Guns N’ Roses said it best when they sang, “All we need is just a little patience.” I don’t think Axl was singing about gardening, but the phrase applies to most of the things that we do in life, and gardening is no exception.
Sometimes you do get an immediate wow out of your garden. When you clean up an area that has been neglected for years and then replant with new flowers and fresh mulch, you don’t need patience to marvel at a completely new look.
But so many things in the garden do require time. Those new flowers are still small. It may be a few months or seasons before they really start to show off. A newly planted privacy hedge won’t block your neighbors for a few years, and seeds and veggie plants won’t bear fruit right away, it will be a few months before harvests begin.
And honestly, in the gardening world there are things with much longer time frames. New shade trees won’t really cast a big shadow for decades. Patience is definitely required! Of course, all of these musings come from an observation I made in my own fruit forest the other day. I have this enormous fruit tree that provides great shade over the chicken coop. At this point, I don’t remember when I planted it. Probably 2013 or 2014. It’s a white sapote, which is this absolutely delicious fruit that tastes like a creamy sugar cube. They are hard to find – we haven’t been able to track them down for five or six years now. So over a decade ago, I decided that I wanted one in my yard, and each year since, I’ve dutifully looked for flowers and fruit and consistently been disappointed when there are none. Last year, I did see a few flowers and was able to harvest a couple of small fruits off of the tree. They were phenomenal, but a meager harvest for such a large tree. I was thinking through the possibilities. Does it need fertilizer, additional water, are there pollinators? Is there some issue I’m overlooking? How do I make it fruit?
And there was an answer. It was time. In our world today, we want everything right now, and many less-than-reputable sources will promise it. Plant a tree today and harvest this season. Magic diets and supplements. And get-rich-quick schemes have been around since humans started using money. But sometimes, the ingredient needed is time and patience.
The other morning, as I was collecting eggs, I looked up and saw a tree covered with flowers. So many that in the early morning you can smell them opening. Every branch has cluster after cluster. It has never bloomed like this before. It does seem a little early in the season for it to bloom (my mango tree is in full bloom, too), and hopefully any cold coming here in January won’t be enough to cause damage. There are already little fruits forming, so I’m hoping for a great harvest this season. It wasn’t anything I was doing wrong. I just needed more patience.
We love to rush things. We want Mother Nature to work on our schedules, but sometimes she has her own ideas. The best thing you can do as a gardener is let it teach you patience. Embrace the waiting, because often good things are at the end! Like a huge harvest of fruit. I’ll keep you updated on how it goes. In the meantime, I’ll leave you with a quote:
“When you plant seeds in the garden, you don’t dig them up every day to see if they’ve sprouted yet. You simply water them and clear away the weeds; you know that the seeds will grow in time.” – Thubten Chandron
