A few weeks ago our friend gave us a tour of a garden she’s been working on for eighteen years. Her garden is a bit of a rambling food forest with squash, mushrooms, and berries appearing at random. She explained to us enthusiastically about her plans for the garden for next year, as well as what she accomplished this year. It was interesting to see what she has done over the years, and also to see the transformation of her garden from the time she bought her house until now when she showed us pictures.

For the past month or so, I haven’t really done anything new with the garden. With ongoing construction around us and intense summer heat, I haven’t felt motivated to do much. I enjoy sitting on our porch and watching our garden for what it is now. Many of the plants we planted this year are growing rapidly, and those we planted last year have doubled or tripled in size.

Alongside the rapid growth of plants, my son has made some major strives in development in the past couple of months. He went from being completely immobile, to rolling, sitting, crawling, and now starting to stand! Accordingly, I’m spending a lot more time watching him, and he’s spending a lot less time napping. The days seem to go by in seconds, and I often only have a few minutes to myself. This means that garden maintenance has moved to the back burner. On the rare occasion that I get the chance to garden (when there’s little construction and my son is napping) I get overwhelmed by the amount of weeds. Because of this, I decided to be kind to myself and hire someone to clean up the garden this year. We will be going away soon for a couple of months, and rather than have the garden become even more weedy next year, I’d rather have someone take care of it now. I’m excited for the garden to become more established and less high maintenance in a few years.

One thing that I’m starting to get better at since becoming a parent is learning to delegate and accept the things that I’m unable to do. I’ve always been an overachiever and have always felt that I should be able to do anything I put my mind to. However now I realize that – while I can do a lot of things that I want to – I only have so many hours in a day. I’m lucky in that I have the ability to ‘treat’ myself by hiring someone to help with weeding, and I think that’s one of the kindest things I can do for myself this year.

After the weeding is done, we’re planning on putting down some cardboard in order to start new gardens for next year. You really can only do so much in a year after all! For now the most important thing is spending slow paced days with my son while I’m still on leave.

In July, cone flowers, lilies and phlox started to bloom:

Now that it’s getting later in the season, we’re starting to have lots of brown eyed susans, and our sedum is starting to change colour. Our morning glories and cosmos are also still in full swing.

I’ll hopefully make another post towards September. Until then, enjoy the remaining days of the summer!