Taexalia

wild.life

Not Buried

"Should is a word that makes a prisoner of us." ~ Louise L Hay

I'm completely rubbish at exuding self-confidence. I've come to the conclusion this is why I seem to be afflicted with unwanted, ininvited "you shoulds". It seems to me that if I had the knack of exuding self-esteem, people wouldn't feel compelled to patronise me or treat me like I need help and advice with everything. It's pretty much like this: if you aim a sentence at me that begins with "you should" then my brain is going to shut down on you. "You should", you see, is so often about failing to acknowledge the current achievement. "You should" ignores the smile on my face because a seed turned into a seedling and survived weather, snails, slugs, soil conditions and my erratic planting calendar and grew into a plant.

My gardening seems to attract a lot of this negativity from one or two people, and half the time I have to sit down a figure out whether I really am the crap gardener they were anticipating, or whether I'm doing just fine after all. I'm quite happy to potter about in my garden and do my own thing. I'm not afraid of failure and I'm lucky enough to be in a position where, if all else fails, I can still put food on the table - even if I did have to buy it from someone else. I'm one of those people who learns by doing, by trial and error, by searching out some information and maybe applying it and maybe making it up as I go along. I like to experiment.

My potato patch is a case in point. I had no idea how to grow potatoes when I started out. I didn't care if there was a school of thought that potatoes are hard to grow because they sometimes get blight. I didn't care about how much space they need and whether that was too much in relation to the rest of my garden. I still don't.

I wanted to grow potatoes because my Granda grew potatoes, because I remembered the excitement of sticking a fork in the earth and uncovering the swollen white tubers that would be on the table within hours, shiny with melted butter and bursting with taste.

I bought some seed potatoes, chitted them and planted them out in the soil. Maybe I was too early, maybe I was too late, maybe they were too close to each other, maybe not. I watched the soil every day and nothing. Hindsight says that of course I didn't know how long potato seedlings take to show because this is the first time I ever put a tattie in the soil and waited. But the doomsayers had a feel day (is it field day or feel day? I think feel day, in the Doric sense, is about right...) and the "you shoulds" came pouring out - as well as the even more unhelpful "you should haves".

When the greenery finally started poking out of the soil, the congratulations did not come. "You should" prefers failure.

The potato plants got bigger and bigger. I had to endure more than one conversation about how I've grown too many potatoes. Because of course I have to have done something the wrong way.

At this point I will add that my own internal critic quite often feels redundant.

I'm told it is too early to pull a plant up for potatoes and I'm thinking that if I have too many potatoes then surely it's best to start eating them sooner rather than later... No?

"You should wait..."

Which is sort of like a red rag to a bull.

The fork goes in the soil a little later, and I dig up the first ever portion of tatties that I grew myself.