Gardening and life are personal

Leave my garden alone!! I don't want anyone messing with my garden, period! Stay out!

I've been gardening since I was a kid. My first ever produce, grown all by myself was a pumpkin. From then on I was hooked. Not having to rely on gardening to feed me allowed plenty of room for experimentation. My gardens have experienced varying degrees of success and failure. My worst failures have mostly resulted from crowding plants together during the planting stage. I have difficulty imagining the expansion of a plant as the growing season moves along. But, I always have hope that I did it right when each year begins. Gardening is a wonderful thing and my table has been blessed with mounds of vegetables and fruits fresh from those gardens. As a matter of fact, family, friends and neighbors have also enjoyed much of the healthy and flavorful benefits of my faithful gardening. Everyone benefits. But I want everyone to stay away from my garden.

The past couple of years some very well intended people have been offering advice and assistance to me in getting my garden in order. "Put this plant here, put that seed there, measure, fertilize, stake, weed and thin. Let me help you harvest it.You'll have a beautiful garden for once and we can all have better vegetables too." Jeez, Louise! Leave me alone, will ya? Truthfully, if I wanted a perfect garden I am totally capable of creating it. I really am! I totally appreciate the helpful folks that want to solve what they see as my problem. It's great to have people around that care about me and what I do. Wonderful as it is, I don't want their help. Let me alone when I'm in my garden. In my garden, I rule! I also accept all the consequences of my actions and decisions. My garden is my little slice of sanity in an otherwise confusing world. The government, as yet has not drawn up enough laws to mess up my gardening. I am still free to succeed or fail on my own. That's why I don't want anyone telling me what to do. It makes me feel too much like control. I don't want to be controlled or taken care of.

I enjoy the food from my garden. I grew it, for better or worse. When I have surplus, which is most of the time, I share it with everyone in sight. Many times, placing a bag of fresh goodies on someones porch anonymously so when they come home or wake up they have a tasty surprise. I like doing that. Sure, most of them know right away who put it there but usually they honor my desire to be an unknown benefactor. It's more fun that way. The people that wanted to help me out also expressed how they would help me distribute the harvest. I didn't like that either. When you give someone something from your surplus it's fun. When you are "told" to divide up the entire harvest the fun fades really fast.

That's my take on the gardening thing for today. I passed on the helpful hands offered me by caring and considerate people. I am in the midst of putting my garden together and planting shoots and seeds and fertilizing and all sorts of weeding and tilling and staking and stuffing seeds, plants and bulbs way too close together. I don't know what the harvest will be this year but I know it will be mine to do with what I want. There is a lot to be said for that feeling. As I said: "I love ya dearly but stay the heck out of my garden."