Planning for Garden Failures
Why would you want to plan for failure in your garden? Isn’t that just tempting fate? Let’s get real for a second. Some things will fail in your garden. Some of your plants will die. Hopefully not all of them and not all at once, but it is a reality in the garden. Sometimes they will die at the end of the season, or when you harvest them and feed them to your family. But sometimes they will never sprout, or die as tiny seedlings because you forgot to water them, or you’ll have hail or a windstorm at the wrong time. But if you factor some failure into your planning, you are able to still meet your garden goals even when bad things happen. Let’s talk about how planning for garden failures can actually lead you to garden success.
Failure is Inevitable
Life is unpredictable and things will go wrong in your garden. But, because we know some failure is inevitable, we can plan ahead. For example, I always plant more seeds than the number of plants I need to reach my production goal for the season. It’s an easy way to protect against some failure in my seed starting system. How many extra seeds I plant depends on the type of plant, how critical it is to meeting my garden goals for the year, and what experience I’ve had with it in the past. For plants that I’ve had a lot of experience with, I may only plant 10% more seeds than I will need. For something new, something critical, or where I’m not sure of the germination rate, I may plant 50% more if I can.
I am also always planning for garden failures in the gardener (me)! It’s not about beating myself up, just recognizing that we all screw up sometimes. I create backup systems for watering and checking my plants, just in case I forget or the primary system fails. The extra time it takes to think about possible problems or obstacles before they happen is more than worth it when you run into human error in the garden. It can turn potentially devastating events into minor setbacks. Think of it as “Murphy-proofing” your garden plan by listing all the things that will probably go wrong at some point and trying to see if there’s a way to prevent or minimize the impact ahead of time. It may be the best time you ever spend on your garden plan.
Capturing Lessons Learned
Of course, you can’t predict everything, sometimes you will face a big failure. But gardens are amazingly resilient and learning from tough experiences makes you a better gardener. You may even find a way to turn that failure into a success. If not this year, then in the future. The key is to capture those lessons learned so you factor them in to your plan. Keeping a garden workbook up to date with what’s going on in your garden is a great way to keep that vital information in an easy to access place.
To make those lessons valuable in the future, you need to be brutally honest about what led to the garden failures. Do an honest assessment of what happened. Was it a failure of planning? Did you not follow your plan? Simple human error? An accident? An act of God? Try to determine the root cause so you can brainstorm ideas for how you could prevent, avoid, or mitigate the problem in the future. Then schedule those fixes into your next plan as soon as possible. You may even be able to course correct within the current growing season and start getting the benefits of planning for garden failures right away.
Conducting Garden Experiments
Sometimes even after a full assessment, you may not be able to figure out how to avoid or prevent a big problem from happening again. A garden pest that makes it through all your defenses. Unpredictible weather that keeps damaging your plants. Abrupt changes to your schedule, budget, or health that plays havoc with your plan. If you feel like you don’t have any good answers, it might be time to gather more data. Consider running some garden experiments.
This is the ultimate in planning for garden failures. You’re actually expecting these experiments to fail, at least some of them. It gives you the freedom to test out different ideas and see what works best. Maybe it’s trying different plant varieties. Or setting up the same plant in different locations. You can test different watering systems, planting schedules, soil nutrition, pest deterrents, the possibilities are almost endless. The key to success is setting up experiments where only one thing is variable so you get back-to-back comparisons. Then gathering good data so you can determine a winner, and evaluating the results. You may be suprised at things you never thought would work suddenly become part of your annual plan.
Using Failure to Leapfrog Problems
Sometimes failure of one thing in your garden is a symptom of a bigger problem. Maybe you’re getting a lot of plant damage from certain pests or diseases, and it leads you to discover a soil nutrition problem. Or you have germination problems with a variety that’s not suited to your area. If you identify the problem early on, and figure out the root cause, it can sometimes leapfrog your garden to a whole new level. The solution you find could improve all your plants, not just the ones that failed.
Don’t be afraid to plan for garden failures, some amount of failure is inevitable in gardening and in life. Planning for it in advance can actually turn failures into success. Take some time today to think about the most likely problem you will run into in your garden this year. Is there something you could do today to make the chances of it happening, or the impact when it does less? Make a plan and take action now! You may be really glad you did.
Looking for other truths you can learn from your garden (and teach to your family)? Check out my blog post on the Top 10 Life Lessons From Your Garden for the key things I’ve learned over the years. Enjoy!
