Gardening as a Practice of Self Trust and Self Confidence

As a beginner gardener, there is a lot you can learn from those around you. Especially if they’ve gardened in the exact same spot as you, literally in your yard. Like, my mum and I gardening together for my whole life.

But your own experience is also essential and can help you learn to trust yourself more and gain more confidence in other areas of your life. I have found that the process of gardening and plant care has slowly helped me learn to trust myself and gain a little more confidence. 

How Gardening Taught Me to Trust Myself 

Gardening and plant parenting has given me a low-risk way to practice trusting myself and learning to listen to my intuition. Here are the ways I’ve gained general confidence and trust from working with plants and my garden. 

Plants are living things that I have to care for, but they’re generally more resilient and less needy than children or pets. The care commitment for the average houseplant is lower than for an animal. They’re also quite patient. So I have plenty of time to research how best to care for certain plants before they’re going to die. But having something to care for and keep alive not only gives me a good reason to get up every day, but thriving plants also give me small markers of success and consistency that prove I can follow through on things.

Tiny successes in life go a long way toward building up our self-confidence. And keeping plants alive is a rewarding success step. The loss risks for plants are also relatively low. If I kill a plant, it's a dead plant. Sure, I probably paid some money for that plant, and I may be quite emotionally attached to it, but at least I haven’t killed a pet or a child. So I am less emotionally disturbed by the outcome. It's sad to lose a plant, don’t get me wrong, but I grieve significantly less for a plant than I would a pet or a human. 

This means I can look back at that plant’s life from a more objective perspective and figure out if there were mistakes I made that were contributing factors. Identifying these mistakes without feeling defensive about it gives me practice for accepting mistakes I might make in other parts of my life. Similarly, I can notice when my plants are thriving and note what aspects of my care may contribute to that success. This helps me learn what different plants like until that info just becomes instinctual, and I start to trust that I know how to take care of the plants I have.

Plants give rather direct feedback, but the feedback is entirely objective. If they don’t get the right care, they wilt or droop or turn yellow or start to lose leaves; if they get great care, they grow well. But there’s no human feedback or judgment. Over time I start to notice earlier and earlier signs that my plants are doing well. 

This eventually translates into other areas of my life. If I can learn to take care of plants, I can probably learn to do other things, too. 

Over time, this relatively slow feedback helps me gain confidence. Gardening is a constant practice of trust and hope.

Learn From Mentors, But Trust Yourself

Your neighbor, a few houses down, might have been gardening for decades, but you can guarantee the microclimates in their yard are different from yours. And microclimates change over time. And they might (most certainly do) have different markers of gardening success than you do. Maybe you just want to experiment and grow a bunch of odd things. Or perhaps you want the juiciest tomatoes ever or a specific type of flower.

Your experience matters. You know what happens in your yard. Track your successes and failures. Analyze analyze. And start to believe yourself. You will develop your intuition over time, and patterns will start to connect in your brain.

You don’t have to do this on paper. I’m a strong advocate for recording and tracking things. I like data. My mum has never kept a gardening journal in her life or tracked any information. But she is an eternal wealth of gardening info. Your brain tracks stuff, whether you put it on paper or not, and it starts to show you patterns over time.