshed apple, feijoa, custard apple, black sapote, pink grapefruit and a fig. But if you’re looking for the biggest bang for your buck, if you have limited time but want to begin growing a beautiful garden, trees are the way to go.

Work on one bed at a time

How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. This is the way to approach your garden if you don’t get a lot of opportunities to work out there. Plant one bed at a time.

It’s much better to thoroughly improve the soil in one small bed and then plant it and care for it, than it is to do a half-assed job on the soil and plants across your whole garden.

Life is long and our gardens are never finished. Knowing that, tackle just one small bit at a time, and do it well. Your whole garden might only get a pass grade, but all your joy will be wrapped up in that one little thriving, beautiful corner, into which you have poured the full extent of your love. And that is much better.

Sow direct

Once you’ve got a garden bed that is filled with healthy soil, the next time saving tip is to choose seeds you can sow direct. I don’t know of any person who has successfully raised seedlings while also raising young children. If there is a gardener who has managed it, I take my hat off to them and would like to know where they are getting their Ritalin.

Personally, I prefer to keep it simple. If you want to grow from seed, choose plants that can be sown direct (beetroots, radishes, peas, fennel, mizuna, basil, chillies, corn, zucchinis, poppies, false queen Anne’s lace, Californian poppies, sweet peas and everlastings all grow well when sown direct) and ditch the pressures of seedling trays.

Grow tough plants

In a busy season of life? Don’t waste your efforts on fussy plants!!!

There is no point making your life more difficult by growing plants that don’t actually like our soils or climate. Especially if you don’t have the time to spend on improving your soil. Here are a few cottage garden plants that will do reasonably well in crappy sandy soil without too much improvement:

• Cistus

• Echium

• Passionfruit marigold

• Dusty miller

• Artemesia

• Elephant grass (ok not remotely cottage-y but I’m obsessed with it)

• Fennel

If you are a member of my Wild Garden club, stay tuned - I’ll be sharing a garden video tour with you on Thursday showing you some of my current favourite tough plants up close.

If you’re not a member of the club and would like to join, you can do so by clicking the “Subscribed” button below. It will take you to a page where you can manage your subscription. Click the “Change” button to upgrade your subscription to “Wild Garden club member” and you will receive all my member-only videos, recipes, podcasts and garden guides all year, as well as access to all the member-only newsletter archives.

Think. A lot.

There are two types of gardening and one of them gets a lot more attention than the other. There is the grotty, leaves-in-your-hair, dirt-under-your-nails kind - this is the one we are most familiar with, and it is least conducive to gardening with young babies, limited time or when you’re feeling run down. But there is another, equally valuable type of gardening that doesn't get nearly enough attention: the kind we do in our minds.

Helen Dillon, a garden designer and lecturer born in Scotland put it best: “The most serious gardening I do would seem very strange to an onlooker, for it involves hours of walking round in circles, apparently doing nothing”.

This is the type of gardening we always forget about, opting instead to shovel mulch, sow seeds, prune plants and generally do whatever makes us feel purposeful and productive. But if you step back and allow yourself some time for mental gardening (or if you have no other choice because you have a 6-week-old permanently in your arms), you will come to see just how immensely valuable and important this kind of gardening is to creating a beautiful and thoughtful space.

Wandering through your garden with a sleeping baby, sitting in a sunny corner while your broken leg heals, taking a ten minute stroll around the backyard each evening after work. These are the times you get a chance to really observe the way your garden is growing. To discover which plants are thriving and which are struggling, to see the way the sun moves across the garden, to notice what is in flower, and to daydream about what you might add, change or experiment with.

It feels like you’re doing nothing, but in my experience, the stillness that arrives when you let yourself just be in your garden is precisely what allows the really good, creative ideas to bubble slowly to the surface.

I also find that these relaxed garden daydreams make me more productive when I finally get a chance to do the grubby work. If you’re familiar with the experience of suddenly having a precious 30 minutes to get stuck into your garden and spending the first 20 of those minutes in a paralysed dither not knowing where to begin, these daydreamy wanders are the solution. I take my phone out with me when I wander and I write lists of all the things I would like to be doing if I could. Then, when I get a chance to garden and am struck by indecision paralysis, I just bring the job list out, pick something that fits the time I have, and get going. It’s the best way I’ve found for getting unstuck.

Speaking of getting unstuck, I’m going to wrap this up by stealing a genius idea from the very clever and equally lovely

Brooke McAlary

whose book Care offers suggestions for practical things you can do to care for yourself, others and the planet, at the end of each chapter. The suggestions are laid out in order of how much time you need for them, so they can be fitted around your own temporal limitations.

Here’s my version for your garden:

If you have 1 minute

• Step outside, close your eyes and look up to the sun. Feel it warm your skin.

• Sit quietly in a patch of dappled shade and watch the light dance as it hits the ground.

• Walk barefoot through your garden. Pay attention to how the earth feels beneath your feet.

• Pick a single flower and inhale its perfume.

• Listen. To the wind in the trees, the bees buzzing, the birds singing.

• Lie flat on your back on a patch of grass. Stare up at the sky.

If you have 5 minutes

• Find a seat and have a cup of tea. Watch your garden move in front of you as if it were a film.

• Pick a bouquet of flowers for your table.

• Harvest some herbs to add to your dinner. Taste them as you pick them.

• Smell every fragrant plant in your garden.

• Deadhead your roses/daisies/marigolds/petunias.

• Walk down your garden paths, noticing how the garden opens up as you move through it. Are there any layout changes you’d like to make?

• Notice what’s flowering in your garden - do the colours compliment each other? Are there gaps to fill? New flowers to think about adding?

• Refill your bird baths.

If you have 30 minutes

• Have a meal in your garden.

• Do some hand watering, listening to a podcast, some music or the sounds of your garden while you water.

• Find a shady spot to read a book.

• Transplant one plant somewhere new.

• Sort our your seeds and decide what to plant next season.

• Plant a tree.

• Using old bricks or rope, lay out a tentative new design for some paths or garden beds that you’ve been thinking about. Live in your tentative design for a few days - walk the paths, imagine the beds - to see if you like it.

• Prune one plant.

• Sow some veggie seeds direct.

If you have 1 hour

• Improve the soil in one garden bed with manure, mulch (and clay if it’s sandy).

• Plant an empty bed with new seedlings.

• Pull out and mulch (or compost) your annuals from last season.

• Fill some pots with flowers and pop them near your seating area.

If you have a whole morning

• Pull up a path or garden bed and begin working on a new one.

• Check and repair any broken reticulation fittings.

• Go buy plants!! And trees! Plant a whole bed! Rearrange all of your pots! Dig a pond! Build a path! Make mojitos! You have a whole morning to be wild and young and grimy and free! Just don’t plant azaleas though, they’ll sap the life outta you like THAT.

However much time you have, however much energy you’re working with, and whatever personal battles you’re facing today, I hope you’ll be able to spend a little sunny speck of it in your garden.

Our lives have a habit of shifting beneath our feet, morphing into new and unfamiliar shapes when we’re not looking. With a nearly-walking, soon-to-be-talking, almost-toddler squawking and stumbling through my heart and over my sofa, I’ve never been more acutely aware that the only certainty in life is that things will go on changing.

There is perhaps one other certainty though: grow a garden, and no matter how your world twists and turns, unfolds and reshapes itself, you will always have a peaceful place to catch your breath.

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Thank you for reading! See you next time for more Lo fi life!

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