This summer, I started a garden for the first time.
I usually avoid going outdoors in the summer. Battling a grueling track and field season, the swarms of mosquitoes and black wasps that terrorize my neighborhood, and end-of-school burnout, I was usually ready to relax at home with my music and a little passion project to keep me somewhat excited about getting up in the mornings (funnily enough, I'm listening to music while I'm writing this blog post).
When Troy High closed its doors in March and cancelled all sports, I worried. How would I maintain my physical and mental health while confined at home, especially when I couldn't see my friends in person?
I was taking online business classes (mYeBEE), and our instructor, Coach John, had discussed starting his own garden and offered to give out free transplants - ranging from over five different varieties of chili peppers to corn - so we could do the same. My mom had bought an osmanthus tree that produced fragrant, sweet flowers we could use to make tea. We had spent the weekend picking out flowerpots at English Gardens, and I thought it couldn't hurt to bring home a few transplants and experiment with a new hobby.
Running along the north side of my house is a strip of dirt separated from our lawn by an uneven trail of bricks. Usually, this entire section was overrun with grass and inedible weeds that grew tenaciously through a thick layer of mulch. I spent hours weeding this little strip of forgotten, cracked soil and watered it generously before digging a small hole and placing a baby tomato plant inside. All I did was move a leafy creature from one container of soil to another, yet the experience ignited a new excitement for gardening.
The next week, I bought spinach, lettuce, tomato, cilantro, Nantes carrots, and Asian chive seeds at the local 168 (a Chinese supermarket). We had no more growing space near our house, so I emptied out a plastic box of cookies, cardboard boxes from Amazon, and old takeout containers, and poked holes through the bottom with a red-hot knife, and planted seeds there under the instruction of many YouTube videos. Once the first spot of green poked through soil, I was hooked. I spent hours outside - sometimes in sock feet if I couldn't wait to put my sneakers on - just looking at the plants and watching them grow.
I tried to water the plants every other day (or as often as they needed, depending on the weather) and added a little bit of fertilizer to the soil once a month. If I'm honest, there were definitely several days where I prioritized other commitments before the garden, and I always regretted it. A vegetable patch is alive, and a homework assignment or textbook isn't. If you neglect your watering commitments even once, the living plants are the ones that feel the physical effects, broadcasted through yellowing leaves and droopy stems. I'll be complete honest, seeing those symptoms and knowing I was responsible hurt, and I've been diligent about watering since.
Fast forward several months and multiple failed experiments, and my garden now looks like this. It's not quite ready to be harvested yet, but I have high hopes! I've also discovered how detrimental crowding can be to a plant's growth, and started experimenting with hydroponics and designing a cost- and space-efficient system. Fingers crossed!
Through this experience, I do have a few takeaways that'll stick with me, the first of which is how to persevere the process of trial-and-error. I love experimenting and finding better ways to do things, but seeing living things die because I forgot something important or wasn't knowledgeable enough about what they needed feels much, much worse than failing a test. When you watch them slowly grow and take the time to water, prune, fertilize, and gently remove insects from their leaves a failure feels like a personal loss.
After each failure I remember that the reason why it hurts is because I care about the garden and whether or not it survives. It's infinitely better to care and think about something than it is to switch on autopilot, and while I'm guilty of flipping that switch during an off day or frustrating chapter, I've found that I'm happier when it's set to "Off".
I've also found that committing to a garden is completely different from sticking with a club for four years. A club or class gives you so much more flexibility and room to experiment: you can decide when and where you want to complete each assignment, and how much effort you put into it. I remember forgetting to water the garden for two days during HOSA ILC, and coming back to find that almost all of the baby lettuce seedlings had withered away (it had been an extremely hot and dry weekend).
On the plus side, by watering your garden every day, you can observe how plants change according to their surroundings and constantly pick up new pieces of knowledge. I remember checking on my cucumber plants the day after a fierce thunderstorm to find that they had almost doubled in size overnight. I can recognize the unique, tangy scent that wafts off of freshly-watered tomato plants and the strange, spiky object that turns into the bizarre lemon cucumber (yes, these are real!). Every day, there is a new surprise waiting for me, whether it's finding fat eastern swallowtail caterpillars munching on my carrot plants or discovering that the peppers had turned from green to a velvety purple.
With any hobby or skill, experience and practice can open the door to a world of nuances and tiny details that used to pass by unappreciated. Just like I now know how to identify damselfly larvae because of Science Olympiad, gardening has filled the outside world with the same sense of wonder and joyful insight.
The more I learn, the more I appreciate how lucky I am to live on Earth, and gardening has been a truly wonderful, uniquely tasty, learning experience.
Give it a shot! You might be surprised by how much it changes you.
