What gardening taught me about patience
And what it has to do with sporting performance
Patience: The ability to wait, or to continue doing something despite difficulties, or to suffer without complaining or becoming annoyed (Cambridge Dictionary).
You are probably wondering what this has to do with adventures and sport and all that - be patient - it bears fruit (sorry).
I have always admired gardening distantly as a thing that other people did. I noticed the time, effort and dedication it takes. It’s rather impressive.
The only gardener in my family is my nana in her 80s. She is well and truly a gardening nut and always has been. She has a small but constantly blooming gardening no matter the season and encyclopedic knowledge of all plants and how to look after them. If you ever breathe the words “hanging baskets” in front of her she will soon have made up enough potted plants to decorate a country manor.
Unfortunately, I don’t live in a country manor, so when I moved house last year and finally had a bit of outside space, I ended up with what is a nice colourful problem to have of where to put them all.
My little childhood brain dreamed of having a veg plot in my future garden, and somehow have all the knowledge of what to do with it (it can’t be that hard to grow vegetables?). But as it turned out I moved to a house with a minuscule garden, bad soil, a weed problem, lots of slugs and snails, and to top it off, it’s east facing and was neglected by everyone who lived here previously.
So, as a natural problem solver, I had a good starting point and lots of enthusiasm.
Spring was the time to start getting my hands dirty. With my new secateurs and rusty old tools, I ‘borrowed’ from my dad’s garage, I started cutting bushes back pulling up weeds and cat poo and digging up the daffodil shoots so I could re-plant them in a nice line.
Hours, days, and weeks later, (I was shocked at HOW much time gardening takes) the weeds were gone, bushes pruned and moved around, some plants bedded and my yellow daffs blooming. I felt immensely proud of the physical graft and admired it every morning on the front step with a coffee. What next?
My gardening strategy was simple: get a load of seeds and bulbs, spread them out a bit and hope for the best. In other words, throw enough stuff at the wall and some will stick. So back to B&Q and Home Bargains I went and picked out the colourful ones.
I scattered, planted and followed instructions and was ready to confront the real reason I wanted to learn about gardening in the first place: patience.
Patience and consistency go hand-in-hand. The latter, I had in abundance thanks to my background in sport, but patience is something I never had much of and started to accept I might never master. It’s also the underlying cause of most of my frustrations.
Sport involves patience. You can’t succeed in swimming, running or anything else if you don’t have it. But until trying to learn gardening, I had never considered that I was thinking about it all wrong.
There are two similarities I found with gardening and sport. Instant gratification together with patience and consistency.
In other words, if you are training for something you don’t get results overnight, you have to trust and commit to the process over a long period of time, but you do get instant gratification in the form of an endorphin rush.
Clearing weeds and pruning bushes gave me instant gratification because it looked immediately better. But I had to wait days, weeks, months for those shoots to poke through the soil and transform into a flower. Likewise, with the bushes I dug up would they flower again in their new spot? I had no idea. There is a way to prune bushes so they don’t grow back bigger but I don’t know what it is.
Not only that, but I had to be consistent putting in the resources of watering, fertiliser, and time to help it along with no guarantee it would work - the same as I have many times over in training for whatever goal or event I had in mind.
Those plants were fed, watered and checked upon regularly as I eagerly awaited their arrival. I realised I was putting resources into something that could fail miserably – which is a direct parallel to training in sport – but I continued regardless, hoping for the best, expecting the worst and encouraging them along. What I should have done instead is be more confident and trusted the process.
Gardening has improved the way I view patience, so my little experiment worked and I made the front of my house look nice in the process. What I learned is that patience is something to measure yourself against, rather than measure it.
The plants would’ve grown whether or not I checked on them daily. They also would’ve grown whether I got frustrated by their slow progress, or not bothered by it.
For all this time my frustrations were a cycle of self-inflicted nonsense! While I waited for the flowers to bloom, I learned about soil types, which fertiliser to use for the respective plant, how often to water, what weeds are, invasive species, which plants are poisonous to cats, staggered gardening and plants for different seasons.
In the end, I successfully grew some colourful flowers, learned how to look after them and enjoyed the process of watching it all happen. And in maintaining the garden I realised I learn more every time lots through trial and error which is comparable to trying new methods in sport.
I believe I made my nana proud, but next time I need to remember what I planted.
PS.
I also grew vegetables with the same strategy of planting a load of seeds and seeing what would happen. Given it was my first time, I figured if I got a vegetable out of it then it was a bonus.
The hardy ones, like potatoes, grew and tasted great; others made it so far and then gave up. I was generally successful with the ones other people gave me… (chilli and tomatoes).
A few months in, I realised I didn’t know how to determine ripeness. A problem I hadn’t considered as you would think it is surely the easy bit - like picking apples and blackberries… until I wondered are they orange tomatoes or are they going to turn red? Do I give it another couple of days? What about those green chillis…?
Reader, they were orange tomatoes, and I lost a whole load of them by leaving it too long. They fell off the vine and splattered onto the soil, my bright orange failure contrasted against the dark growing powder for all to see, until they eventually faded away like nothing had happened.
Thankfully, lettuces are a bit easier to pick when you need it. I learned an awful lot this year.
Recommendations & good things
Two great films about two great individuals. Even if swimming isn’t your thing, they are epic endurance tales worth watching:
Ross Edgley’s 510km/56 hour non-stop swim (Yukon River)
Mitch Hutchcraft swam the English Channel as part of Project Limitless (more on this project coming soon).
Tara Dower set a new record on the Appalachian Trail, which is 2,189 miles from Maine to Georgia in the US, including 465,000 ft of elevation. She did it in 40 days, 18 hours, 5 minutes, (subject to ratification) and beat the previous record by around 13 hours.
Loved reading about your Nan and your gardening exploits.