Most sustainable gardening advice does not survive a real garden.
It sounds right: let things grow, help pollinators, step back, work with nature. But a real garden is not an idea. It’s a place where things have to work.
You’re trying to grow food, keep paths open, stop taking things altogether and deal with whatever the weather, time and your body will allow you to do that week. That’s where a lot of sustainable gardening starts to fall apart.
I tried to do it.
During the lockdown, I was given access to the walled garden. It was an incredible piece of generosity. It gave us an outlet, a way to do something effective, something real. I thought if I approached it in the right way – gently, sustainably, with good intentions – it would respond in kind.
It didn’t happen.
Pushing back in the garden, harder than I expected. Weeds don’t stay in their place, crops don’t behave and things always take longer than I want. Then my back went, went right. Stop working whether I like it or not. When I got back to it, I overdid it and also hurt my wrist. The roof of the greenhouse fell in the storm and messed everything up.
At one point, I stood in the middle of it and shouted, “Fuck it, I’m done.” I meant that, because that’s the part that doesn’t make it into most advice: the point where the task stops working. Where the concept no longer matches the reality in front of you. Where everything seems to be slipping backwards faster than you can keep up.
But I went back, because I didn’t have a plan, or I knew what I was doing. I went back because there was something that kept me there. Something that made it worth trying again, even when it wasn’t going well.
Little by little, something changed—not the garden, not at first. i am
I stopped trying to “fix” it. I stopped expecting it to behave. I stopped thinking in terms of control or abandonment.
Instead, I started paying attention to what grew easily and what didn’t, what grew back on its own, where the soil held water and where it didn’t, and which parts needed work and which parts were best left alone. I pulled some nettles and left others. I grew food where I could and left space where I couldn’t. I worked some parts of the garden hard and let other parts be rough.
I heard about the garden, the soil, the plants, the earth. They told me what to do.
One year I learned this the hard way with onions. They looked fine above ground: upright, green, healthy enough. But when I picked them up, they rotted down. The bulb has completely failed. Later I was told that the onion had been grown in the same patch for many years and had developed a soil disease. It was a real lesson in the difference between theory and practice. You can read all you like, but sometimes the soil tells you something that only failure can teach.
It was not neat. It was not effective. It doesn’t look like the kind of thing you see in advice columns, but it worked – not perfectly, not consistently, but enough to keep going.
There is a version of sustainable gardening that exists in theory, and there is a version that exists in a place where you actually have to live with the results. They are not the same.
Most people are trying to find a way somewhere between controlling everything and letting go, but there is little honest discussion about what that actually entails. It involves failure. It involves limits. It involves doing work that doesn’t always pay off. It involves making mistakes, learning from them, and starting over multiple times.
Something else is involved. If you stay with it, if you keep going back, if you pay attention, you start to create something that’s not regimented and not completely abandoned, but somewhere in between.
It’s not that you’ve found the right answer. There are many answers, and perhaps none is entirely correct. But some of them are better than others. You find something that works for you and your land because you keep working on it.
That’s where most of the advice leaves off, and that’s where the real work comes in.
Ed. Note: You can find out more about Ciaran’s work and his book Nature’s Acre here.
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Previously published Reprinted on and with resilience permission
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