Gardening: an apology
May. 4th, 2018 09:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexxkayOne of the things I value the most is Truth. In service to that principle, one of the personal qualities I value most is the ability to admit error. As a male raised in a Western patriarchal society, it is a constant struggle for me to do so, but I’m working on it.
There is something that I have claimed on many many occasions to many different people. And it was so utterly incorrect. It’s past due for a public acknowledgment.
Often, in years past, when I would feed people fresh strawberries from the Melville Keep garden, they would ask me “How hard is it to grow strawberries?” I would invariably answer with some variant of “Not hard at all!” As it turns out, I was speaking from a position of unconscious privilege and was wrong in every important respect.
Now, I KNEW we paid a gardener to come in and do some amount of work. But I figured that the bulk of her work must’ve involved the decorative flowerbeds on the borders of the garden. I knew she did things with the goal of encouraging the strawberries to grow, but that seemed almost redundant, given how much I observed them growing enthusiastically on their own. And, yes, she weeded; but I weeded too, in the midst of my harvesting.
All that was years ago, when the household budget was less strained. Times have gradually gotten tougher, and it’s been several years since we had a gardener. Over this time span, I have spent more of my time and effort on gardening tasks, only to watch entropy gain steadily and inexorably upon my efforts. You may have noticed that it’s been a long time since anyone here said “Please come and pick our strawberries; there are too many for us to eat.” Indeed, the crop has been steadily shrinking in both number and duration, and is now well below the level which I would like to eat all by myself.
Growing strawberries is HARD. Gardening is HARD. I apologize for ever being so foolish as to believe and say otherwise.
There is something that I have claimed on many many occasions to many different people. And it was so utterly incorrect. It’s past due for a public acknowledgment.
Often, in years past, when I would feed people fresh strawberries from the Melville Keep garden, they would ask me “How hard is it to grow strawberries?” I would invariably answer with some variant of “Not hard at all!” As it turns out, I was speaking from a position of unconscious privilege and was wrong in every important respect.
Now, I KNEW we paid a gardener to come in and do some amount of work. But I figured that the bulk of her work must’ve involved the decorative flowerbeds on the borders of the garden. I knew she did things with the goal of encouraging the strawberries to grow, but that seemed almost redundant, given how much I observed them growing enthusiastically on their own. And, yes, she weeded; but I weeded too, in the midst of my harvesting.
All that was years ago, when the household budget was less strained. Times have gradually gotten tougher, and it’s been several years since we had a gardener. Over this time span, I have spent more of my time and effort on gardening tasks, only to watch entropy gain steadily and inexorably upon my efforts. You may have noticed that it’s been a long time since anyone here said “Please come and pick our strawberries; there are too many for us to eat.” Indeed, the crop has been steadily shrinking in both number and duration, and is now well below the level which I would like to eat all by myself.
Growing strawberries is HARD. Gardening is HARD. I apologize for ever being so foolish as to believe and say otherwise.