Garden Envy and the Case of the Black Thumb

As spring rolls through the foothills of the Sierras, everything is coming to life. Our farm is surrounded by that startling chartreuse of new growth. There are buds on the trees and the beginnings of blossoms. Everything is growing.... except for what I am purposefully trying to grow.

I have a notoriously black thumb.

Across the social medias, I scroll with so much happiness and barely contained envy at the beautiful gardens both large and small that my friends and loved ones post. Plants that grow wild and the bumper crops! Be still my heart. I am so proud of everyone's accomplishments, and often times benefit from it because my neighbors are so generous with their bounty. But many times I am plagued with feelings of inadequacy because of encroaching feelings of, "I wish...."

My mother and mother-in-law are wonderful gardeners. They can nurture sticks to sprout roots and are always giving me glorious clippings of things just ready to be put into the ground to flourish. Herbs and vegetables and flowers and bushes and trees, filled with verdant potential, all to end up in my hands and wither away to crispy death.

I hear the definition of insanity is repeating an action over and over expecting a different result, so I'm probably certifiable considering I accept all greenery with the very real hope that this time, it'll work.

It never does.

But now, apparently, I'm a country lady farmer. Especially because we have been really pushing to try and be more self-sufficient, and cut down as many trips into town as possible, I feel the very real pressure of trying to grow food. We have expanded our garden (an insane thing to do considering I struggle so much with this, but because to grow a year's supply of food for a family, one needs a lot of space--so expanding the area in which my failures take place). We're experimenting with so many variety of plants with the desperate hope that something will take off.

Baby artichokes struggling to perk up :)

Each spring growing season, I'm trying new things. Learning lessons from the years before and we get a little better, a little less death, a few more items in our harvest. We're a far cry from self-sufficient, as I attempt the hike up this gardening hill that is my Sisyphean struggle. (You can tell how I feel about this by how ridiculous my verbiage is getting) My kitchen is covered in trays and pots and growing things. My floors are sprinkled with baby fistful amounts of dirt because my little one is tall enough to try and sabotage my seedlings. There are so many empty blocks of dirt in my seed trays of things that just haven't sprouted. Anything that's been planted outside is being eaten by our free-ranging chickens. I look at my chopped up chard and my shredded lettuce and wonder, 'Why do we even have these birds?' (But then I make some glorious orange-yellow yolked omelets and remember, and they live to see another day.)

So many social media posts tagged and watched and re-watched of tips and tricks to beautiful growth on my phone and computer. My seed vault is enviable. I've been collecting everything I can get a hold of in larger and larger quantities for the day when my farm will actually be a farm. We had a giant truck load of good planting dirt dropped off on our property to fill new garden beds that my husband has made for me. I am carting wheelbarrow loads of dirt all around the property, mixing compost and manure like my life depends on it....

Laying out where new trees will go...

I am taking each failure as an opportunity to get better. We did a few soil tests in our garden and was horrified to discover that we failed in every mineral. FAILED. As in NONEXISTENT. As a stereotypical Asian student, those results hit me straight in the gut and I physically felt upset by the news. I've never failed anything in my life, and I'll be damned if I fail this. Ever since, I have diligently collected every cow pie, every shred of composting material and scattering it over my garden area (after letting it fully break down) because this is the year that things are going to grow. (Grow well, I mean. Things have grown in the past, just pathetically so.)

A lot of credit goes to my husband who is putting in many hours building garden beds, digging soil and trenching drip lines, replacing broken sprinkler heads and programming drip systems, expanding the borders of our fenced garden and discing the ground for larger crops. He is right beside me shoveling and mixing and building; clearing out trees and stubborn roots so we have more room for more crops.

I still have a black thumb. I kill more than I grow, without meaning to. But even my toxic touch can be somewhat overcome by sweat and science and foolhardy hardheadedness, which I have a lot of. I have high hopes for this year's garden. It may not be as amazing as others, but I think we will manage a little something. And if it doesn't work out, I know I'm crazy enough that I'll just try again the next year.