Sustaining a garden required me to get very comfortable with killing plants. I did not expect that going in - if any one warned me, I missed it.
And it's not just the weeds that are constantly intruding and need to be fought back. Sometimes it's the plant that the previous person placed precisely in that portion of the plot that gets the good sunlight and it's just the wrong plant to be taking that space. Sometimes it's the plant that was the right plant but was let grow so wild that it's suckers are going to destroy the rest of the garden unless it is removed. Often it's the many seedlings that were started because, hey, some of them will fail, but now you've gotten good enough that twice as many survived as last year and you don't have room for twice as many.
Plants grow. It's great and rewarding to watch them live out their cycle over the course of a season or years. I work hard to keep them alive and thriving when they're young and not yet established. But there's still so much killing.
listen man, u wanna know a great truth of the universe?
every plant person stands upon a mountain of plant corpses
i have killed endless plants, and once i've mastered one type i inevitably will kill a new type because so many plants have so many different requirements
y'all have no idea how true this is
I am a plant mass murderer
You have to try, and fail, and fail, and fail again. You have to try lots and lots of variations of different things until something works.
It's not even just the learning process, though. I'm trapped in an endless loop of: plant seeds or gather transplants-> plants grow-> too many plants-> some of them die of neglect-> need more plants -> and so on.
I usually lose about half my stock to overwintering cause I can never get arrangements for all my potted plants before the hard freezes hit...
I'm getting it under control though. I have lots of plant recipients now that are more skilled and don't kill my adoptees as much.
Right now my trouble is with the seeds. I launched a huge personal seed starting project this winter and I got HUGE success with some species (jack-in-the-pulpit had near 100% germination!) and huge failure with others (Not a single Scutellaria...)
If you plant 100 seeds you gathered from the wild, it's a reasonable estimate to expect maybe, like, 10-20 plants. BUT you might get 100 plants. Or 1 plant. Or none.
You don't want to be like "Dammit! I wish I had planted more seeds!" But you might end up like "FUCK FUCK FUCK WHY DID I PLANT SO MANY SEEDS"
Oh yeah and the eternal situation of setting out to grow an equal amount of several different species you want to work with this year, but with 1 species you have insane success way overshooting your expectations and with the others you have hardly anything
so you show up to the pollinator garden meeting like "hi here are 50 american bellflowers! and this is Dave. he is a coreopsis. probably"
Digging up a random fern or something before the meeting to round out the selection might make you feel a little less weird about it, but still.
