Gardening is not for the faint of heart. Yeah, I said it and I meant it. Gardening is hard; it is also dirty, messy, and unsure. However, it is also exciting, fulfilling, and wonderful. A lady by the name of May Sarton once said, “A garden is always a series of losses set against a few triumphs, like life itself.” And indeed, it is. We plant in the spring and hope for a good harvest in the fall. Seed coats are broken, and life begins to show itself in the form of little green leaves and stems almost as soon as they are planted. However, if the temperature is not quite right or the moisture level is too far off, things can go horribly awry.

You Reap What You Sow

Just as we should have a vision for our garden, we should have a vision for our life. When we take a look at our lives and we don’t like what we see, we wonder what went wrong. Simply answered; we planted the wrong seeds. Sometimes we must replant because crows helped themselves to our corn seed, or we planted our tomatoes a little too early in the season. When we start out, a small mistake can make a big difference. Whether it be gathering buckets and buckets of produce or having to replant entire rows and start over, we adjust. Much like human life, gardens require careful nurturing and often the effort put in is magnified many times over when we reap what we sow. We learn and we grow, and each season teaches us new techniques, tips and tricks.

A Garden of Hope

We never know how our harvest is going to turn out, but we plant anyway because we have hope. Hope is a precious thing, and I think it is what I have learned the most from trying to grow a garden. There is always hope; hope for a new day to bring us a bountiful harvest, and hope that each day is a little better than the one before. After all, as Audrey Hepburn once said, “To plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow.”