The Season That Asks More Than I Can Give
When everything is waking up and I’m realizing I can’t keep up
There’s a very specific moment in spring that doesn’t get talked about enough. It’s not the early hope of the season. Not the seed catalogs, the clean rows, or the optimism that comes with imagining everything you might grow.
It’s what comes after that.
The moment when everything starts happening all at once.
The trees leaf out overnight. The weeds surge. The soil warms. The garden finally says, go. And suddenly, instead of possibility, I feel pressure.
I think this is part of why I started the garden circles in the first place. Most gardeners don’t actually have many places where they can talk honestly about this part of gardening. The messy middle. The overwhelm. The things we’re excited about and the things we quietly feel behind on.
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Because this is also the point where I begin to see the gap between what I imagined and what I can actually carry.
Right now, I still have plants sitting in their pots. Good ones, (mostly) healthy ones. The ones I was excited about weeks ago when I planted them. They’ve done their part. Their roots are pushing through the bottoms of the containers now, reaching for more space, ready to go into the ground.
And I still haven’t gotten to them.
Not because I don’t care. Not because I changed my mind about wanting them. I just don’t have the time. Or the bandwidth. Or the kind of energy it takes to do all of it well.
This is the part of gardening that feels sad and brutal to me. No one really prepares you for the fact that you can want something deeply and still not have the capacity to follow through on all of it. That you can care and still fall behind. That growth doesn’t pause and wait for you to catch up.
So now I’m standing in that uncomfortable in-between place where I have to make a choice:
Do I force myself to get everything in the ground just to avoid the feeling of wasting something? Or do I step back and admit that I planted more than I could realistically sustain this season?
There’s a kind of honesty required here that I don’t particularly enjoy because it means letting go of the version of myself who had the time for all of it. The version of myself who could grow everything.
Some of these plants are probably going into the compost :(
Even writing that stings a little.
At first, it feels like failure. Like I didn’t follow through. Like I should have managed things better somehow. But if I’m honest, keeping everything would be its own kind of failure too.
Because overwhelmed gardens don’t really thrive. They sprawl. They compete for resources. They become harder to tend. And eventually, instead of bringing joy, they start to feel heavy.
People aren’t that different.
There’s something about this stage of spring that mirrors life in a way I can’t ignore. The excitement of what’s possible eventually collides with the reality of what’s sustainable. And if I don’t make intentional cuts, the whole thing starts to lose its vitality.
So maybe this is the real work of the season.
Not the planting. Not the planning.
The choosing.
Choosing what actually gets to take root. Choosing what I realistically have the capacity to tend. Choosing what I need to let go of before it drains something out of me entirely.
The garden is still growing.
Even with less.
Maybe even because of it.