There’s a garden bed along the back fence that has been exactly half finished for three years now, one side full of perennials that have grown in nicely on their own, and the other side just bare dirt with a few sad, struggling weeds, the same bare dirt it’s been since I dug it up back in a burst of ambition I no longer fully remember the source of.
I go out there fairly often, mostly to tend the side that’s actually planted, and every single time I look at the empty half and think, this weekend, I’ll finally get to it. It has been several dozen weekends now.
What Was Supposed to Go There
The original plan, back when I dug up the whole bed in one determined afternoon, was to plant vegetables on that side, something practical, tomatoes and maybe some herbs, a small kitchen garden I could actually use. I got as far as turning the soil and adding some compost before life, in its usual unremarkable way, simply moved on to other things, and the bed sat there, prepared and waiting, for far longer than I intended.
Three years is a strange amount of time for a plan to just hang there, half executed. Long enough that the compost has surely broken down into something different than what I originally added. Long enough that I’ve forgotten some of the specifics of what I was even planning to plant first.
Why It Keeps Not Happening
I’ve tried to figure out honestly why this particular project has resisted completion for so long when smaller things around the house get finished readily enough. I think part of it is that gardening requires a kind of sustained attention, watering, checking on things, that I’m not always confident I’ll give consistently, and some part of me doesn’t want to plant something and then let it die from neglect, which feels worse somehow than never planting it at all.
There’s also just the ordinary fact that no specific day ever feels urgent enough to be the day. Nothing forces the issue. The bare dirt doesn’t complain, doesn’t get worse in any dramatic way, just sits there, patient, exactly as unplanted as it was the season before.
What the Osei Kids Think of It
One of the kids from across the street asked me last summer why half my garden had flowers and half was just dirt, a question asked with the kind of blunt clarity only a child manages, no diplomacy attached to it at all. I told them I was still deciding what to plant there, which was true in the loosest possible sense, and they seemed satisfied with that answer in a way an adult probably wouldn’t have been.
What I Actually Did This Spring
I want to report that I finally planted the vegetables this year, and I did make some progress, a few tomato starts went in back in May, three of them, in a bed clearly meant to hold far more than three plants. It’s not the full vision I had three years ago. It’s a start, though, the first real movement on that side of the bed in a long while, and the three tomato plants are doing reasonably well, better than I expected given how long the soil had just been sitting there unused.
Why I’m Calling This Progress and Not Failure
I could frame this whole thing as a story about procrastination, three years of failing to finish something simple. I’ve decided not to frame it that way, mostly because I don’t think that’s actually accurate. The bed wasn’t neglected out of laziness exactly. It was just lower on the list than everything else that kept happening in those three years, and eventually, this spring, it moved up the list far enough to get three tomato plants into the ground.
The Rest of the Bed, Still Waiting
There’s still a good stretch of bare dirt out there, waiting for whatever comes next, herbs maybe, or more vegetables if the tomatoes do well enough to convince me the effort is worth expanding. I’m not making any promises about when that will happen. Three years has taught me not to set a timeline I probably won’t keep. It’ll get planted eventually, or it won’t, and either way the fence will still be standing, patient, the way gardens generally are with the people who keep meaning to finish them.
What the Tomatoes Actually Taught Me
The three tomato plants, small as the gesture was, did teach me something I hadn’t expected. I checked on them almost every day once they were in the ground, watering, watching for the first small green fruit to appear, and I noticed that this daily attention, brief as it was, became a genuine part of my routine rather than a chore I dreaded. That surprised me, given how long I’d avoided starting the project in the first place out of some vague worry about not following through.
It’s made me think the original plan, the ambitious full bed of vegetables all at once, might have been the wrong scale from the start. Three plants I could actually tend to properly turned out to matter more than a whole bed I would have half neglected. I think whatever goes in next will follow that same smaller logic, a few things at a time, rather than trying to finish the entire vision in one determined weekend the way I originally set out to.