Gardening Habit #3: Rituals and slow accumulation.
It is the last day of March and we are in the full swing of gardening season. This weekend was the DeLand Wildflower Festival, and as I was looking for a heirloom tomato variety, I started a conversation with a seller about tips and tricks. I told him how I had a few experiments running in my garden. He immediately told me his favorite trick: rabbit feed. Every morning, he would diligently go out and place rabbit feed around each of his tomato plants and water it in, “huge tomatoes!” he exclaimed. I went back home to look at the rabbit food I have in my shed and realized— it is just compressed alfalfa and likely would do no good for the nutrient balance of my garden.
What is important about this story, I realized, is not the rabbit food, but the ritual. Placing rabbit food around the tomatoes made it to where this grower had to really look at and tend to each plant. He could see if any pests were boring into the leaves or digging into the fruit. To dissolve the rabbit feed, he had to deeply water the plant at the base of the plant, not just spray a mist over the leaves or turn on an irrigation system. The fact that he was experimenting helped him to be diligent in keeping up with the ritual over time. All these factors accumulated to create his ‘huge tomatoes.’ Whether or not the ground-up alfalfa did anything at all is less important.
The third and final gardening habit this month is understanding that growth and change comes from the accumulation of habits, not just one “life hack” that changes it all. To learn more about this, I suggest reading the excellent book Atomic Habits by James Clear. Change is often sold to us as one big decision or “ah-ha moment” that completely shifts the trajectory of our lives. The reality is much different and often incredibly slow, with many valleys and plateaus. What matters, however, is the accumulation of positive habits over a long period of time.
This kind of change should feel more like a ritual than a task to be completed for the sake of a result. If you want to run more, the ritual of running should be the result. You should feel accomplished every morning you wake up and put on your running shoes, not just when you do a “good” run or finish a 5k. In the garden, it is about consistency, not grand gestures. If you don’t water your plants for a week and then soak them for hours, you are likely going to end up with a garden of soggy, dead plants. If you apply a massive amount of fertilizer once you see the plants aren’t thriving, you are going to burn the roots and kill the already-struggling plants. Break each habit down to its smallest parts and do those things consistently. If you want to read more and be on screens less, start a ritual around reading at bedtime by putting your phone in another room and then do it consistently, even if you only read a page.
Small rituals accumulate positive habits. Grand gestures and sweeping change create unsustainable systems, and lead you to expect immediate results. To be a gardener that gets “huge tomatoes” you have to be willing to start the small (and sometimes ridiculous!) rituals that sustain healthy growth.
-Katie Chapin, LCSW, MCAP
