Do you have your coffee? Shall we sit a while on the porch and gab? How was your week? How is the garden? Did you get any rain? 

 

This week I found myself extolling the virtues of a more hands-off pest approach in my garden. My father got me in the dirt growing things at a young age, so I’ve been at this for a while. And with each passing year, I find myself letting the plants have their way. 

Gardening has always been a means of putting food on the table in our family. Even if I didn’t can a single thing that year, it still cut the grocery bills in the summer months. While feeding us fresh ingredients is still an important aspect of gardening, I find it’s not the most important anymore. 

 

It seems, for me, that gardening is less an activity of self-reliance these days and more a mental space I enter whenever I open the gate that keeps all the four-legged critters out. 

It’s truly that simple. I love planning where everything will go and watching it all fill in over the summer. I marvel at how a tiny nub of a cucumber I just checked on two days ago is now the perfect size to be sliced into chips for scooping up hummus.

 

It all seems to happen so fast. Just ask anyone who has been surprised by a baseball bat-sized zucchini.

 

And while a lot of planning and hard work goes into my green space each year, once it’s set up and growing, I’m more than happy to sit back and let nature run its course.

I’m currently hosting a massive crop of cabbage whites larvae. They thoroughly enjoy my Pennsylvania Dutch flat cabbage and the Dazzling Blue kale.

 

Sure, it’s annoying seeing huge holes in my kale leaves, and I hope they leave me some. But I don’t necessarily feel the need to go into action mode. Eventually, they will hatch into pretty white butterflies and move on, and I know I’ll still have plenty of kale and cabbage this fall. 

 

And the Colorado potato beetle pupae have all disappeared from our potato leaves, which means they’re busy turning into adult beetles. 

 

Rather than break out the neem oil, we decided to give the potatoes another couple weeks and then pull them all up. (We love new potatoes anyway.)

I like to set our plants up to be drought-resistant at the beginning of the season by encouraging deep root growth and large root systems with mycorrhizae. But beyond that, I don’t tend to water much. If we get rain, we get rain. If not, we wait. Maybe I’ll water, maybe I won’t. 

 

When you start fussing over every pest creeping into your garden and spending hours a week watering it, this thing you’re supposed to enjoy suddenly becomes this giant patch of stress in your backyard. 

Besides, my chickens anxiously wait by the garden gate for me to bring them the little jar they know will be filled with tiny, wriggling green treats to eat. If I started spraying all my brassicas with neem oil, I wouldn’t be as popular with my flock. 

 

This summer, I challenge you to be a little less hands-on and a lot more observant. If gardening has become something stressful in an already hectic season, I encourage you to take a deep breath, go for a walk in your garden with your coffee mug in hand and enjoy what you’ve set in motion. Be a part of it without giving in to the urge to try and control it.