grace grits and gardening

Hello to a New Gardening Year!

A brand new year has me thinking about gardening goals, and I decided to jot down a few that are important to me.  While doing this, I realized what I was really doing was writing a garden mission statement. Yes, I do love a good mission statement. Old habits die hard (or don’t die at all.) Business plans, year-end summaries, new budgets, spreadsheets, etc.—that was such a big part of my world once upon a time. Still is, in a way.

Is that weird?

I don’t think so. (And who cares, anyway?) I’ve reached the age of not worrying about being thought of as weird.

“We are all a little weird and life’s a little weird, and when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours,
we join up with them and fall in mutual weirdness and call it love.” ― Dr. Seuss

If you consider the reasons for having a mission statement of any sort, you’ll see how it can be a good thing. A business mission statement helps define an organization, setting forth its core values and beliefs, while encouraging a bit of goal-setting for the future. We do a similar thing when we choose our word of the year, right?

A garden is an organization too. A vital one, in fact. After all, without pollinators we can say goodbye to blueberries in our oatmeal. Who wants a strawberry-less strawberry cake? A salad without tomatoes or root vegetables? No thanks.

So yes, writing a garden mission statement is a fantastic way to kick off a new gardening year. And even though our space in town is not large, the members of our organization are a diverse variety of flora, fauna, and fungi, each with different wants and needs. And, for as long as my husband and I are entrusted with this space, understanding and fostering our members’ needs is important to us.

So yeah, I like the idea of it.

A garden mission statement was harder to write than I imagined.Continue Reading