Like many of us during the 2020 lockdowns, I had the completely unique idea to build an ambitious vegetable patch in my parents’ front garden. As a fresh university graduate who’d tried to kickstart a creative career in the midst of a global pandemic, I was eager for any and all distractions to help me stay sane.

Naturally, I ensconced myself in the world of no-dig gardening. I watched Charles Dowding vlogs in every spare moment, completely entranced by the British gardening guru’s soft-spoken instruction on how to achieve the most bountiful vegetable patch your eyes have ever seen. I became utterly convinced that a six-inch layer of compost would be the solution to all my problems, that it would magically transform our sandy soil into the dark, fluffy, nutrient-rich stuff – a gardener’s wet dream.

One dinnertime TED Talk later to persuade my parents (“I guess you can give it a go...” were their exact words) and I was off collecting cardboard from hard rubbish and flinging my fortnightly Covid payment in the direction of the best organic compost I could find. The glorified dirt delivered and many wheelbarrow trips later, I had the giddy sight of a blank canvas before me.

I filled the garden bed with neat rows of carrots, snow peas, cucumbers and swedes, added bushes of marigolds and left areas for melons and pumpkins to roam. I posted a picture online, tagging the no-dig godfather himself and got sent an encouraging red heart in return.

In the months following, I harvested modest crops of carrots the size of my thumbs and swedes no bigger than golf balls. Soon, even I had to admit that the soil’s ability to grow vegetables was slowly petering out. Unfortunately, my vision of a patch so full of produce I’d have to offload surplus onto family and friends was not coming to fruition. It seemed the compressed sandy soil, surrounding mature trees and bossy bitumen had other ideas.

I was crushed and frankly pretty embarrassed. Our low front fence and the abundance of lockdown walkers meant the outcome of my experiment was on display for all to see. Stubborn in my vision, however, I pushed on. I had success with calendula and borage flowers, so I saved their seeds and sprinkled them freely. Over time, I realised some herbs and native ground covers were happy enough to fill in the gaps. This solution wasn’t what I’d initially imagined, but the garden looked better now that the plants had more than a couple of leaves and were growing to the size estimated on the packet.

As the world opened up again, work opportunities began to pick up and gardening took a back seat. Ironically, I started to fall in love with my oddball veggie patch and what it had grown to be. Twice a year the bed would boast a metre-high field of flowers, attracting hordes of happy pollinators and prompting dog walkers to stop and stare in the evening light. I’d pick the edible flowers at dawn to use for my micro-bakery pop-ups and nestled foliage around food for my recipe photoshoots.

When I pulled out the odd weed here and there and dutifully added two inches of compost every year, I’d muse about how this patch had become a metaphor for my fumbling creative career. Both have been processes of throwing seeds into the ground and seeing what grows. Each had thrilling beginnings full of promise and hope that were quickly humbled by conditions outside my control. Both took far longer to establish than I imagined.

It's true that my garden has produced more life lessons than vegetables. Gardening has been a gentle but stern teacher on how to approach a creative life, showing me how to be more flexible, to follow what’s working, and that success rarely happens in neat, well-spaced rows. You simply can’t know what will work before trying different things. Gardening has demonstrated the importance of every season and shown how little wins help foster longevity and love for your craft.

Most of all, the patch has taught me that keeping your fingers in the soil – or creatively engaged – is the one thing that’s within our control. We might not get the outcome we’d first dreamed of, but our efforts will come back around in unexpected and delightful ways.

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