I know a lot of people who think that gardening is too hard, or just something that they can't do well. There is a lot of hard work involved in gardening. You have to prepare the soil by digging, tilling, turning, adding compost, etc. You have to plant your seeds. When they come up, you have to thin them and keep all of the weeds from choking them out. You have to make sure they get enough water and nutrients. You may have to prune them. All of this work may take months before you ever see a harvest. When you do get fruit, there is more work in harvesting, cleaning, preparing and storing! With all of this work that is involved in gardening, there is one thing that gardeners can't do: we can't make anything grow. We can make the conditions more favorable. We can eliminate or reduce competition. We can't make it grow. Inherent in every seed is the potential for growth.
The plant pictured above is a great lesson to me. I never tilled this area. I never planted a single seed there. I didn't do any thinning or any weeding (as you can tell). In spite of my complete lack of work, this arugula plant has grown and thrived. It must have come up as a volunteer in the fall and survived our extremely mild winter. This spring, it got positively huge (that's a four-foot fence). In fact, it's bigger and healthier than any of the arugula that I tended last year. This picture was taken a few weeks ago. Now, it has completely gone to seed and I'll be harvesting them soon. Most of the arugula I grow later this year and early next year will come from this one plant that grew with no help from me!
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