What to Think About When You Think About the Garden

Welcome to the Grow youw Self podcast.

Surprising stories about the food we eat.

And inspiring conversations about what it really takes to live the whole and happy life we're all craving. My name's Nicole John C. Burke, and I'm the owner of Rooted Garden and Gardenary Incorporated, an author, author of the upcoming book Kitchen Garden Revival. Is it obvious I'm kind of obsessed with the kitchen garden.

Each week here on the Grow youw.

Self podcast, you're going to be shocked at the things you'll learn about foods you eat every single day. And you'll feel encouraged to take little steps in your own busy schedule to create a more whole and happy life for yourself. So turn up the volume and let's take a walk, go on a drive, or just hang out in the kitchen garden together. Every time you listen, I promise you'll learn something that will help you grow yourself in a new and exciting way. Sound good? I think so. Now let's dig in.

What should you be thinking about when you think about the garden? That's what we're gonna talk about today on the Grow youw Self podcast. You know, what we think about inevitably affects what we do. And so today we're gonna go all the way back to our brains and think about what we should be thinking about when we're thinking about the. The garden. Sound confusing? It really isn't. I'm gonna simplify things in such a new way for you today, and I know it's gonna literally blow your mind and change the way you view your food and the garden forever. So today's episode is brought to you by the Garden Coach Society. The Garden Coach Society is something I am so proud of. It is like my biggest passion project. When I started my business, rooted garden, in 2000 2015, I was dying for some help. I was reaching out to all kinds of people all over the place, asking if they would mentor me and teach me and help me start and grow my business. And it was so, so difficult to find somebody who would give me the time of day. Well, I created the Garden Coach Society for me, for that person back in 2015 who needed a mentor, who needed training, who needed a place and a way to be found and to market and who needed colleagues and who are also growing a similar business. The Garden Coach Society is packed with all those things. I am the mentor inside the society. There are over 130 other garden coach businesses inside the Society, and it is packed with trainings, all kinds of trainings from just how to set up your own Garden Coach. Business all the way to how to market your businesses, how to be on social media, how to price your businesses. Every single thing is in there. So I would love for you to come check it out. We are now enrolling this week the Class of 2020's Garden Coach Society. So go check it out@gardencoachsociety.com if you're a gardener who's always dreamed of having a side hustle or an extra line of income in relation to what you do in the garden. If you love sharing and teaching about the garden and you'd love to explore the idea of making money from that, I would love to let you know more about the Garden Coach Society. So go check it out at gardencoachsociety. All right, now let's talk about our thoughts about the garden and get ready for your mind to be blown as we talk about what to think about when you think about the garden. Let's go. Welcome back to the Grow youw Self podcast. I can't wait to dig in to the idea of what we should think about when we think about the garden. Today I'm going to be telling you thoughts I've been developing around the garden for years, thoughts that I had long before I started rooted garden, and how it's really impacted me as a gardener, myself, as a person, and as a garden coach. So being a garden coach is really like part of our job is to break down the steps and the mystery of the garden into things that are much more understandable. And I'm gonna try to do that for you today, kind of display what it's like to be a garden coach by talking you through the thoughts we have about the garden together. So the way I wanted to start today's episode is by reading to you from my book, Kitchen Garden Revival. So Kitchen Garden Revival is literally the step by step to set up and to grow and plant and tend and harvest from your own kitchen garden. My book comes out. We hope the end of it's been delayed a little bit because of the coronavirus, but we're hoping that it is well on its way to all of our hands very soon. So let's start. I'm gonna read you from. I believe this is chapter four. So here we go. You're gonna find what you should be thinking about right here. Here we go. The title of this part is We're Talking about the Soil. And this is how it starts. When you think about the soil for your garden, take a step back, come out of the garden store and just think about nature. Profound, right? But seriously, the bags at the hardware store, the vermiculite, the perlite, the other words that we just don't know how to pronounce, the peat moss, the blends that will supposedly work miracles. Those can be so confusing. So for a moment, let's just forget about the store and let's just think about nature. Have you ever stumbled upon an uncultivated berry patch or some wild tomato vine? It can be hard for us to know what nature to actually think about if we have never seen it. So let me help. Let's imagine a wild tomato vine. This tomato is growing along the banks of the Amazon River. The soil along the banks is sandy and airy. The vine is getting longer by the day as the plant begins fruiting. Some Amazonian critters, I'm not sure what critters, live along the Amazon river, but I'm sure they love tomatoes. They come by and they take a few bites. The unnamed but very lucky critter sits there and enjoys the tomato leaves, some skin and seeds and a little, well, you know, treasure of their own. Behind and repeat day after day after day, the vine continues to grow and fruit and be eaten by passersby until the weather turns cooler. When the night temperatures get too cold or the tomato is just tired of growing, the vines drop the remaining fruit, which then shrivel and are soon buried under the fallen leaves in the plant's vine. And there you have it. A pile of dried tomatoes, leaves, dead vines, and, yep, some animal treats. Time passes through the cooler months and all these things slowly break down. Then the weather warms again and you return to that same spot a year later. And now there's not just one, but five or 10 or 20 tomato plants growing in that same spot, more lush than before. And the process in nature begins again. The new and fruitful tomato plants are telling you and your imagination that the combination of sandy, moist earth that was naturally there already, the decomposed plant and fruit matter and the animal manure have all worked together to create this amazing, rich, fertile, organic area that's perfect for growing fruits and vegetables. There's no spray bottle, no secret ingredient necessary, just nature. A combination of what's there naturally with what's occurred over the seasons. Gardening should be second nature. You don't have to be a chemist or a horticulturalist to figure it out. You just have to think about nature. All right. Did you love that tease? I love that part of the chapter. So that's what we're going to think about today. We're going to think about nature when we think about the garden. I want to walk you through three parts of the garden where thinking about nature can totally help us and keep us going when we feel confused or overwhelmed. So let's first talk about the setup of your garden. I want to bring you back to a time when I went with my family to Big Bend National Park. Now, if you've never been to Big Bend, I highly recommend it. Actually, all the national parks that I've been to so far have been so amazing. I went to Big Bend right around the time that my family was really starting to try our hand at backyard garden gardening and getting better at it. And so I was really, really perceptive of what was going on in these, like, uncharted areas. In places where no human was interacting with the plants. It was just literally nature taking its natural course. What I recognized with these plants is that they were surviving in pretty tough situations. So in Big Bend, there's areas that are very dry, like, desert, like, and there's areas with forests, and there's areas where it's super hot and there's no rain. And yet there was so many beautiful plants that were flowering and blooming and growing tall. And so it was really, really neat to see the plants just loving where they were living, but, you know, not necessarily needing lots and lots of attention. So that was the first thing I noticed. And the second thing I noticed about these plants is their arrangement. So as we would walk by or drive by these plants, it was so neat to see they were set up. I can remember taking so many photos. And in general, there was this rise and fall of these plants throughout the park. So as you'd be walking up to a new set of vegetation, there'd be these low lying plants right as you first approached. And then there'd be more medium sized plants, you know, that were more like bush, like. And then as you got to say, the center of the arrangement, there'd be these taller plants at the top. And so it was this tiered growth, right? And it would kind of rise and fall. You might in one area have, say, three or four sets of very large plants and then medium sized plants to each side, and then these lower kind of vining, low lying plants on the outside. I loved seeing this arrangement and thought, wow, this is so different than the formal landscapes I've observed in people's yards or even in my own yard. And this is definitely different than like row farming or places where I've observed just one plant after another that are all the same lined up together. So this is really. I think this. This trip kind of put me on this path of thinking about nature in regards to the garden. As I was walking by all these plants and observing their growth and their beauty and just the setup that they just naturally created on their own, I thought, I want to bring this back to my vegetable garden. I want to feel this feeling that I have and think this way when I plant my own vegetable and kitchen garden. So here are some ways that we can bring this into the kitchen garden. First is just in this way of letting plants be in the same conditions in which they originated. So one of the reasons the plants that I observed in Big Bend or in any natural place are thriving is because they've adapted to the conditions around which they're living. So these particular plants in Big Bend, they were fine with having less water. They were fine with having tons of sunshine, right? They were fine with growing in particular types of soils because that was home to them. And so anytime that we're bringing plants into our kitchen garden, we really want to take some time to figure out what home is like for them. Think of them as adopted children, right? And really kind of paying attention to the cultures and the places from which they came, and then wanting as much as we possibly can to put out the welcome mat for these plants by making them feel like where they are now, living, their new home, is kind of a reflection of their first home. What I mean by this is if it's, say, a plant that originated, let's say, like the tomato plant in the Amazon region in South America, really thinking about what those conditions were like for that plant in its originate original form. So how much sunshine was there? What was the soil blend like, how much water did the plant get? And then as we grow that plant in our own garden, trying to imitate as much as possible what home is like for that plant. We can do this by planting the plants in certain parts of the garden, by using certain types of soil blends, by watering a certain. With a certain timing or schedule. And each time we do, it just clears up the confusion. I get so many questions from clients and from students who are like, they want a step by step, right? Like, they want. This is how much water. This is the definite, you know, feeding schedule, that kind of thing. We want it to feel almost clinical, the way that we are going to grow and treat our plants, but really we want to think about nature instead. And as we know, nature doesn't have this set schedule, right? It's not clinical. It's natural. And so we want to respond and create an environment for our plants that's much more natural and that imitates their original home. So that's one way that the setup can be affected by thinking about nature. The second way that our setup can be affected by nature is by not going with everything all lined up in a row all the same. So as I mentioned, what I saw in Big Bend is there was never ever a situation where all of one plant was all in a line all together with no other plants breaking it up. In fact, the opposite was true. It was very rare to seed even 2 to 3 of 1 type of plant all together in a row. Instead, there was tons of variety and there was quite a shift in every single plant setting of height and size and growth habit. And that is what we want to create as we plant our gardens. We want to create kind of an imitation of this type of setup where there is great variety in size and shape and growth pattern. This is literally the way we think about nature and bring nature into the gardens. We create this way. We recreate what nature does on its own. This is so good for the garden one, because it doesn't put extra stress and pressure on certain plants. So when we plant only one type of plant all in a row, we're asking that plant to do all the work on its own without the support and help of surrounding plants. So for instance, when you're say, only growing smaller plants like those, those plants that would be growing on the outside of the setup, say, like what I saw in Big Bend, those low lying small plants, when you only plant those all in a row, you're asking them to survive without any shade or support or protection from taller plants. And in nature, that's not the way they're used to growing, right? They're used to growing under the shade and the protection of those taller and medium sized plants. So when we plant them all in a row all by themselves, we're basically saying, good luck, I hope you can take care of yourself. But in nature, that's not the way they began or they grow and flourish the other way. We do this the other way we protect them by growing them in sets of different sizes and growth patterns is we also protect them from pests. So in a situation where all the plants are all the same lined up, there's very little protection that they have from, you know, pests or critters that want to come and eat from them, right? Because literally, it is like a buffet line. The critter can begin to Eat and just keep eating and eating and eating without any interruption. But when we set up our gardens more like nature, where there's a little bit of this and a little bit of that, the critter may find a little bit of what they want to eat, but then very soon would be interrupted by a plant that basically perhaps, maybe they have no interest in. I come across this a lot. So very soon after I returned from Big Ben, I did start Rooted Garden. And I brought this idea of planting into my clients gardens immediately. I never really created gardens with rows of all the same plants. I would use this idea of breaking it up based on the different growth patterns and really packing in the plants in the way that I saw them occurring naturally in the national park. And I had a few clients, especially at the beginning and even now to this day, where they would say, oh, like, I understand that you have a particular way of planting, but it's very confusing to me. You know, I'll go out and I'll be harvesting from one pepper plant and then, you know, I can't find the other pepper plant. Like, where is it? And I have to kind of step back and figure out where you put it. Or, you know, I'll be treating or tending on this side of the garden. And I can't find. I thought that was all that was planted. And then, and the next day I came back out and I realized there was a whole other set of those same plants on the other side of the garden or in this other bed. And they're like, can you just put everything in a row? For me, I think that's when the order and the clinical nature that we've grown accustomed to in our more advanced society can really fool us into thinking that's the way things should be. So we do change things for our clients based on their desires. But I do always say, if you're confused, then, then the pests are too. And there's a reason to the madness. Like, there's a reason to the way that we set up the garden this way. Like, we're literally imitating the way nature grows on its own. And so we're just going to be creating a much richer ecosystem. We are literally like recreating on our own the magic that happens in a situation like I saw in Big Bad. So that's one way to think about nature and to bring nature into the gardens that we set up. So what we want to realize with our garden is we are building it right. We're creating like these raised beds and these, I guess, we're using like human structures to create natural things. And so as much as possible, we want to let these man made things we're creating on our own reflect what would be happening naturally. The more we can do that, the more we will have natural success. So that's the first thing with your setup. You want to be paying attention to where your plants originated, what home looks like for them, and recreating that with all the elements possible and then also thinking about the way the layout and the setup that occurs naturally, and then again trying to recreate that in your own garden too. So that's the first way that thinking about nature can really change the way we think about the garden. The second way is with the growth. So many times we all want to know, and you see this on the back of a seed packet and plants is how long till maturity, right? We want to know when is this thing going to be over? When are we going to get the thing that we want? And this, I'd like to say this perception and thought about the garden is totally not serving us well. So when we think about plants in terms of, okay, when will they be finished? When do we get what we want want from this plant? We really miss so much of the magic of the process and we try to speed up. The best part, I think of the growth and of the garden. So I love to compare this with my children, right? Like I'm a mom. My oldest is literally turning 13 this week. I have a 11 year old, a 9 year old and an 8 year old. And I like to compare that to basically if you had a child and the minute you had them, you were like, okay, when are they moving out? Right? Like, when are they going to get a job and pay me back? Like that kind of perspective. And it's rare. I don't think I've ever met a parent that felt that way, right? Instead, it's like everyone tells you, enjoy every moment, you know, take tons of pictures. It goes too fast. I literally said this to a mom with a baby on the airplane the other day. I was like, I know everyone says this, it's so trite, but really enjoy this. I miss my babies. I think we can look at the garden in terms of production too often. And if we step back and think about nature, as a parent, we would never say that, right? Or maybe we do say that every now and then, but we don't mean it. We really do want to enjoy every single step of the growth process as we watch our children grow. And even when they leave the home and become, let's say they actually get a job and move out. There's a sadness there, right? Like, we're so excited for their future and it's very special satisfying to see them grow up and produce. But at the same time, we, we loved the whole journey. And that is what gardening is too. Like the whole idea, the whole definition of having a garden is the tending piece, right? It's cultivating a place. You know, you do get production out of it. That is a goal of it. But really it's all about the journey. And that is how we can make the process of gardening so much more rich for ourselves, so much less overwhelming, so much more enjoyable. So I love to think about nature when I look at plants. And instead of immediately wanting to know how long is it gonna take for this plant to give me what I want, it's more like, okay, what is the process of growing this plant going to be like? And if you really start to look at plants that way, it's gonna clear up a ton of confusion. It also helps you to decide which plants you want to grow. So depending on the amount of time you have, the amount of space you have, and really your level of experience in the garden, that's how you can choose the plants you want to grow. Like, do you want to grow plants that you need to tend heavily, that you need to feed regularly? So this could be like a vining tomato, for instance, that's going to need a lot of your attention over say, a three month period. So that would be a great plant to grow if you've got some experience already. If you really want to give your garden some time, like you're up for hanging out in your garden, at least say an hour, a week or something like that. And then you get to watch the process. It's also a great plant to grow if you don't have to have immediate gratification, if you're okay with waiting to get the fruit of your labor for three or more months. But then if you're wanting something that's easier to tend, you don't have a lot of time and maybe you don't have a ton of experience and you're looking for more of like a quick payoff. Like you just want to feel what it feels like to bring in something from the garden, then you could start with something smaller and easier, like an herb or a salad green that's going to produce leaves for you in say, 45 to 60 days. You don't have to trellis it and prune it you don't have to fertilize it nearly as much. It's just a much simpler plant to grow. And so if you think about it in that way, then you can find your match in the garden. So, speaking of time, I think so much of our marketing right now with gardening is all about speeding things up, making literally miracles happen overnight. If you look at commercials, if you shop in the stores, you'll see all this advertisement about speeding things up and just basically trumping nature, making unnatural things happen with nature. If we think about nature, I think this marketing won't pull us in as often and as much. And that's really my recommendation to you. You. The whole idea of growing a plant and setting up a garden is to really appreciate and enjoy the journey of the growth. And so we don't have to be spending our money and our efforts and our time on fertilizers that are synthetic and not real. Not just because obviously they don't even help nature in terms of the runoff and the ways that they affect our oceans and our water supply, but just if we're only just looking at the plants, just the idea that we're trying to make something supernatural happen in a place where literally we're trying to imitate nature, it just doesn't line up right. So I love that this idea of thinking about nature can really clear up confusion. It can also cut down on the consumerism. Right? We don't have to buy all these things to make our plants grow and flourish in supernatural speed. We can just enjoy the journey and the process. So I love the way that thinking about nature can help us with the growth process. It helps us to slow down, to better estimate which plants we want to grow, not based on how much we can speed them up, but based on what they really do in nature. And then it also helps us to just calm down and not feel like we have to buy things or do things to make things go faster. We can literally just enjoy the natural process. We have planted fruit trees before and have had a good number of clients in Houston, particularly who enjoy adding fruit trees to their garden and their kitchen garden area. And it's always been interesting to help kind of educate them on the idea of growing fruit trees and what a time commitment it is, because, again, we've been advertised to that things happen so quickly and even times clients will shop at stores, and the fruit trees at the store for sale will already have fruit on them. And so the assumption is that they can bring those trees home, plant them in their landscape, and then literally pick fruit from them, like, the next day. And so, you know, my recommendation generally is that a tree gets planted, and then you wait at least two to three years before you. Before you take fruit from the tree, and they'll just kind of gasp. Like, two to three years. Are you kidding me? And I'll compare it again to children. I'll say, you know, that's kind of like asking my teenager, you know, to have a child, or even a child to have a child. And if we look at it that way, the way that, you know, plants need to reach a certain point of maturity before we ask them to reproduce, because that's literally what fruit is. Fruit, you know, contains the seed of the next tree that would grow. And so by demanding fruit on trees that literally might grow for decades, right away is very similar to asking something of a very young human being in terms of reproduction, which I know I would not have wanted or even been able to care for a child when I was a child. So it gives us a new perspective on things like fruit trees and vines and plants that are designed in nature to grow for 40, 50 years, not asking them to give us something right away. You know, thinking about nature and welcoming them in and saying, you know what, just come make yourself at home here. Get super comfortable. Get very, very strong and healthy, and then we'll talk about, you know, your reproduction and the fruit that you can give me. But first, I just want you to make yourself at home here and to just grow super strong and healthy. All right? The third way that thinking about nature can really impact us in the garden is our interactions with the rest of n. So I want to talk about animals and pests and their interactions with the garden. I probably get the most amount of questions in terms of garden care about pests and disease. These are the things that freak us out whenever we think about the garden. They're just parts of the garden that overwhelm us. And at the first sign of challenge, of holes in our leaves or dots or discoloration, our kind of, you know, I don't know, our freak outside of our brain likes to just go crazy and think that all hope is lost. Well, I want to encourage you when you think about your plants, when you think about your garden, to also think about nature. And just as I told you from my reading from the book, you know, those plants on the Amazon river, those tomato plants, were naturally surrounded by animals. And the way we've developed our food industry in the US Is we've really divided plants and animals, right? We have our plant farms and we have our animal farms, and those two should never meet. In between, we've made such a big deal about sanitation and cleanliness and not mixing those two living beings that we've really kind of fooled ourselves into thinking that that is natural. In fact, I had a friend recently telling me she had tried a garden and it just grossed her out because she would go out there and there'd be like, say, rabbits around the area, or there might have been a deer there, or then she saw bugs around her plants and it just grossed her out so much that she didn't want to eat those plants at all because they'd been touched by animals. And then I've had clients and friends who are vegan or vegetarian, and they said, I just don't want any kind of animal manure of any type to be used in my garden because I'm vegan or vegetarian. I thought about those two thoughts and just how our culture, the way we've developed, I guess so much has really, I don't know, we just don't think about nature clearly anymore. So, you know, going back to say, my friend who is grossed out by the animals, you know, I said to her, well, I mean, every food that you eat is somehow touched by an animal, right? Like, you just don't see it. So all the, all the lettuces you eat, all the vegetables and fruits that you eat, I mean, there are birds surrounding those trees and squirrels and rabbits and moles and there's all kinds of animals around all of your food, you just have never seen it firsthand. So isn't that better that you got to see what was happening, right, rather than happening and you not knowing it?

And she was like, oh, yeah.

And then with our clients who don't want animal manures or matter in their garden, I said, well, what do you think soil is? We literally are walking and using soil that has been developed over the. With animal waste, right? Our soils, our compost, all those things are basically, what's the word? Like, it's the, you know, the leave behinds of nature, of both plants and animals either decomposing or letting off, you know, particular minerals or literally pooping. And we can avoid the bagged stuff or the stuff at the store, but we're not avoiding it. It is literally in the soil that we're standing on, and it's definitely in the soil that we're building our gardens with. So think about nature, think about the way that plants and animals interact, and I think this will help you so much Instead of being overwhelmed with pests or problems in the garden, to instead. Instead see it as a natural situation. So I like to say you want to think back to Big Bend, where we were walking through these areas in the park, and there were jackrabbits and there were all these critters just coming in and out of these plants and eating from them. There were signs in various places like, beware of the mountain lion. Not scared at all. Prom we literally got into our little cabin at Big Bend, and a fox came up right to our room. He could smell, I think, the food we were making in there. And that is nature. Nature doesn't divide animals and plants. So if you're creating a garden, you are literally going to be welcoming animals into your space because you're putting plants there. Animals and plants interact with one another. That's just the way it is in nature. So. So instead of being overwhelmed or grossed out or wanting to avoid animals altogether in the garden, a new way, really an old way, when we think about nature is to just expect it to understand that plants and animals go together. Literally. It's like peanut butter and jelly. Like, they just. They can't be without each other. And so when we have our plants to just go ahead and assume, unless there is a protective cover, like literally a cage or something between your plants and the outside world, you are going to have animals in your garden. It doesn't have to mean that it's bad, right? Like, nature works. So at Big Bend, there were plenty of plants that were flourishing and gorgeous without cages or pesticides or a farmer coming and dealing with them. There were animals that were eating from those plants and living among those plants, and those plants were still thriving. And so when we think about nature in this way, when we think about the garden in this way, it can really remove a lot of the overwhelm. And instead of trying to get out our guns and spray and fight the bad guys out of the garden, we can look at it more of, okay, this is what's naturally happening happening. What other parts of nature can I welcome into the garden to deal with it? So, for instance, if you're dealing with a particular thing that's eating from your garden, you know, to start researching, well, what are things that would eat this thing? If you're dealing with, say, a particular pest, trying to figure out, is there another pest that would, you know, that would. That would eat this pest and deal with it, or also just kind of celebrating the idea that you've brought nature into your yard, I'll close With this story. When I first got onto this new way of eating locally, eating seasonally, buying locally and growing naturally, I was shopping at the farmer's market quite often in Nashville, Tennessee. They have a year round farmers market. And I bought a ton of corn one week and from this great lady and got it home. And there were tons of little caterpillars in them. I think they were earwigs or something like that. So we still ate the corn. I mean, I just kind of broke off the pieces where the caterpillars weren't. And it was so good. I went back to the market the next week, had my kids in tow, and I found the same woman. I said, you know, your corn was so good, but can you help me? Like, they all had caterpillars in them. And she said, well, honey, if the caterpillars don't like the corn, it's not worth eating. And I was like, huh, that's a good point. And that's really followed me with my gardening and helping clients this idea that if the food we're eating doesn't taste good to animals, then it's probably not very good for us either, right? There's a reason why now I cannot eat an apple that's been sprayed with fungicide or herbicide. Like, I can literally tast that nasty taste and so can the animals. Like, there's a reason why that apple made it all the way to the store without a bite on it or any bruises, right? Because nothing in nature liked it, including me. And so I think sometimes it can calm us down a lot to think about nature in terms of our garden. And if we see pests or wildlife enjoying our garden and wanting a part of our garden, that's a good sign, right? Part of the animal kingdom too. And so, you know, just like that corn, it really was delicious. The caterpillars agreed with me. Right? And so part of gardening, I really think is just coming into a comfort with this, of not being grossed out with the idea of animals being around our plants. Because, guys, that's the way it always has been. That is love, literally nature. So I hope these new thoughts, maybe they're new, maybe they're not new to you. They were a new way of thinking for me years ago. They've impacted me so much. You can see them in the way that I work with my clients. Even though we set up very formal, clearly man made gardens with our raised beds, you will see that I try to imitate what I saw way back when in Big Bend and the way that we. We plant our gardens and fill them out and tend them. I teach this inside my kitchen garden academy. I use this idea of thinking about nature in the way that we plant our gardens and tend our gardens and set them up in the first place. And then I use this philosophy as a garden coach, society director, as I help other garden coaches and teach them how to coach their clients, I encourage them to comfort their clients with this idea that when we think about nature, so many of the overwhelming parts of the garden just get cleared up. So our thoughts really do matter. And we can end up not moving forward in our garden or being overwhelmed or honestly just being frustrated and disappointed when nature comes to play in our garden or when it doesn't and we don't see the results that we want or we don't get them as fast as we want. But I think 99 times out of 100, it's often because we had the wrong expectations in the first place. When we set up our garden, when we planted it, when we came out to care for it or harvest from it, we weren't thinking about nature. We were thinking about something else. A promise we saw at the store or just even some idea we had in our head of what garden utopia looks like. But the reality is, nature is a beautiful thing. Just like those gorgeous plantings that I stumbled upon in the middle of the desert and Big Bend, nature has a wonderful way about knows what it is doing, and it has been doing it for thousands and thousands of years. And as gardeners, we literally get to come in and observe the process. We get to watch the journey happen before our very eyes. And suddenly the fruit at the end of the process isn't that big of a deal. It's more about watching the magic happen right there in our own backyard. So, guys, think about nature. When it comes to your garden, when it comes to your food, when it comes to all the aspects of growing ourselves, think about nature. This is going to free you up from so many of the frustrations and disappointments. It'll help you answer so many mysteries that you're trying to solve in the garden. And I think it just makes us better. Awesome people. So think about nature this week, this season, this year, and let's change the way our culture and our community sees the garden. And let's bring a little bit of nature to our spaces all over the world. Thanks so much for listening. I'll see you next week on the Grow Yourself podcast. Hey, guys, I cannot thank you again for coming here and hanging out with me in the garden as we grow ourselves. I hope you enjoyed this episode about thinking about nature. Listen. As a Garden coach, what I've been doing for years is taking the things I learned in the garden and then turning them into lessons step by steps and helpful how how to's for clients all over the place. And the coolest part is that I actually make a living doing it. There's something so amazing about doing something you care about, something that's good for the planet, and making a good and honest living in the process. I have loved growing my own garden coach business, but the biggest joy I have is helping other women and men start and grow their own garden coach businesses too. And that's just what I do inside the Garden Coach Society. And guess what? Signups are happening right now. So go to gardencoachsociety.com you'll get a thorough video that walks you through the step by step of what it takes to sign up and what's included inside this society and you'll have a chance to join us before doors close very, very soon. So go sign up@gardencoachsociety.com and let me help you help you grow your own garden coach business too. Thanks again for listening and I'll see you next week.