I’m a visual learner. I still have some of my study guides from college because I spent so much time in the library using color-coded markers and pens, took the time to write each letter and symbol perfectly, and organized everything just so. I can’t currently pass an organic chemistry test to save my life or recall the TCA cycle but I can picture those notes.
I started my first real garden this way too. I mimicked the gardens I grew up around by tilling a sunny plot in the yard and planting in perfect rows. One designated for tomatoes. Another for cucumbers. One for corn. Another for peppers. It was exciting to plant that first garden, but something didn’t feel right.
I know now that I lacked intuition. Rightfully so. I was inexperienced. Intuition in the garden is naturally flowing, understanding the plants, and knowing what to do without active or conscious thinking. It’s a state of being that occurs when we are so present in our own experience that it becomes reflected within our actions.1
Between the gardens and I grew up with and the books that I poured over, I compiled a set of rigid rules to follow. They told me when to plant, where to plant, how and when to harvest. But they lacked the nuance that exists in every garden. The unique climate and weather patterns, how the plants interacted with each other, the make up of the soil, etc. Here were all of these highly influential factors that didn’t factor into my rules.
And I didn’t have the slightest idea how to adjust. How does one transition from a rigid framework to one of trust and flow? More importantly, how do you grow more food with less effort and have fun while doing it?
Tapping In
The answer is trust. And time (no matter the question, time is always the answer. It’s just the one no one ever wants to hear).
The garden is nature. We are nature. Nature invites us to approach it from a sense of discovery and connection. However, most days we enter our garden with to-do lists, distractions, and hard-set expectations. I am constantly balancing expectations of how my garden looks versus how much food I am producing. Even though I share my garden in a very public way on social media, I don’t care about how it looks as long as it still produces food. That may be an unpopular approach since it seems most people deem the success and worth of a garden on how it looks. This misplaced focus not only adds undue pressure to gardening, but it distracts from the goal of growing food.
Adopting an intuitive mindset requires slowing down and listening - both to plants and yourself. Here are three tools that can help shift the energy from stress to mindfulness in the garden and tap into your inner trust - the place where intuition lives.
Tools for Cultivating the Right Mindset:
1. Journaling: Seek out prompts or simply take time to sit in the garden and release what’s on your mind. Journaling is a powerful tool for increasing focus and tapping into your intuition.
2. Observation: Spend a few minutes sitting quietly in the garden before beginning tasks, observing the plants, soil, and even insects. Listen to your gut feelings before diving into work.
3. Tarot: I find tarot to be a powerful tool for tapping into my intuition, especially when I’m feeling a bit stuck. Contrary to what critics say, tarot doesn’t predict the future, but provides different ways of thinking about a question or challenge.
The Rhythms of Nature
I’m not recommending that you throw away your gardening books or adopt chaos gardening practices. I consult my collection of homesteading and gardening books frequently for inspiration, base knowledge, and fresh ideas. An intuitive gardening mindset does not mean going at it blind or without guidance. It’s a built-in system for checks and balances to ensure your gardening approach is aligned with your experiences and knowledge, that it is uniquely you - not what someone else is doing for the sake of imitation.
When searching for a guide, turn to nature. I could rattle off an hour long speech with zero preparation of all the ways that working with nature instead of trying to manipulate and control it has made gardening much more abundant and honestly so much easier. It took time (and many failures) for me to understand the natural conditions of my garden and to apply an intuitive approach to working with them. It’s not a destination, but a journey.
Nature gives us cues everyday. If you didn’t have a calendar, how would you tell time? From changes in light - hues and length, plant life cycles, and what’s in bloom, to animal behavior, observing the seasons can tell us a lot about how and when to show up in the garden. Plant health, pests, and the presence of weeds can tell us about soil health, biodiversity, and other challenges.
Here are three tools for getting in touch with nature as a guide for growing more food.
Tools for Tuning Into Nature’s Rhythms:
1. Phenology: The study of natural phenomena like bloom times or migrations. This helps you understand when to plant or harvest based on what nature is telling you (e.g., when dandelions bloom, it’s time to plant cool-season crops).
2. Stories of Permaculture: Seek out stories of those growing with permaculture techniques. I studied permaculture first from the lens of academic knowledge - purely definitions and rigid tutorials. When I shifted to learning about permaculture through other people’s stories - focusing on why they implemented a certain technique and what challenges they were trying to overcome helped me truly understand the impact and apply the same thinking to my garden.
3. Moon Gardening: Many gardeners plant, prune, or harvest based on lunar phases. Tapping into the cycles of the moon can offer a structured way to bring intuition into the garden through nature's timing.
Creating Room for Growth
Every spring I feel so anxious to share my garden plans and my garden on Instagram. I always feel the need to disclaim my goals and actions. I share about gardening on Instagram in a community of highly aesthetically motivated creators I admire greatly. While I have a much more raw approach to content creation (I know my strengths and aesthetics will never be one of them) I still feel compared to these folks. Because I’m comparing myself to them, this inadvertently puts so much pressure on me to have a perfect garden and sets me up for burnout and a season of frustration.
Instead, I’ve embraced imperfection in the garden by being adaptable. Through my practice, I can connect with nature and understand that most of what happens in the garden is outside of my direct control. I can show up with a more relaxed approach and free up energy for creativity, experimentation, and adaptation.
There is always at least one “bad crop” in the garden. There’s always at least one “failure”. This year has been tough on gardening because we’ve been in a drought. Instead of giving up and letting the plants succumb to the elements, we tapped into our well of knowledge and adapted. We used mulch to cover the soil. Companion planting to provide shade and cover soil. Chop and drop and other methods of living or green mulch in the garden. We were intentional with our sprinkler use.
Without creating room for growth and change, we resign ourselves to giving up when challenges and apparent failures present themselves. Here are three tools you can employ to embrace imperfection in the garden.
Tools for Letting Go of Perfectionism:
1. Planting “Wild” Corners: Dedicate a part of the garden to wildflowers, letting nature take its course. This creates a space where perfectionism has no place.
2. Experiment: Every year we allow for at least one experiment. Whether it’s comparing different varieties of the same plant or using different trellising methods, it’s a fun way to try new things, learn, and release the pressure of perfection.
3. Designated Kids’ Area: Assign a bed or area of the garden to your kids. Allow them to dig, plant, and grow in their own way. If they’re like my daughter, it will become a mud-bath-kitchen-worm sanctuary.
The 10-Minute Mindset
At this point, my 10-minute mindset for gardening is my signature piece of content. I’ve shared about it here and here and here (oh! and here).
Gardening can be physically and mentally taxing, especially when gardening is more of a way of life (like for us homesteaders) and less of a hobby. The 10-minute mindset is a commitment to yourself to show up consistently. I’ve found that consistency is the key to success in pretty much everything I do in life. Some days you will have 10 minutes, some days you will have hours.
Intuitive gardening is critical to maintaining this mindset and avoiding burnout in the garden.
Tools for Overcoming Burnout:
1. Forward Thinking: A huge key to avoiding stress in the garden is to think ahead. Don’t let yourself be surprised by “must-do” tasks or stress about last-minute harvests. The more you garden and show up in that space the more natural this type of future-forward thinking will become.
2. Work Smarter, Not Harder: The cliche “work smarter not harder” mantra is helpful in the garden. There’s no such thing as a singular task in the garden - everything is related and connected. You can make this work for you by strategically sequencing tasks so that the trickle-down makes things easier or does some of the work for you. For example, I use a broad fork to till up the soil before planting carrots, otherwise, I grow the puniest carrots. Now, I plant carrots right after I harvest potatoes, removing the need for additional working of the soil.
3. Selective Ignoring: Practice walking away from small issues—like a bit of leaf damage or a few weeds—without feeling the need to fix everything. Prioritize the most important tasks by setting a goal of completing a single item each gardening session. Sometimes you’ll complete more than that, sometimes it will be just that one thing.
The Flow
You can take gardening very seriously and grow a whole boatload of food for your family and community, without it causing burnout and excessive stress. With mindful practices and smart strategies, you can embrace a more intuitive, ease-filled approach to gardening.
I’m speaking more about this topic at the upcoming Seed Folk Gathering on November 10th. I hope you join me!
𓏋Danielle𓏋 recently shared a story on Instagram about a totally different topic but this quote perfectly summarizes intuitive gardening:
“…living life so much that you can see it reflected within you so you make decisions through experienced based knowledge and not just reciting a catchy sentence you heard.”
This was so full of wisdom! “Working with nature” is also my all around food growing mantra. I couldn’t agree more with the idea that gardening may be a hobby, but homesteading is a way of life!! Thank you so much for sharing 😊