Creating seedlings for the summer garden

It’s snowing again in southern New England. We’ve picked up another eight inches today so far. We could end up with as much as a foot by the time this storm drifts away sometime tonight. I cleared six inches from the driveway and walk about two hours ago. I’ll have to go out again in a little while to clear them again.

…even the answers we have are not very good ones.

Ten days ago, I planted some perennial seeds for this year’s garden projects. Earlier this week, I set up my plant lights as the first seedlings emerged from the soil a full week ahead of schedule. This weekend, I’ll start more seedlings and likely begin transplanting some of the things that are already up into bigger quarters.

The farmer’s garden

Both my grandfathers were farmers and my father grew up on his father’s farm. He worked not only on his father’s land but on the neighboring spreads as well. He turned the soil, hoed out the weeds, bailed the hay, milked the cows and tended the chickens. But we didn’t have a garden until I was ten–and then, I think, only because my mother wanted one.

It’s snowing again in southern New England.

My mother’s first garden was a small thing–a 12 foot circle of dirt just outside the kitchen door between the house and the driveway. She grew tomatoes there, and very little else with much success. Radishes, I think, and gnarled carrots that were stunted and twisted by the clay and rock of New England soil. It was a good place to dig for worms.

Lessons from the garden

Farming is in my blood but I didn’t have my own first garden until the year after I graduated from college. I was living with friends in a house that had a small yard with some raised beds and some leggy, unkempt roses nestled against the foundation. It wasn’t much, but it gave me some pleasure. I like to see things grow–and I don’t mind getting dirty in the process.

My mother’s first garden was a small thing…

I’ve learned a lot in my gardens–sometimes even about plants. I was impatient and short-tempered in my youth, but hiking up long trails with a heavy pack taught me that I needed to learn patience and my gardens were the place I learned to be that. You can’t rush the growth of a plant, nor can you slow it down once it decides to start growing.

Garden realities

And you can’t count on plants any more than you can count on people sometimes. You can do everything right with a pepper plant, but that doesn’t mean you’ll get a bumper crop of peppers. Nor does it mean the Habanero peppers you grow this year will have the same heat as the ones you grew last year. In the garden, as in life, nothing is entirely predictable. You can only do the best you know how and adapt when you have to.

You can’t rush the growth of a plant…

People laugh when I tell them it takes three years or more to get a garden truly doing it’s best. It takes two years just to get most of the rocks out of the soil here in New England. It takes three years to build the soil into something better than dirt. It takes manure and compost and careful attention to soil composition and acidity to really get things cooking.

The impatient gardener

But people want things right away. They throw chemical fertilizers and herbicides and pesticides at their plants without paying attention to anything but their own need for a quick fix and a quick success. In the process they often make the longterm results worse. Kill off the bees and the earthworms with pesticides and herbicides and destroy the tilth of the soil by relying too much on chemical fertilizers at the expense of organic matter and your yields will decline markedly over time.

…nothing is entirely predictable.

The lessons I learn in the garden I try to apply to every aspect of my life. As a teacher, I quickly learned that every student was as different as every tomato plant. Each one had to be treated as an individual. I learned I had to be just as patient with people as I did with the plants in the garden.

Moving quickly, moving smartly

I’m learning those lessons all over again as I work on Walking with Jane and NET cancer. My initial goals were shaped by my anger and frustration and impatience. NET cancer is a disease and my gardening instinct is to move quickly when I see a plant–or a person–in trouble. In terms of finding a cure, we need to do that quickly.

But people want things right away.

But organizations are made up of people–and while it is all right to be impatient about finding a cure, being impatient with people does about as much good as tugging on a plant to try to get it to grow faster: about all you accomplish by doing that is to pull a useful plant out of the ground. Everyone is doing the best they can with the tools they have to work with. You can’t cultivate people by throwing fertilizer at them; nor can you ask someone who is an apple tree to grow a turnip.

The patient gardener

And the same thing applies to me. Four years ago this month the idea of Walking with Jane began to coalesce out of conversations with a number of friends and colleagues. It would be another 14 months before we were ready to create Walking with Jane as a non-profit with a clear vision of where we wanted to go and what we wanted to do. And that vision has continued to evolve.

You can’t cultivate people by throwing fertilizer at them…

I used to tell young teachers–and still tell young gardeners–that it takes three to five years to become good at something you do. It takes five to seven years to really master a new skill or fully develop a new idea. By that measure, I am only mid-way to really knowing what it is I am doing.

The master gardener

People like to say that if you’ve been dealing with NET cancer for six months you have the equivalent of a Ph.d in the subject. But that is more a measure of how little we really know about the disease than it is a real understanding of the disease and how it works. The idea may make us feel good–make us feel like experts, but we aren’t. We only become experts when we recognize we have more questions than answers–and that even the answers we have are not very good ones.

…the same thing applies to me.

In the garden or the classroom, I may be an expert at that level. But in the worlds of NET cancer and non-profits, I’m not even sure I’m qualified to scatter a few seeds on the ground in the hope something useful comes up.