I ordered a bulk pack of bare-root cottage garden plants in the autumn and put them straight into the soil, totally ignoring the instructions to put them in a smaller container and ‘pot them on’ after the frosts had passed. I was impatient and bunged them straight into the soil as soon as they arrived in October. Fast forward to this early summer- unsurprisingly they didn’t flower, not one! I was gutted.
All that work and effort, digging in the cold weather for nothing!!! After I sat down and had a cuppa, I thought about it- if I’d planned it better and taken my time to plant them in a smaller container first, rather than rushing it through, I would have seen a different result. The roots would have been protected from the frost, and by now I would be looking out of my kitchen window to a beautiful cottage garden, full of delphiniums, lupins, hollyhocks, and other bee-friendly plants. The urge to rush just to complete a task and tick it off my ‘to do list’ ended up being less productive than if I had taken my time and done it mindfully.
The old adage ‘more haste less speed’ can definitely be applied in my case. I had doubled the amount of work involved, not to mention the expense, as I had to buy the same plants from the garden centre, fully grown. For many of us, myself included, we feel that our days must be productive and that jobs must be done so that we don’t fritter our time away.
What gets missed is the joy of the process, the wonder of the experience.
