Gardening Can Be Easy
Gardening Can Seem Hard
Gardening can seem hard. I know.
Every time I try to teach someone about a piece of it, I’m reminded how complicated it can be. It seems like there are a million variables, each with dozens of connected parts.
Especially if you’re new to gardening, or even if you’ve been doing it for years, it can seem like a dizzying array of thousands of discrete tasks and just way too much separate information about each plant to hold in your head at once.
Plus, it’s often specifically taught as if it were a thousand discrete tasks and pieces of information pertaining to every plant that you have to do and take into account to be successful. This way of teaching gardening is difficult and demoralizing for everyone, but it’s especially discouraging for big-picture thinkers like me who find this disconnected perspective is especially frustrating, since just not how we think.
Gardening being taught in this way, not gardening itself, however, is why gardening can seem overwhelming to people, leading them to think they can’t do it. Maybe it’s even led you to think you can’t do it. If so, that’s a damned shame because it doesn’t have to be difficult.
You Can Do It
Gardening can actually be quite simple and surprisingly easy. It can be taught in a way that each part of it is connected to a broader whole, making it inherently make sense. And you can definitely do it. Anyone can. If you have the desire, you can definitely learn the skills. It’s something everyone can easily do. YES, EVEN YOU!
Just Focus on What Really Matters: Your Plants’ Needs
Gardening is not hard if you simplify it to what really matters. And what really matters is what your plants really need for optimum growth, health, and productivity.
The Biggest Secret and Skill Is Understanding Your Plants’ Perspectives
That means the biggest skill you can gain is to stop looking at gardening from your own perspective and start looking at it from your plants’ perspectives. Seeing your garden in this way is the number one biggest difference between successful gardeners and those who constantly struggle to succeed— and the absolute line of demarcation between “veteran” gardeners, who are really just gardeners who’ve learned to be successful, and people who seem and feel like neophytes or newbies even if some have been doing it for years. I’ve had friends, whom I watched struggle for years, finally see their garden in this way and become like old-time garden masters in a couple of years.
Looking at everything you do in your garden from your plants’ perspectives is the absolute biggest secret held in common by every great gardener and what is so obviously, glaringly absent in every gardener who struggles. The more a gardener embraces this perspective, the better they are.
If you have the passion to do it but have always struggled, or have always wanted to but feel overwhelmed by the challenge, or even if you’ve been gardening for a long time but would like to be even better at it, start thinking about everything you do in terms of what your plants most need, and your garden will explode in growth, health, and production.
And, luckily, for your garden plants, this is pretty easy. Here’s an easily understandable explanation of your plants greatest needs: The Four Main Needs of All Garden Plants.
