The Garden Grows Us Back
I started gardening because I wanted to grow food. That was pretty much it. I liked the idea of becoming more self-sufficient, knowing where some of our food came from and being a little less dependent on the grocery store. I thought I was building garden beds to grow tomatoes and cucumbers and zucchini. I didn’t realize how much that little patch of dirt would give our family in return.
Gardening has given me a sense of peace I wasn’t expecting. There is something incredibly grounding about walking outside, putting my hands in the dirt and paying attention to something that cannot be rushed. You can Amazon Prime almost anything to your doorstep by tomorrow, but you cannot two-day ship a garden-fresh tomato. You plant the seed, water it, keep the soil fertile and wait for months. Eventually, this teeny tiny thing you pushed into the dirt becomes something you can carry into your kitchen and feed to your family. HOW? I understand the science, but it still feels like a miracle every single time.
Over the past several years, Ammon and I have become more interested in learning how to do things for ourselves. We called ourselves gangsters because if gardeners are anything, they are truly G units. It’s not easy out there trying to figure out how far apart carrot seeds should be planted or why your tomatoes suddenly turned yellow. With time, focus and plenty of trial and error, we started figuring things out.
We were living in the middle of the city learning to garden, compost, preserve food, keep chickens alive, make sourdough and brew kombucha. We bought books about seeds and herbs and canning and all kinds of weird things our ancestors probably knew how to do before they were twelve. The more I learned, the more I wondered how we got so far away from knowing how to do any of it.
Lately, with recall after recall, I’ve thought about that even more. Eggs. Lettuce. Cucumbers. Meat. Something has salmonella, something has listeria, and suddenly you’re standing in front of your refrigerator Googling a lot number because lunch has become a crime scene.
Don’t get me wrong, I love grocery stores. Costco is basically Disneyland to me. I love buying a pineapple in Utah in February even though absolutely nothing about that transaction makes geographical sense. I’m not interested in abandoning modern convenience or living entirely off the land. But there is a certain peace in knowing we’re not completely helpless without it. We can grow food. We can preserve some of it. We know a little more about what we’re eating and where it came from. We’re certainly not self-sufficient, but we’re more capable than we were before, and I really like that feeling.
But if I’m being completely honest, the food isn’t even my favorite thing we’ve grown.
It’s us.
A garden gives our family work to do together and a common goal. It gives us something to care for. There are disappointments when seeds don’t come up, bugs eat something we’ve been babying for three months, or the weather decides it has other plans. And there are wins. The first strawberry. Finding a zucchini hiding under a leaf. Sending one of the kids outside to grab basil for dinner. Sitting down to eat something that started months earlier as a seed in one of our hands.
I love watching my kids in the garden. They’re learning where food comes from, obviously, but they’re also learning that good things take work. You have to show up. You have to take care of things. You can do everything right and still lose a plant. You can think something is dead and discover a tiny green shoot the next morning. And sometimes you plant one zucchini and apparently spend the rest of your summer operating an unauthorized zucchini distribution center.
There is a lifetime of knowledge in a garden, and I think that’s part of why I love it so much. I’ll never know everything. Every year we try something, fail at something, get better at something and discover something else we didn’t even know we needed to learn.
All of that work, energy, disappointment, trial and error, patience and eventual payoff does something to you. We’re growing a garden, but the garden is growing us back. In a fast-paced world, it has become a sacred little place that demands we slow down and pay attention. You can’t rush it. You can’t control all of it. You show up, do the work, learn from what goes wrong and feel ridiculously proud when something grows.
I don’t know that we get enough of that anymore.
Maybe that’s why I think everyone should try growing something at least once. Not because I think you need five acres, a greenhouse or a sudden desire to churn butter. A basil plant in the windowsill counts. Tomatoes on the porch count. Two garden beds in the backyard count.
Just enough to experience what happens when you put something in the dirt and take care of it.
When I first started gardening, I was completely overwhelmed by how much there was to know. Soil, seeds, zones, watering, composting, when to plant what and why everyone on the internet seemed to have a different opinion about all of it. So I started writing things down. I kept track of what I learned, what worked, what didn’t, and all the things I wished someone had told me before I started. Eventually I compiled those notes into a beginner gardening guide. If you’ve ever wanted to grow something but have no idea where to begin, it’s there for you. Not because I know everything about gardening, because I absolutely do not. I just remember what it felt like to know nothing.
I thought I was planting a garden because I wanted to see what we could grow. I didn’t realize how much it would grow us too.
