Everything is connected

Trigger warning: fertility issues.

Yesterday, I posted a picture on stories about all the new packets of seeds I had amassed during the week and a Gather member replied thus. 

"I have a similar amount of seed packets scattered around the house needing to be sown. If you have any words of encouragement would be greatly appreciated! I have sown many seeds, some sprouted, some haven’t, some looked good and now I’m not too sure they will really grow into anything. How does one keep the faith? Or maybe my heart is too delicate (or I’m not green fingered enough) for growing things…"

I have written about this before. I will write about it again. Milli and I talked about this in our conversation, and I will probably talk about it again with others. Everyone bangs on about how gardening is therapeutic, healing, connecting etc etc. Yes but. Yes but. I have just finished Sue Stuart-Smith’s book, A Well Gardened Mind. 90% of it is the narrative about gardening being inherently grounding, with a bit of Jung thrown in, and I found it deeply unsatisfactory. There is always a tale of a soldier, returned from harrowing circumstances, mute and closed off. Through the successful cultivation of tomatoes or orchids or something, he (and it is usually a he) comes alive again.

How awful, I always think, if those tomatoes got blight.

There is a more interested aspect in Sue’s book. She touches it and then moves away. I wonder if it is too complicated, too nuanced. I wonder if you have to live with this to truly know it. That how you garden is how you do everything. My relationship with my field reflects my relationship with my core self. Well-adjusted people garden and then bask in the blissfulness of the beauty that exists. Me? I look on it as a project, always to be improved, a physical manifestation of a to do list that is always two items too long for every day, and so they roll over and over and over in an exponentially spiralling comedy stream of infinite reams of paper. I constantly question what I should be doing with it, and whether I should have got a ‘proper’ designer in because I still don’t totally understand how sight lines work, how you borrow a landscape, or what the perfect ratio between mass and void is for a classic English cottage garden. I weed for an hour, remember that I should have sown carrots two weeks ago, put my fork down and then have to spend forty minutes trying to find it again because I don’t go back to it until eight hours later.

This is, if you hadn’t realised by now, pretty much how I life my life. The themes, that productivity and the offering of value is the only metric that matters, that hard work can make up for a lack of expertise and disguise a lack of confidence, that I have a problem with focus because I turn too many ways, take on too many things, that I organise my soul around urgency and imperative rather than importance and meaning. This is who I am, and this is how I garden. I have too many seed packets and not enough compost.

I have spent quite a long time trying to live with this, and quite a long time trying to hide this. I have had seeds die, or not grow, because I have not had time to water them. Worse, I have killed more impulse buys from the garden centre because I do not know where to put things and I bought them on a whim and I just can’t commit to digging a hole and planting them in the ground.

And this leads me onto the secondary effects of this. The judgement of the first thing, the chatter about how selfish and wasteful I am to garden this way. To do it so badly. From February seemingly, people post pictures of verdant, lush, abundant greenhouses. Perfectly arranged module trays with every single spot filled with a single, perfect, seedling.

The idea of green fingered implies some sense of magic, or being able to bring forth life with ease. And so humans, in our culture at least, conflate biology with morality and value. To not take to gardening with ease, to need to learn, to have to make effort, take time and to endure disappointment is to somehow be less worthy. I have supported one of my colleagues through ten years of attempting to conceive a child, through multiple losses and griefs, the crippling despair of an absence of life, and the even worse pain of the loss of a life. We work in a service for families whose children are at risk. Almost all of the babies are unplanned, conceived in complex circumstances of drug use, aggression, violence and chaos. The babies are often unwanted and attacked and yet they burst into being with apparent effortlessness. It is hard to be objective when so much is at stake and my colleague has wrestled with the idea that this was some moral judgement on her that she could not do this primitive thing. She has asked herself over and over what was wrong with her that she could not do this most primitive of things, that life would not magically emerge*.

*I can tell this story because she is now very very pregnant and her baby is due in August.

It is, of course, nothing of the sort. There is no moral judgement, only biology. Human beings make meaning wherever they go and we are so egotistical as a species that we do always seem to make it about us. It is not because they don’t like you, that you are a failure as a gardener, that you don’t have the ‘magic’ touch. It is, my love, only biology. Here are some of the things that seeds, seedlings, plants need, and here is where it might have gone wrong.

Seeds need warmth to germinate, light to grow. I have had only a few failures this year and I absolutely do put that down to the biodynamic system. You may think that this contradicts everything I have just said above, and that I am bringing the whole magic thing in again. I could pretend it is that I have invoked the power of the cosmos (and I am not saying I might not say that in the future), but actually it is predictably biological. Almost all my failures historically have been inconsistent watering; I am busy, it gets hot, things fry, I feel guilty, I over-water or put in gravel trays of water, get distracted, come back two days later and everything is drowned. Every single thing I have sown this year has been in Fertile Fibre compost which is incredibly high in coir content, which is amazingly water retentive. I don’t have to water nearly as often and it is quite forgiving of getting sodden and not rotting the seed. I can go up to a week with some things and the plants are still quite happy. Even when things do need watering, they don’t go from fine to crispy and dead in a day, they have a good window of looking a bit wilty and so I can get to them in time.

I am not going to deny that I have some seed trays that have done nothing. Weld, disappointingly, and some coreopsis. I am going to sow them again today because I am going to fold up and pack away the heat mat, and I do wonder if it got a bit hot for them. Heat is good. Hot is not.

If your seeds germinate, but then stall, two things might be happening. One is that they need more nutrition and space, and you need to put them in a bigger pot. This is especially the case if you sowed into seed compost because it has very little food for the plant to use once it has used up the reserves that were in the seed casing. Seedlings need light for food, and they need nutrition in the soil for food. Prick it out and pot it up into a multi-purpose compost. Don’t expect this to be immediate. They will take a week or so to get over the surprise of moving, but then they should shoot up.

Secondly, some plants put a lot of effort into getting their roots going and so you might not see a lot of top growth, and you will think they aren’t doing anything, but they are. I always find cuttings are like this. Just at the moment I declare them a waste of time and utterly beyond rescue, I tip them out and find a beautiful network of white roots. This also tells you something about timing. Because I grow mostly for seed, I grow a lot of annuals. These burst into life in what seems like minutes. I have invested in some perennials this year too though. They sat there for weeks and did nothing, whilst trays of cosmos and turnips sprung up into forests around them. I blamed myself for being such a rubbish grower that I could only do the ’easy’ things and that I shouldn’t have tried to step up into the pro league. The usual mind chatter, and then I did what I always do with a slow burner, which is out of sight, out of mind, and I tucked in towards the back of the bottom staging. This is, completely coincidentally, the perfect place for slow germinators. It is shadier and cooler, and I don’t poke and prod it nearly as much. After nearly a month, the first seedling of Campanula takesimana ‘Alba’ has appeared. Of course, it may just be a weed.

And so, before you fall down the rabbit hole of seed sadness, check the biology. Are they warm enough, moist enough, light enough? Have they got enough soil underneath them and not too much above them? Once you have done that, check your mind and your heart. Are you expecting perfection? (Most germination rates for fresh seed are about 70%, but no one ever remembers that.)

Are you taking it personally?

Are you comparing yourself to people who never tell you about their failures?

How are you actually feeling about yourself right now?

These are such tricky times. Put your hand flat on the earth wherever you can outdoors, feel the warmth, the life. It is going to be ok.

Much love,

G x

PS. There is lots of content being posted in the next few days but I am just waiting for some pictures from Pyrus and some words from Polly Nicholson. She's had Shane Connolly at her place for a workshop so I can forgive her for being a bit caught up with that, I will let you know as soon as the tulip articles are up. A few people have got in touch to ask about sources of bulbs. There is a post here, but I am also in discussions with Organic Bulbs in Bruton and I will keep you updated about how they are too. I think only Peter Nyssen has moved from dahlias to tulips already so there's no rush.