Failures Survived

Perfect seedlings

Seedlings sit on the porch, waiting for something more.

My seedlings remain in their 3-inch pots on the porch — perfect, protected moments in time. It has been well past the last frost for nearly a month and a half, yet still I let them dance in the sunlight on the porch while they reach for more, slowly suffocating in their own perfect pots.

Yesterday, I stopped to look at them and finally asked myself why.

Why are all these plants still sitting on my porch?

I have never hesitated to harden seedlings off and get them into the ground, so why is this year any different?

The realization came crashing down on me as I sat alone on the front porch swing. Even in solitude, I stared at my feet against the wood like a child being scolded for nonsense.

I am afraid this year.

I have lost countless crops to rats and moles and deer and geese. I have knelt in the garden and wept over empty spaces where plants had been thriving only the night before, only for the morning light to reveal bare earth.

But the porch? The porch is safe. It asks nothing of me. Nothing disappears in the night and it does not disappoint me in the morning.

This year, I opened my farm as a business for the first time, and in doing so, my failures stopped being private. Before, the losses lived deep within me and in what I could no longer provide for my family that season. But this feels different.

It feels as though every loss from the last six years has settled onto my chest. Every season seemed to whisper reminders of where I had fallen short. And this year, for the first time, I feel eyes on me. It feels like the world is waiting to watch me fail again.

So fear has paralyzed me in the middle of the busiest season of the year — while I recover from surgery, try to finish the school year strong, and attempt to build a business from the ground up. And still, I sit on the porch swing and marvel at my perfectly protected pots.

But I have systems now that I never had before.

I trust my deer protection, and now I only need to find ways to make it more permanent. I know how to manage the endless march of slugs creeping steadily out of the forest, and the ducks play a huge role in keeping their numbers at bay. I still worry about the ducks — they are gentle on established plants, causing little more than minor damage to the lowest leaves, but seedlings are another story. So I build temporary protections for those too.

No matter what this season holds — whatever successes or failures may come — I know I am ready to face it head-on. Instead of allowing fear to keep me frozen, I will treat every failure as another opportunity to refine my systems again and again.

Market farms are not built in a season. They are built in failures survived.

And so, today I planted.