The good stuff among the weeds

In my opinion there are two types of vegetable gardeners.  There are the ones who devotedly hang out at their local gardening centre, and at the beginning of spring, they truck in $200 worth of good soil and manure.  They set it up in their backyard and then spend another $100 on the fertiliser and sprays they will need.  Then they run to their local gardening centre and buy up all the spring seedlings and plant up their plots with lavish greens.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m not saying this is wrong, I’m just jealous.  These gardeners have a lot of fun (which is the point!) and end up with huge returns.  You see them bring out their bloated zucchinis to brag over and point out the box of tomatoes they are giving away because they have too many.

Me?  I’m the other type of gardener – the one who spends zero dollars.  Instead I spend a good twelve months making just the right mix of compost and I add to it the offerings of my worm farms as fertiliser.  My vegetables are planted from seeds that I saved from the previous harvest, and I rely more on companion planting, natural predators and picking off the damn bugs to save my crops.  My returns are modest and I often need to cut around that hole made by that slater bug before I can eat my produce.

Today on Unproductive Monday, I was out checking on the latest doings in my garden and I noticed something exciting.  Plants!

Here, growing in the cracks of the paving, along with some weeds is a cos lettuce seedling.  And in the other picture, nestled up to a weed is a thriving rocket plant.

Both are very productive plants and both have taken root in odd places after last year’s seeds were allowed to take.  Like most veggie gardeners who fall into second category above, I don’t see that allowing my plants to “go to seed” as a bad thing.  I allowed my lettuce and rocket to flower and seed six months ago and look at what I now have!  I managed to find three new rocket plants, and three lettuce.  I transplanted them to a more conductive area (ie away from hubby’s whipper-snipper) and hopefully they will feed my family in a couple of week’s time.  If not, then they’ll feed the canaries and chooks.

I think writing is like that sometimes.  I was recently having a conversation with Robyn, an aspiring author, about writing even when you don’t feel like it.  Some days I just don’t “feel in the mood” for writing.  But I’ve found that even if I force myself to write, in the end it comes out good.  Even when you are not writing brilliantly, you are still writing something that is salvageable.  Write it, leave it and then come back to it.  You may find that you delete most of it, but often, it really wasn’t as bad as you thought.  Sometimes, you may’ve even had a moment of genius in there.  It can always be edited and changed, but if you have nothing but a blank page, you have nothing.

My mother has a saying:  How can you expect to grow flowers if you can’t even grow weeds?

I think we should all take that to heart, and maybe expand on it a bit more.  We should be proud of the flowers (or vegetables) we grow, but don’t think that the weeds are unimportant.  If you can’t grow weeds, you can’t grow flowers.  If you don’t write anything, because you don’t “feel” like it, how are you meant to write that story inside you?  Just sit down and write.  You may find something useful growing among those weeds.

And who knows?  It could be awesome.