Filling In The Holes

The hostess approached tentatively as I put on my coat to leave the party. "I'm going to start a new veggie bed!" she said excitedly, and then her face fell. "But I don't know what to do with the old soil. Is it okay to use it?"

It never fails: Once someone finds out I'm a landscaper the list of earthy questions they've been harboring comes tumbling out. It's one of the parts of my job I enjoy the most--filling in the missing ingredient to the home gardener's plans in order to empower them to take the next step.

No matter our enthusiasm, it's easy to become stymied by uncertainties and unknowns in a project whose territory is unfamiliar. Searching online often provides too many solutions, rather than one sure path. But cultivating a garden space is about testing boundaries and making mistakes just as much as it's about successful growth--and really there's no separation of positive and negative in the garden. There's a lot of death in the soil, and in fact healthy soil relies on the destructive process for nutrients. Gardening is about establishing a relationship of exploration, understanding, and compromise with the earth and plants. This relationship takes bravery as well as time to forge, and it's natural that both garden and gardener will experience setbacks in the process. So ask those questions--and then get going.