Leave it to my favorite author, Ursula K. Le Guin to set me straight. It kind of happened as a “duh!” moment for me.

A couple days ago *correction* Michele Owens posted on Garden Rant about “The Myth of Planning”. Now, I’m crazy about Garden Rant and frequent the site. Much of the content gets me riled up, but in a good way. I agree with much of what they write. “The Myth of Planning” was a bit different. It completely irked me. You see, I had recently posted on my own page about how planning and research can make landscaping easier. Michele implied that planning is a waste of time for the novice.

I wholeheartedly agree that everyone should throw caution to the wind and go for what they like and to not be afraid of failure. But it’s so hard for me to agree that we should just ignore planning. I don’t mean planning as in spending all of your time drawing out a complex blueprint, making meticulous calculations of spacing and such. It doesn’t make sense to torture yourself when all you want to do is something enjoyable like gardening. I mean planning as in “the act of subconcious planning”. The kind of planning that someone does when they can’t stop thinking about a vision they have. The kind of planning that gets you all excited, that gets you wanting to go out and garden.

For me, pouring over books and magazines and talking to other gardeners is all a part of this sort of planning. It’s planning, but it’s fun. It’s exciting.

So I say to you, read! Know your basics and know at least some general plant knowledge, but use your own judgement: if you find a book that suggests methods you know won’t work for you, find another book. There are plenty out there and not all of them are terribly misleading. My first gardening book (I’m lying I suppose, I did have a basic gardening book as a child as well) was Gayla Trail’s You Grow Girl and I found it indespensable! I wouldn’t have known much of anything and probably wouldn’t have become nearly as interested in plants as I am now without it.

Start out small. Don’t go putting all your eggs in one basket by rushing out and buying loads of expensive plants. I think if the beginner experiences a large scale failure, they are more likely to get frustrated and give up. Scale of failure is avoidable. On the other hand, failure alone is never avoidable. For every few plants you grow, one or two are sure to die. Sometimes it’s not even your fault. There are so many variables, you might never know why that delphinium croaked. It just comes with the gardening territory.

So back to Mrs. Le Guin’s amazing eye opening statement:

I had noticed that she had a new book out and I very excitedly began reading an interview about the book. When the interviewer asks “While working on a novel, do you plan the events that will occur in your characters futures?”, she replies:

My writing self is working away on who does what next and why, all the time; but it isn’t planning, it isn’t developing, the process is not as rational and under control as that. It’s groping and discovering, going wrong, thinking back, seeing connections, imagining where the story might go, saying “Oh no”, saying “Aha!”

After reading that line I think I understand what the ladies at Garden Rant were trying to say. We can’t always expect to succeed right away despite how much you have planned and prepared and researched. Things go wrong and that’s that. Gardening is “groping and discovering, going wrong, thinking back, seeing connections, imagining where the story might go, saying “Oh no,” saying “Aha!”. Just get out there and learn by doing and above all, don’t give up!

Today at the farm I dug up and divided the iris bed. It was a large task and I didn’t come close to finishing before I had to leave for school.

It is a wonderful feeling digging in the earth in the morning sunshine. Who knew that something so repetitive as digging and lifting and dividing and cutting could be so rewarding? Shoveling until my back aches and clawing in the moist soil to feel for the bottom of the rhizome until my fingertips are tender are surprising joys that come with working in the soil. When I drive by men doing landscaping in the neverending expanse of shopping centers, I poke my nose out long enough to smell the soil! It’s the basic manual labor that is getting dirty that I think I appreciate most about gardening.

When I arrived home from taking my chemistry test (my mind had already ejected any and all thoughts of moles, formula units and nomenclature) I immediately spent time with my tiny container garden next to our front door. Sometimes I just stand there, hovering over my pots, inspecting each leaf until the trail of ants who are continuously marching through my container garden find their way up my leg. Before they managed to find my foot, I noticed that my Chinese Lanterns (Physalis alkengi) had a tiny orange lantern. The ants had found it before I did.

I’ve read and read about how fast radishes grow, but I still had found myself in shock at how big they already were when I came home today. My swiss chard and bok choi seedlings have ceased to grow while my beets and carrots are moving along at a steady pace. I decided it was time to give the little buggers a douse of fertilizer. They probably needed it.

After completing that task, I didn’t know what else to do. Everything was still tidy and kept up from tending to the pots a few days prior. I had to think of something to do because Joe wasn’t due home for hours and I didn’t want to just sit indoors all day. So I decided to recycle some old potting soil (replenished with an organic fertilizer) and planted Petits Pois Baby Peas ‘French Citadel’ outlined with a small planting of ‘Petit Dejeuner’ French Breakfast radishes. Still not ready to come indoors, I pulled out a package of Lollo Rossa lettuce seeds and interplanted them with my wine crate of easter egg radishes.

My garden may be growing sick of the sight of me.

So we are starting up our October pumpkin patch and hay rides at work. The farm is decorated and filled with pumpkins, gourds and ghoulish pumpkin people.

The weather was crisp and clear this morning. The sun was warm on my skin, but the air was cool.

The trees are beginning to turn shades of red, orange and yellow.

It finally feels like fall.

So after yet another hiatus I’m back and better than ever! If you didn’t know already, I’ve been working on another project website. One that is a bit less personal and more gardening related. Now that I’m fairly comfortable with how “The Potted Seed” is turning out, I have had these two sites merged. This blog will be updates on me and my garden while “The Potted Seed” is gardening related articles of a more or less journalistic style.

I’ve been having many great ideas with what I’d like to do with my new website and am far from short on topics to write about. This coming spring I would like a arrange a Sacramento area local farm and garden tour and publish my accounts. One farm/botanic garden that I recently read about, Del Rio Botanic, sounded especially interesting.

I’ve also been interested maybe starting a community garden project here in Folsom after finding out (to my surprise) that Folsom doesn’t have any community gardens. Not a one. It’s a bit depressing, there is plenty of space here for one.

Right now not much is going on with gardening. I’ve cut down my herb containers and will pull the last of my basil out and make one last batch of pesto. For my fall ‘crop’ (which isn’t much of a crop) is a container of beets, swiss chard, carrots, bok choi, and I just sowed a few radishes in an old wine crate.

I’m basically in limbo gardening-wise. It looks like Joe and I will be in the market to buy a home around December so planting anything major in my rental just seems a bit pointless, but the idea of having my own permanent garden has me too excited to care.