I’ll be honest, I am terrible at gardening. I enjoy it but I am not green-fingered in any way. I am too impatient to wait for certain months to sew, I have no idea how you ‘propagate’ (or even what that actually means), I don’t have a greenhouse or any tools that weren’t bought as a novelty set from Wilko. I honestly don’t believe you have to be good at gardening to get enjoyment out of it and I also think there’s a lot of gatekeeping and general judgment in the gardening world (heaven forbid I use an abbreviation of a plant and not the latin name on Instagram - I will be corrected). I have an allotment which looks like an overgrown weed patch currently but I am learning a lot about myself.
I strive for perfection in most of my hobbies, career and life in general. So having a space that isn’t perfect and I am not in control of is, I’ve found, quite healthy. I spend a lot of time with our kids outdoors, we deweed together, look for spiders, rehome snails and cut trimmings for little vases by their beds. Watching my kids play in their mud kitchen and carry weeds over to the compost in our allotment is one of my greatest joys of parenting. And something I’m proud of amongst our very concrete existence.
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