On Gardening

“To plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow,” said Audrey Hepburn. I realized the truth in it over the past few months.

The wife has been venturing into gardening – a small beginner home garden – for the past few months. She did most of the work. I was the observer, contributor, and co-passenger in the ride.

I got seeds from a gardener, soil and manure from the compost plant and a watering can online. Then we went and got a set of pots of different sizes with holes at the bottom. It turned out that some plants are better suited for longer shallow pots, and some for round deeper plots. No one told us which to use for which before we put the soil in them.

I had no idea how much compost to mix and how deep the seeds are to be placed. So I went to the gardener from whom we got them to ask. He gave ambivalent, anything is ok kind of answers. With the help of some of our own beginner logic and google, we managed to plant them. Now the question was how often to water which plants. It is not uniform. For a while, I charted a timetable and then just watered all of them every other day.

The planting and watering schedule was done in the first few days. After that there is not much to do but to watch them grow. And plants grow slowly.

Every day, for a few days, we went to the balcony to watch if there are any sprouts, and for a while nothing happened. We saw things that we otherwise didn’t, like a small sprout somewhere. It is hard to tell whether it is real or just something we want to see. Some things we thought were sprouting plants never came up and some grew out of the blue. The flowers, fruits or vegetables aren’t going to be seen soon, and unless you are ok with this, gardening can feel like way too much trouble.

There is a time for planting, and there is a time for harvesting. Rest of the time is waiting and hoping. Nothing can be skipped. For some plants, we got a harvest every couple of weeks, but then they ran out after couple of harvests. Then there were plants that took a long time to bear their first fruit.

Some plants got some diseases due to weeds. Some didn’t see light due to more or less water. Some survived but the fruit or vegetable fell off. Some just wilted away due to reasons I don’t know.

And some plants grew beyond my wildest imagination. In some cases, all sown seeds sprouted to life, and in some, none came up. The garden eventually produced a good variety of flowers, fruits, and vegetables. We had to build a stand for it. But I couldn’t have said which at the start.

Gardening is not easy. There are many factors that add up to create the result. You plant the seeds, lay the soil, water them, and wait and watch. And it is indeed a miracle that out of that, sprouts a plant that not only springs to life and grows but has the ability to bear fruit.

One Is led to believe that it would be too proud and too vain to claim that you were the only reason for it. You plant the seeds but someone else makes them grow. It is no wonder that some wise man said that the best place to find God is in a garden. You can dig for him there.

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