Try, try again

I'm feeling a bit reflective today so I wanted to find some photos of my very first attempt at creating a garden. If you read our welcome post, it says we started our garden about 18 months ago which is true, this go round did begin about 18 months ago but I actually tried to start a garden about 5 years ago and I failed miserably. 

It wasn't your typical type of failure, like my tomatoes got blight or something; it was an epic fail. I did absolutely everything wrong starting with the attitude I took about getting a garden planted. I didn't exercise any patience at all which is probably one of the biggest mistakes gardeners can make. The garden plot I chose  didn't get enough sun, it had a problem with invasive weeds, I did not start by cultivating incredible soil, and I did not find good experts to advise me. 

After the bad experience I had, I hung up my trowel and gloves and gave up until about 18 months ago when I decided to give it another try with a whole new attitude, I would tackle one square foot at a time so I wouldn't get so overwhelmed that I got frustrated and gave up again. 

If I would have been a little more patient and willing to allow myself to learn from all of the mistakes I made initially our garden today would probably be much further along than it is now. Farmer D would have been more interested in getting involved sooner because I would have been having fun and creating something enjoyable for us both to do together. Instead I was frustrated and pissy about it all, why did I expect Farmer D would want anything to do with that?  

Gidget's house circa 2005

Gidget's house this morning

I was hoping to find some photos of the first "garden" I attempted but I was so embarrassed about it that I don't think I took any. It really was a disaster and there are still things in the garden that remind me to accept my imperfections and simply learn from my mistakes. If I just gave up every time I did something stupid then we would never have produced a single successful vegetable.

"If you would just let me handle the garden it would be perfect! Rabbits over here and chickens over there."

One of the silly things I  recently did was place a raised bed against a wall so now it's very difficult to maintain or use to it's fullest capacity because I can't get around all sides of it.

Raised bed against wall

Because I made this mistake, I have to leave an open area so I can sort of crawl in to take care of the plants in the back. We will move this whole bed in the near future to plant grapes, and from now on I'll remember not to put a raised bed against a wall. Lesson learned.

The area I squeeze into to take care of plants in the back of the bed  - not ideal

If you have tried a garden in the past but did not have success, I hope you will try again sooner than I did. Cultivating plants teaches so many valuable lessons and how to grow plants is probably the least of them.