The Part of Gardening No One Really talks About
After the rain, everything grows… not always what you expected
Happy Saturday,
There’s a version of gardening that lives in our heads long before anything is planted. It’s calm there, ordered, slightly idealized, the kind of version where everything unfolds with a perfect sense of rhythm.
You picture the garden beds, the spacing, the timing. You imagine yourself moving through it all with intention, planting at the right moment, staying on top of things, watching it come together just as you thought it would.
What actually happens
And then the season actually starts, and almost immediately, something doesn’t line up.
Here in Emmett, after all that rain last week, the ground softened, the air warmed (just a little) and things really started moving. Not just the things I planted, but everything. The weeds especially. They came in fast, like they had been waiting, spreading through spaces I thought I had under control, filling in the gaps before I even noticed they were there. You can almost watch it happen if you stand still long enough.
At the same time, the things I did plant feel slower. Some are doing well, some are just sitting there, and some don’t seem to be doing much of anything at all. Nothing is failing exactly, but it already doesn’t match the version I had in my head.
The part we don’t talk about
There’s a particular feeling that comes with that. Subtle, but persistent. A kind of reckoning that’s hard to name but easy to recognize.
I thought this would be going differently by now.
Not better, necessarily. Just further along. More settled. A little more in place.
It’s not something people really talk about. Not in the photos, or the conversations that stay on the surface. Not when we’re sharing what’s growing or what’s working. But it’s there in almost every garden, I think. That space where things are uneven, where some parts are thriving, some are stalled, and some have been overtaken by something you didn’t plan for.
The instinct to fix it
And the instinct is to tighten around it. To catch up, to fix it, to clear the weeds, rework the plan, and try to bring everything back into alignment with what you thought it should be.
But if you stay there for a moment longer, without immediately moving to correct it, something else begins to surface. Not an answer exactly, but a shift:
An acceptance.
A different way of seeing it
The garden isn’t following your plan. It never was. It’s responding to the rain, the soil, the timing, the things you did and didn’t do, and a hundred other factors you don’t fully see. It’s moving in its own rhythm, whether you’re keeping up with it or not.
The weeds aren’t a failure. They’re just part of what grows when conditions are right. And you’re in relationship with all of it, not managing it from above, but participating in it as it unfolds.
Not just the garden
I think that’s the part no one really talks about.
Not just in gardening, but in life too.
That feeling of being somewhere in the middle of things, where parts of your life are growing easily, almost without effort, and other parts feel stalled or unclear. Where something unexpected has taken up more space than you meant for it to. Where the picture you had in your head doesn’t quite match what’s actually here.
And the quiet question underneath it:
Am I doing this wrong, or is this just what it looks like while it’s still unfolding?
There isn’t a clean answer to that. But something shifts when you stop trying to resolve it immediately, when you let yourself be in it for a moment as it is. Slightly uneven. Not fully formed. Still becoming something.
Where this shows up
This is the kind of thing that’s been coming up in the garden circles. Not as a topic, exactly, but in the way conversations unfold when people have a little space to talk honestly.
Someone mentions how fast the weeds came in after the rain. Someone else shares what didn’t come up the way they expected. And without trying to, it opens into something a little more real than what we usually say out loud.
An open invitation
The next one is Tuesday in Eagle.
There are five people signed up so far, so there are only three seats left.
If you’ve been thinking about coming, this would be a really easy one to step into.