It is 2020 and do you have anything on your bucket list for this year? Sometimes plans or goals or dreams we have are slowed down by the work, time or investment we have to make beforehand. This applied to me with the dream of vegetable gardening. I postponed my dream for years because I simply didn’t know where to start. Just the thought of constructing raised veggie beds for my home garden was paralyzing.
This is now my 9th year of vegetable gardening in the heart of Silicon Valley. My journey into edible gardening only happened because at some point (in April 2012, to be specific) I bit the bullet and made a larger investment to hire two young gardeners with the vision of “transforming many thirsty lawns into vegetable patches.” This expert team came to my home, removed the useless shrubs in the backyard and installed raised planting beds with healthy growing soil and provided information on how to get started (that is, they sent their very knowledgeable gardener Hannah who taught me the secrets on how to grow a healthy vegetable garden.) Without outsourcing this project it would have never happened – neither my ex-husband nor I were pretty handy or able to put the work in to achieve this goal with a DIY project.
A week after the installation I planted my first summer vegetables and that summer ended with harvesting the juiciest and most delicious tomatoes I had ever eaten. A few years later I had the same gardening team come out again for my front yard and replaced the dead lawn with another three vegetable boxes which increased my growing space tremendously (and provided a nice rebate by the Water Company for taking out a dead lawn.) Outsourcing the work and paying for experts to get the project going was one of my best investments ever. Since then my family has enjoyed fantastic homegrown veggies, year round, and I have personally experienced the soul soothing benefits of gardening. Both are priceless to me.
If you want to do regular bike riding around your neighborhood for errands, get a bike. If you want to enjoy regular healthy smoothies for breakfasts and snacks, you’ll have to get a good quality blender. If you want to travel in a particular country and get to know the people, you have to get some basics of the language. If you want to get healthier or lose weight and nothing has worked so far, you might have to enroll in a program or hire a coach.
Sometimes we just have to do something or make an investment before we can reap the benefits. What is on your bucket list for 2020 and are you prepared to do the first step?
