Confessions of a Not-So-Perfect Gardener

Anne-of-Green-Gardens-Cool-photoAs a fellow gardener and a college graduate of horticulture, I feel a lot of pressure to be a perfect gardener. Along with having a 40 hour work week as many of you do, as well as weekly chores, I’m unable to focus 100% of my time on gardening and blogging. Aside from these facts, this past summer I had a terrible bout with tonsillitis, missed watering on several occasions and did not keep on top of pests.

So this blog post is my confession to you, dear reader: the aphids, whitefly, and spider mites won. Anne’s patio garden was not very green and only produced a few squash, pumpkins, cucumbers and cherry tomatoes. The eggplants languished, the beans were destroyed by spider mites, the tomatoes dropped blossoms and the watermelon wilted.

I was hesitant to write this blog post let alone post it. I’ve suffered in silent shame for about a month on what to do. I was given free seeds to start the garden from Renee’s Garden Seeds, as well as asked to be a Cedarcraft ambassador for their planters. I started out so excited and with really good intentions.

Why did I decide to confess? Well, I’ve been reading Brené Brown’s “The Gifts of Imperfection” and the author confesses all kinds of embarrassing things about herself. The interesting thing is that it didn’t make me like her less or want to poke fun at her. It inspired me to be open, authentic and real.

As I’m writing this I realized that the official Anne of Green Gardens quote “If you’ve never killed a plant, you aren’t trying hard enough!” is apparently advice I need to take to heart.

So with new excitement, I look forward to planting a salad garden with colorful carrots, beets and fun greens from Renee’s Garden Seeds in my Cedarcraft planter this fall. I hope you will join in wishing me luck! Oh, and feel free to share your failures (i.e. learning experiences) too.

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  1. Well, you’re about 10 steps ahead of me cause the pumpkins never took, the cucumber died, the watermelons never matured, just rotted, one tomato got wilt, another refused to set fruit and the one eggplant I did get became a caterpillar condo.

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