In February of my second year I carried a metal shelving unit up the basement stairs one shelf at a time, and when I had it out on the driveway I stood there in my coat for a while deciding whether I was really going to do this. It was the seed starting rack. Two shop lights zip tied to the underside of each shelf, a timer, a heat mat, a stack of black plastic trays with soil still crusted in the cells from the previous March. I had spent a good deal of a weekend building it and rather more than I want to think about on the lights.
I gave it to a woman from church who was excited to have it. Then I went back inside and felt strange for the rest of the day, the way you do when you have made a correct decision that also feels like a small defeat.
The seeds were the first thing to go
Here is what happened with the seed starting. I could grow the seedlings. That part worked. What I could not do was the six week stretch where they needed watching every single day, in a basement I otherwise had no reason to enter, during the exact weeks of the year when my work is busiest. Twice I let a whole tray dry out and die because I had a hard week and forgot they were down there. The second time it happened I sat on the basement step looking at forty dead pepper seedlings and understood that the problem was not my technique.
I buy starts now from a grower about twenty minutes away. It costs me more per plant. I have made peace with that faster than I expected to, and the peace came from a fairly unsentimental piece of arithmetic: the plants I buy are alive in May, and a meaningful number of the ones I raised were not.
The corn was vanity and I knew it at the time
I planted corn the first year in a bed that was about eight feet by ten. Anyone who knows corn is already wincing. It needs to be planted in a block for pollination and my block was not much of a block, and what I got were ears with about a third of the kernels filled in, gappy and sad looking, on stalks that had spent the entire summer shading out things that would have actually fed us.
I knew before I planted it that the space was marginal. I planted it anyway because corn is what a garden looks like in my head, from childhood, from my grandmother’s place. That is not a growing reason. It is a picture. I have gotten better at noticing when I am chasing a picture rather than a vegetable, though I would not say I have stopped doing it entirely.
I stopped canning like I was being timed
The first August I put up everything. Anything that came out of the yard got processed, and when the yard ran out I bought flats of fruit to keep going, which in hindsight is a fairly clear sign that something had tipped over from usefulness into compulsion. I was doing water bath batches until eleven at night on work nights. The kitchen was permanently sticky. I burned my wrist on a jar lifter and still have a faint mark from it.
And then in January I looked at the shelves and realized we were not eating most of it. Nobody in this house wants pickled anything in quantity. The tomatoes went fast, the applesauce went fast, and the rest sat there through the whole winter looking like a reproach. I now can two things and I freeze most of the rest, and the freezer is not a moral failure, whatever the internet says about it.
The rabbits I never actually got
For about four months I read seriously about meat rabbits. I had hutch plans printed out. I had talked to a man at the feed store twice. What stopped me was a single evening where I sat down and honestly walked myself through the killing part, not in the abstract but as a Tuesday in November with a specific animal I had fed that morning, and I understood that I was not going to be able to do it, and that a person who cannot do it should not start.
Some people would call that squeamish. Possibly it is. I would rather know that about myself than find it out with sixteen rabbits in the yard. That one I do not feel sheepish about at all.
What the quitting actually taught me
Every one of these things failed on the same point, and it took me embarrassingly long to see it. None of them failed because I lacked skill or information. They failed because they demanded attention on days when I did not have attention to give, and I had built them as though I were a person with an empty calendar and reliable energy. I am not that person. My weeks are lumpy. Some of them are consumed entirely by work and family and I do not walk into the yard for four days running.
So the question I ask now before I take on anything new is not whether I can do it, but what it will demand of me on my worst week rather than my best one. Things that survive a bad week stay. Things that need me at my best get dropped sooner or later, usually later than they should, usually after they have already cost something.
The order I would keep
I started by adding projects and then subtracting the ones that did not hold, and I have heard people argue you should be more careful up front and avoid the waste. For me the subtracting was the part that taught. I did not know which things suited my actual life until I had lived a year of them badly. The shelving unit was not a waste, exactly. It was tuition, and it was cheaper than most tuition, and the woman from church still grows peppers on it.