Gardening is good for the soul even when it’s no bed of roses

Dear new gardeners:

I hope you had a great year in your garden. You were one of the many people who tried gardening for the first time this year, probably because you wanted to grow your own food, or maybe because you had some extra time on your hands or needed a good project to do with your family. Or maybe you figured that if you were going to be stuck in your yard all summer, you wanted it to look nice.

I hope you had great success, but my guess is that not everything went as well as you envisioned. Maybe you only got a couple tomatoes after coddling a plant for months, or maybe some of what you grew just died. I’m going to let you in on a secret — it happens to us all.

The fact of the matter is that some years go better than others, and sometimes plants just die through no fault of our own. Just to be clear here, if you forgot to water your plant or watered it way too much or planted something that needs sun in full shade, it’s definitely your fault, but don’t take it personally. We’ve all done that too.

The sooner you embrace the idea that these things sometimes happen, the happier you’ll be as a gardener.

I bet you found out that gardening was more work than you thought it was. Somehow the image of a little old lady fussing with flowers in her yard has made people think that gardening has the physical requirements of knitting a scarf. But it turns out that all that digging, hauling and bending over actually takes some muscle. That little old lady in her yard with the flowers is probably 100 years old and looks as good as she does because she’s been working in her garden all these years.

My guess is that you also discovered that soil is far more expensive than you realized. There is no explanation for this, but I can tell you that you’ll regret it if you don’t just spend the money on it.

Did you get the chance to meet any veteran gardeners? If you did, you might have found us to be a bit over the top. Odds are some spewed some latin and then named five other plants that you “simply must grow.” Forgive us for the enthusiasm, we can only talk plants with fellow gardeners and we know a good target when we see one.

Even though gardening might have been a little more difficult than you expected, I hope you had the chance to taste something you grew or enjoy a bouquet of flowers on the table that came from your garden. Or maybe that you found yourself, cocktail in hand, admiring the view that you created. Because that’s the soul-stirring part of gardening. Those moments make the hard work, soil prices and even the occasional plant death worth it.

So I hope you’ll be back in the garden next year, not just because I want more gardening friends, but because it’s good for your soul. And it might help you live to 100.