10 Stories That Show Gardening and Caring for Your Land Are More Than a Hobby, They’re a Practice in Discipline and Personal Growth

I’ve grown my kiwi garden for a year, spending around $2k on it. It’s next to a park, so strangers sometimes enter. Some even damaged my plants, and I started losing interest, but I didn’t want to feel like all that effort had gone to waste. For the past two weeks, I noticed an old man coming by with different kids. At first, I didn’t think much of it. Until I was watching the news one evening and saw his face.
Turns out, the old man was a retired teacher who had been volunteering with a local community program. He was taking the kids around different gardens and teaching them how plants grow, how to care for the land, and why you have to be patient with something before you can expect it to give anything back. Apparently, his own little garden had made the local news because of how many children he had inspired through it.
I just sat there thinking about my own garden. I had been so focused on the money I spent, the plants that were damaged, and how unfair it felt when strangers came in that I forgot why I started growing things in the first place. The next morning, I went outside and started fixing the plants I had almost given up on. I put up a small sign asking people to respect the garden, and I decided I was going to keep taking care of it.
Funny enough, that old man probably doesn’t even know he changed my mind. But seeing him keep showing up for those kids and his garden made me realize that gardening isn’t really about getting everything right.

I’ve volunteered in the garden at our local hospice for about three years. People assume it’s sad, and some days it is, but it’s not as bad you’d expect. Most patients can’t garden anymore, so we bring it to them: potted herbs by the bed, plantings outside their windows, and paths wide enough to roll wheelchairs and beds outside. One fall, a retired biology teacher directed our planting from her chair nearly every morning for about six weeks, through pansies, a long row of mums, and a bed of garlic for the hospice kitchen.
She was demanding, specific, and right about everything, including telling me I was planting the garlic too shallow. In late October she asked us to put in a row of tulips, knowing she wouldn’t see them come up, and she made me plant those at three times the bulb’s height. When they bloomed in April, the staff who run our bereavement program reached out to her family, and they came to see them. I think about her every time I plant bulbs.

My Mom would say, “You can either garden 10 minutes a day or all weekend. It is up to you.” Just go out and walk around the garden a bit. You will see something small to do and do it. And likely more! If you don’t go out there once a day for the little things, the work will pile up. The weeds will get large and everything will become overwhelming. But just walk around for 10 minutes. You’ll be surprised what you’ll get done just by showing up.

My wife says my garden is a study in survival of the fittest. I start my seedlings at the ideal times, pot them up, harden them off, lovingly prepare the garden beds, then run out of steam, throw them in the ground and abandon them to the elements. If they’re lucky, I’ll pull a couple weeds when I go out to harvest something and the weeds are in my way. Honestly, a lot of my annual veggies don’t make it, but I always end up with more tomatoes and herbs than I know what to do with.
Also, perennials are the cornerstone of my garden. Raspberries and rhubarb, my herbs are perennials if I remember to chuck some leaves on them in the fall, and I recently added some fruit trees. They require virtually no maintenance from me, just picking and annual pruning

Make it part of your routine. Get up, get dressed, eat breakfast, fill a watering can and walk around the garden. You’ll pull a couple weeds. You’ll pick a couple of ripe snow peas. You’ll look and see if your tomatoes have blossom-end rot (a problem that you’ll have to work on another day). Granted, it works really well for me because I have a fairly small container garden. So, mileage may vary. But once the garden is set up, working in the garden doesn’t have to be “toil”. It can be, 9 times out of 10, a walk in the garden. It doesn’t hurt that there may be some fringe benefits. You may see a cool bug (if you like bugs. I do as long as they don’t eat my plants). And the flowers of vegetable plants like potatoes and cucumbers are prettier than they get credit for.

I teach seventh-grade science and run our school’s garden club, so I’m out in the beds most mornings before the bell. Two Octobers ago, cherry tomatoes started disappearing, a handful a day; we’re in Georgia, so the plants were still producing. The garden sits right next to the bus loop, and one morning I caught a sixth grader whose bus always arrived early putting tomatoes in his backpack before he headed in for breakfast. He was embarrassed and told me they were for dinner because his mom was working two jobs.
I didn’t write him up. Instead, I asked him to join the club as our harvest tracker, weighing what came out of each bed and logging it, and after I talked it over with our principal, he took home whatever was ripe each Friday. He took the job very seriously and caught powdery mildew on the squash before I did. I also quietly connected his family with our school social worker, which mattered far more than the tomatoes.

We didn’t have much money when I was growing up, so my mom turned our whole backyard into a vegetable garden to stretch the grocery budget. I spent a lot of summer weekends weeding while my friends were at the pool, and I complained constantly. What I didn’t think much about back then was how much of it she gave away.
Some mornings she’d wake me early to carry grocery bags of pole beans, collards and yellow squash to a few porches down the street before anyone was up. The one I remember best is the Hendersons, who had five kids and a dad out of work. When I asked her about it as an adult, she just said we always had a little more than they did. My garden is about a third the size of hers, and I’ve started taking the extra to our food pantry; many pantries accept fresh produce if you call ahead and drop it off on intake days. My mom finds it funny that I complain much less about weeding now.

This is for my dad, who would have hated me posting it on the internet. He kept a vegetable garden for thirty-one years and always said a garden shows you exactly how much effort you’re putting in. When he got sick, I moved back home to help with his care, and that spring I planted his beds myself because I couldn’t stand the thought of them going to weeds. I ruined about half the peppers in the first month by overwatering, which he had plenty to say about from the window.
Once my zucchini went in, his neighbor Mrs. Norman came over and showed me a trick he’d picked up long after I moved out: wrapping the base of each stem in a strip of aluminum foil to keep squash vine borers out. Apparently he’d been doing it for a decade and never once mentioned it on the phone. After he passed, I bought out my sister’s share of the house, partly so the garden wouldn’t end up with strangers, and keeping it going has been its own kind of personal growth. The tomatoes did well this year, Dad. Better than last year, anywa

For me, it begin with a love of fruit. I enjoyed eating fruit, foraging from local trees and bushes, and even went to Thailand to experience tropical fruits like Durian. Eventually I started dreaming about growing some trees and living in a place with space to plant a fruit forest / orchard. When I landed in a place where I could start a garden, I started trying annual veggies and herbs from seed, and I planted fruit trees and blueberry bushes. I watched a lot of gardening videos on YouTube and just went for it. I made a lot of mistakes, and still do. Lately I’ve gained an appreciation for native plants and have been incorporating them into the garden.

My neighbor across the street uses a wheelchair, and before her accident she grew serious roses. I’d noticed her watching me work in my yard for two summers before I finally asked if she’d want a garden again. She said yes right away, like she’d been waiting for someone to ask. The first problem was that she couldn’t roll across her lawn, so we started by laying a paver path from her patio. Then I built two cedar beds: a 2×6 box 30 inches tall that she works from the side, and a table-style bed about 10 inches deep on legs, so she can roll her knees underneath.
I filled the bottom of the tall bed with old logs to cut down on soil, and the materials still came to about $500, which she insisted on paying, plus four weekends of my time, including one where I measured wrong and had to re-cut everything. She picked every plant herself and vetoed my marigold suggestion on the spot. For tomatoes we chose a dwarf variety that tops out around two feet, so she can still reach the fruit from her chair. Most mornings her patio light is on before mine, and I’ve never seen her look that happy.