Someone on the forum recently called me a pro, and I was startled and then really touched because I feel so inadequate sometimes . . . I’m so, so far from my goals!
I’ve only been gardening for five years, and while I’m obsessive and can accumulate knowledge through research quickly, a lot of practice takes time, and really awesome results tend to take even longer.
The past two years, I’ve been actively trying to cultivate an experimental mindset: “This is an experiment. I don’t need to demand any particular outcome. I am doing this to see what will happen. I need to be patient and observe, and determine what I can learn from it.”
I have noticed that when I try ten different experiments, usually one will be a wild success that I’m excited over, one will be a crushing failure that I’m gut-wrenchingly disappointed over, and eight will be mild failures. It’s very, very easy to look at those failures, especially the gut-wrenching ones, and get miserable — and that’s the wrong focus entirely. Because failures are just failures, even the most crushing ones. Successes are potential building blocks to create a stronger system to get me towards my goals. I should pay attention to the failures only in order to learn from them, and let go negative feelings about them.
Especially since I’m starting to find that a failure isn’t always as much of a failure as it looks. I’m starting to find that, long-term, one of those mild failures turns out to have been a success after all — it just needed more time. Let’s say seeds of a species I was interested in growing failed to germinate, but those seeds pop up a few years later, and they do wonderfully. Or a species I had decided to dismiss as unpalatable turns out to be really tasty if prepared in a different way I hadn’t thought to try.
I’m finding that, out of those nine failures in a given batch of ten attempts, one of them very often turns out to be a delayed success after all. I just need to be more patient. Perhaps more than one will turn out to have been a success, given a long enough timeframe. It’s hard to say at this point, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that happens eventually.
Meanwhile, another four out of those eight remaining failures tend to be valuable for my education. Perhaps I’ve learned that that particular species is a poor fit for my goals, or I’ve learned that that particular microclimate is different from what I was thinking. Early on, one of my most spectacular failures taught me a valuable general principle: “Thorns are a really big problem for me and my family!” That has guided my gardening choices ever since.
Sometimes I even learn something about that genus or that whole plant family that will help me make decisions about a lot of other species in the future. For instance, a lot of my failures with bananas (there have been so many!) have been applicable to being able to grow other Zingiberales successfully. I have ginger and cannas growing in my greenhouse right now, and the reason I had a decent idea of how to keep them alive was that I’d learned so much about what not to do by failing with so many bananas.
(In case you’re interested: Zingiberales want almost completely dry soil in winter. In summer, they want soil that is always moist, never dry, and never wet. It’s better to underwater them than overwater them, because they can recover from underwatering, and overwatering kills them instantly. My best successes so far have come from filling a large pot three-fifths of the way full with pine cones, so there is tons of organic material in there to retain moisture and also tons of huge gaps to drain excess water out, and putting pure compost on top and putting the plant into it. They seem to prefer full shade in my climate, probably because that is the only way to keep the soil moist, so I stick that pot under a tree that will appreciate the excess water draining out of the pot. “Diva” is a bit of an understatement when it comes to Zingiberales in my climate, but I love them, so I keep on trying to find easier ways to get them to succeed here.)
There are definitely some failures that are just straight out failures and I feel like nothing comes out of them . . . but those are rare, and most of those come from me trying to do the same thing twice knowing that it didn’t work last time.
An experimental mindset really helps to keep my heart up, and it helps me learn more. Instead of allowing myself to become distracted by negative emotions, I create open time in my mind for noticing more details, and for pondering what to try going forward.
So I recommend giving it a try.
