- Author: Aysha Huerta
It seems safe to say that 2020 did not turn out to be the “year of perfect vision” that I had joyfully anticipated. I started my garden in early spring with all the hope of this being my most productive year and it seemed like everything I had put the most energy into did the worst. I had a binder with raised beds and drip lines mapped out to the millimeter, watering schedules, excel spreadsheets with seed inventory, calendars filled with start dates, and progress notes. I set my compost bins up for success, got myself a new backyard flock, sourced the best fertilizers, and basically went all-in on the garden and then COVID came and I thought it would be a wonderful excuse to devote extra time to the garden, that was not the case. I now had to devote extra time to entertain a 3 and 5-year-old with all of our normal activities being shutdown, my husband was now working from home which was both a blessing and an obstacle, and visiting friends and family were no longer as easy as it had once been. All of these things were not mapped out in the binder and so I scrambled for a new normal whilst also holding tight to the dream of the perfect garden. At some point, the drip line busted and flooded the side yard and so I shut it off and left it for another day…or 60. I watched the garden start to wilt and seedlings never make it to getting their true leaves. I typically avoid the news altogether but things in the world became so heavy and extreme there was really no way to not know what was going on and with so much newness I decided the garden would have to take a backseat. Pests started showing up and plants started to die and because I didn't have the mental space to take care of anything else I had to be okay with it.
One day on one of our billion quarantine walks my boys found a dead ladybug on the sidewalk and they were devastated. As they cried we held hands and started walking and just a little further down the sidewalk we found a little ladybug larva just scurrying along. The boys picked her up and took her home and put her on the milkweed that had been practically overrun with milkweed aphids and every day for 3 days we'd go out and check on her and she'd still be out there eating away. By the end of the week, there wasn't a single aphid left and I was inspired to go out and get more good bugs, and maybe they could get the garden back for me.
I bought a praying mantis egg case that sat on our bookshelf for a full month before it finally hatched on Mother's Day and I had 200 brand new babies to release in the garden. They became another joy to check on every day and pulled me back into the garden with a different purpose. I started hand-watering since I was going out every morning to check on the growth of these little bugs and the garden started perking back up.
Once all the baby mantises were gone I started losing my excitement again until one day I noticed two robins kept showing up at the same time every day so I sat out and watched them and realized they had built a nest in the tree right by our fence. This bought me another month of garden visits because I now felt responsible for keeping the soil happy to host lots of bugs for my new garden friends. The boys and I watched them build the nest, lay their eggs, and raise their 3 babies. We even got to see two of them fledge. I had been so focused on one aspect of gardening that I had completely lost sight of all the non-edible joys it brings with it. This summer we didn't get a single cucumber, our squash plants were pitiful, and of the fifty sunflowers that sprouted only five survived the winds and bugs. Despite all the disappointments of the year we were able to appreciate so many things that we had overlooked before and that's one of the most beautiful parts about gardening, there's truly always something wonderful to be found if you can sit still long enough.
