Gardening is in my blood. When I was a kid, all of the men in my family had gardens in their backyard. A product of their agricultural, southern roots, they couldn’t look at a patch of land without envisioning what could grow there.
So I spent my formative years helping my grandfather harvest collard greens and helping my father pick tomatoes off the vine. Extra produce, and there was a lot of it, went into brown paper, grocery bags that were delivered to family and friends. Being young, I didn’t understand many of the intricacies of growing vegetables, but I was always eager to help eat them at dinner time.
Now that I’m grown, I have my own garden and a deeper appreciation for what it takes to pull food out of the earth. One of the biggest challenges comes in the form of weather. Unlike their wild cousins, the domesticated plants that we enjoy eating—carrots, radishes, cucumbers, and so on—are very particular about their growing conditions.
If the soil is too cold, the seeds won’t sprout. If the air is too hot, the plants may turn bitter or refrain from producing vegetables. There are a precious few months during the summer when the weather conditions are ideal for growing vegetables.
Sadly, it is during those same months that the pressure from pests is the highest. Slugs eat green beans. Cabbage moths attack anything that is leafy and green. Japanese beetles devour corn stalks. Striped cucumber beetles go after the squash.
Simply put, there is no “perfect” time to grow a garden. There is always some problem to solve or some challenge to overcome. Whether it is the temperature, or the soil, or hungry bugs, the avid gardener must be ready to tackle anything that life throws at them.
Because it’s always a terrible time for gardening, and that’s what makes it fun!
What I’ve found is that the satisfaction that comes from gardening isn’t the result of having fresh vegetables. Sure, that’s nice, but I can buy vegetables from the store with a lot less effort. Rather, the satisfaction comes from reminiscing about all the challenges that had to be overcome to turn a packet of seeds into food.
This means that instead of waiting for the exact right time to start putting seeds into the ground, I must look at the problems that I’m likely to experience and plan accordingly.
In late spring, this means knowing that ground will be covered in frost well into April, so my plants must be grown inside a greenhouse. It also means choosing my crops carefully and only planting seeds that do well in lower temperatures.
Generally, this means I have to stick with leafy green vegetables, such as cabbages, collard greens, spinach, and kale. It also means that I have to eat lots of salads and green smoothies during this time of year.
In the summer, the hot sun and high humidity requires that I stick with heat-loving plants, such as tomatoes, beans, squash, and carrots. It also means that I must abandon the greenhouse—it gets too hot in there—and plant my crops outside in garden beds. Also, I must use garden nets to keep the bugs from eating my crops before I harvest them.
These are all real problems, and if we enter into gardening with the expectation that it will be all sunshine and rainbows, then it will fill our lives with misery. However, if we look at solving problems as part of the fun, then the result is a bountiful harvest that will feed us and our loved ones.
This is true of gardening, but it’s also true of life. Buddhism teaches that our human nature causes us to be born, to grow old, to get sick, and to die. These are inescapable facts of life. Additionally, each of us will lose friends, gain enemies, lose objects we want to keep, and receive things we don’t want to possess.
This state of affairs is known as “The Eight Winds.” If we live our lives in waiting, not wanting to do things because one of these metaphorical winds might blow, we’ll never get anything done.
The nature of life is such that it’s always a terrible time to search for a job, to start a new hobby, to reconnect with a loved one, and so on. But if we look at these challenges as opportunities to solve problems, to experiment, to try new things, then they won’t hinder us.
Instead, they will become opportunities for us to showcase our creativity and experience the sense of accomplishment that comes from doing something hard.
It is only by tackling the difficult parts of our lives head on that we are able to change them. We can’t grow a garden if we aren’t willing to get our hands dirty.
Namu Amida Butsu
Related features from BDG
Metta’s Gardening Leave
Book Review: Gardens of Awakening by Kazuaki Tanahashi
Keep Planting Seeds
Calm
A Humanitarian Action for Other Living Beings: Creating Space for Urban Biodiversity through Buddhist Gardening
