As you embark on your beginner gardening journey, remember that every experienced gardener was once just like you. You will gain more confidence in plant care alongside your green friends through patience and keen observation.
As you build up your confidence as a gardener, here are a few helpful hints: Study your plants closely to learn their health indicators, such as drooping leaves or stunted growth.
Be Your Own Best Gardener
Gardening provides an empowering sense of personal accomplishment and self-worth, from nurturing seeds into full-grown specimens. Not only can gardening enhance our connection to nature and beautify home environments, but it also makes us more capable of cultivating healthy, productive, and ecologically sound gardens.
To form a strong bond with your green friends, you must learn about their needs and meet them accordingly. Understanding their wants and needs allows you to establish mutual trust and respect.
Being mindful of your plants can deepen your relationship by paying attention to their color, texture, smell, and sounds. During your next gardening session, please walk barefoot through the garden and observe its colors, textures, smells, sounds, and sensations. Touch one of your plants and notice its texture: dry and brittle or soft and fragrant? Smell all the flowers and plants around you for what fragrance they emit before listening to how the wind moves sound from plant to plant or leaf to leaf.
Mindfulness practices may seem simple but can significantly impact your gardening experience. Engaging in mindfulness practices will encourage you to slow down and relish each moment spent gardening. So put down your phone, stop texting or emailing, and spend more time getting acquainted with your garden on an intimate level – your plants are as intrigued by you as they are by them, creating lasting bonds.
Be Mindful of Your Plants
Gardening or tending plants on our windowsill helps people connect to our planet in a meaningful way. Studies demonstrate how being immersed in nature and being around plants benefits both physical and mental well-being; plants’ well-being when we’re feeling anxious or stressed provides comforting stability when we need a boost of resilience.
Plants can serve as powerful symbols of self-care and teach us how to care for ourselves better. When we feel down or overwhelmed, plants can remind us that all living things experience similar cycles of growth and renewal. They can also teach us mindfulness techniques, such as slowing down and being present, and they can remind us how interconnected we are. Moreover, plants promote mindfulness and gratitude, both key mental wellness aspects.
Researchers have recently demonstrated that people who regularly cultivate plants experience decreased stress and depression. By engaging in self-care practices like gardening, we can better cope with life’s challenges more efficiently and remain resilient against them. Gardening offers an active way of self-care that provides the exercise needed to decrease the risks of heart disease, diabetes, and depression.
Reminding ourselves that everyone was once new at gardening can be daunting, but being patient and attentive during your initial attempts can go a long way in building confidence in both yourself and your plants. Failure may occur along the way, but learning from past errors should help prevent making similar errors again in future attempts and allow you to grow alongside them with ease.
Appreciate the Resilience of Plants
As with baking or mastering other complex skills, developing confidence in plant care also takes time and practice. When starting, it can help to focus on providing light, soil, and water; creating and nurturing just one or two healthy environments will give you a great sense of achievement and increase your confidence to tackle more complicated challenges in the future.
Plants can provide invaluable insights into their needs by simply being asked. Ask your plants questions either out loud or silently, and watch for responses such as visual images, sensations, or sounds. For instance, if you touch one and feel an overwhelming sensation of heat spreading across your body, that could indicate too much sunlight is being received by that location.
As part of your efforts to strengthen and appreciate your plants, why not encourage them with regular conversations? Talking with plants provides them with oxygen exchange and strengthens bonds between you and them—it’s a win-win scenario!
Once you feel confident in your ability to provide healthy environments for your plants, it can be helpful to surround yourself with like-minded individuals who share the same enthusiasm for plant culture and care as yourself. This could include joining online communities, attending local workshops, or finding a mentor. Other plant lovers can offer invaluable insight into familiar problems like overwatering or underwatering and provide emotional support when your plants don’t thrive as expected.
Give Your Plants a Pep Talk
Plants might not have faces to interact with directly, but they still deserve care and love, just like any living thing. Unfortunately, we tend to treat houseplants like mere decorations; conversing with them regularly will help you see them as integral members of your household. Talking with them also increases awareness of their needs—like whether they need watering or more sunlight than usual.
At times, it might not be clear, but the plant spirit often has something to tell us. Connecting with them and understanding what they’re telling us can be very revealing; journaling your conversations may also prove helpful so you can look back later.
Though it is impossible to know whether showering your ficus with compliments enhances its beauty, many have noted that their plants flourish with some positive reinforcement. It shouldn’t come as a shock that plants also enjoy being given water and fertilizer!
As you give your plants an extra boost, it is also important to remember to treat yourself kindly. Don’t compare yourself with others or pressure yourself into growing in ways that don’t match up with your personality and goals; focus on finding healthy ways of expanding and celebrating your results with pride—you may find out that you are just as successful (if not more successful than) those around you!
Be Kind to Yourself
No matter where your gardening journey may have led you, or even just feeling that taking care of yourself as well as it should have, keep this in mind: self-kindness is a journey. Starting small might mean paying attention to how you talk to yourself during the day and changing negative self-talk into more supportive and compassionate words. Imagine how you would respond when speaking to a struggling friend; apply that kindness to yourself, too.
Self-kindness means acknowledging what’s most important to you and finding a balance between accepting yourself as is and reaching for more. Beating yourself up can make it hard to reach your full potential; therefore, finding a place between accepting where you are now and setting goals that stretch and inspire further growth is often best.
If you need extra help being kind to yourself, don’t be shy about seeking support from others. That could mean anything from asking someone at work for assistance on a project to spending time outdoors or with loved ones—whatever works for you. Just make sure that no matter what it involves, you show yourself some kindness—just as giving plants special care, they deserve it, too! Make this summer count by being kind to yourself (and your garden!!), and see your confidence blossom!