Failures…

They say what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, and this week I was thinking about how unnerving farming is. Windstorms and huge temperature swings just within a day. One challenge for me is to trust rule “don’t cover if it’s gonna snow”, the precipitation will insulate the plants. Well it’s really hard to follow, and this week I found myself adding a layer to the ranunculus transplants not because of some rules or scientific suggestion, but to make myself feel better about it so I could sleep easy.

I’m finding farming isn’t for the faint of heart and at the end of the day when I’ve killed a couple plants it’s not the end of the world and trivial otherwise I’m the grand scheme of things.

I do feel some growth, or maybe you might say my farming senses have toughened up a bit, like that blister on your hand turning to a callus. The pain was worth it to shield you from the next event. It’s how o feel about this tray of plants I didn’t plant. That right you heard me… I’m celebrating NOT planting this tray of plants. They are spindly and got kinda pinched in that really cold spell we had. The leaves are lovely green, but the stems are injured. If I would have planted them they would have died. It wasn’t worth the time of putting them in the ground to find out what the result of the gamble would have been.

There were other times failure won over the past couple weeks as well. Last year I was I was unable to germinate a single strawflower, so I started extra this year, and they did so much better because now I know not to bury the seed in the starting medium. Because of my past failure and all the extra I planted, there was plenty to fill the space where the above mentioned spindly tray did not make the cut.

Another win in the books: (or maybe my perspective is the win?) Even if something happens and I lose every Lisianthus seedling in the basement, this year I made it further into germination and they are bigger and of them than last year.

Are you seeing the pattern? It’s difficult for us to fail. We want everything to go smoothly and as planned. If you fail, learn something from it. My goal is for my failings to not get me down to the point where I can’t persevere, to instead use them as a guide for the next time.