No. 3 Learning to trust myself

So, the really cool thing about being around a lot of other farmers, is that you get to be around of a lot of other farmers-- with different techniques, and farming styles. I'm surrounded by people who know what they're doing-- in a capacity I haven't tapped into. I'm almost 29... Some of my farm mates have been growing as long as I have been alive. They know what they're doing, the setup is clean and I watched how they moved through their plot. I decided I would move that way, too.

Ever since I made that decision, something felt off. Not wrong, just-- off. Like a piece of clothing

that just isn't made for your body shape, or doesn't complement your skin tone, so you don't feel your best when you wear it.

Things kept going wrong. I bought the wrong cartridge for my butane burners. I kept second guessing myself, second guessing the plants, looking for logic in a process that was not mine.

Let me paint the picture. Have you worked with landscape fabric before? It is used to suppress weeds and retain moisture in the soil.

Before the farm, I had never used it a day in my life.

But the way some of the other farmers' plot looked with the fabric over their beds, and perfectly formed circles with even spacing between their plants made me feel like I'd be stupid not to tend to my beds the same way. By the end, I felt disconnected from the thing I was working so hard to create.

What I learned, there's a huge difference between learning from someone and becoming them. And that line, is your gut.

The Internet Will Give You a Framework for Everything

Urban farming content is everywhere right now. Square foot gardening. No-till methods. Companion planting grids. Succession sowing spreadsheets. There is a YouTube video, Substack, a Reddit thread and IG carousel from 'experts' on the topic. And, that stuff is a great place to start but here's what none of it accounts for: you.

Your quarter-acre is not their quarter-acre. Your soil has its own history. Your microclimate-- the way afternoon shade falls across your beds, the way the ground holds moisture after rain, the way the wind moves between your rows-- that's specific to your plot, your season, your relationship with that land. Where's the framework for that? Oh, there isn't one.

Where Gardening Ends and Farming Begins-- and Where I Live in Between

I've been thinking about what to call what I actually do out here. Farming feels too industrial for how I approach it. Gardening sometimes feels too small for the scale of what I am trying to build. The truth is I live somewhere in the middle-- a place where productivity matters and so does the way something looks, the way it makes you feel to walk through it, the way it smells in the morning before the heat sets in.

Aesthetic and yield are not opposites. Intention and output are not opposites. The beauty of a plot is data. If your space feels chaotic and exhausting every time you show up, that tells you something. If it feels grounding and alive, that tells you something, too.

What I've landed on-- for now-- is intuitive growing. It's not a technique. It's a posture. It means I come into the field and I pay attention first. I look at what's thriving and what isn't. I notice what the insects are doing. I notice which plants are reaching towards the light and which ones look like they've given up. I notice the soil color after the rain. (Which is why I had to rip up my landscape fabric).

After that, I make a decision. Not just from my checklist, but from everything I observed in the moments before the work. Something underneath all of that, something I can't fully name.

That is something is intuition.

And yes, it's a feeling. It has no logic.

We live on a rock. A floating rock surrounded by gas, spinning through a void at 67,000 miles per hour, orbiting a star that's moving through a galaxy we can't see all of. The conditions required for life to exist here, let alone in so many species, in the exact distance from the sun, the exact distance from the sun, the exact composition of the atmosphere, the exact tilt of the axis-- are so specific, so improbable, that science can describe them but can't fully explain why they happened.

Meanwhile, we're here growing tomatoes.

So, when people tell you to trust the process, the method, their framework-- I'm not saying they're wrong, I'm saying it's a starting point, not the ceiling. At some point you have to trust the part of you that's been watching, absorbing, feeling and integrating everything you've experienced in the soil. That's not mysticism. That's pattern recognition that lives right under your conscious thought.

The land operates on its own constantly. A tree knows to drop its leaves before the temperature fully turns. Earthworms move to the surface before the rain comes. Bees navigate by magnetic fields they can feel not see. The whole ecosystem runs on a kind of knowing that isn't verbal, isn't logical, and isn't explainable-- and it has been working for hundreds of millions of years before anyone invented a grow schedule.

What One Size Fits All Really Costs You

There are details you only catch when you're present-- really present-- in your own space.

Life is not one size fits all. That's not an inspirational phrase. It's a biological fact. Every organism adapts to its specific conditions or guess what, it doesn't survive. Coming up with some type of standard is a human invention that nature never asked for.

Your garden, your farm, your plot, your containers on the patio, is yours. It will teach you things no one else has learned because no one else has spent time with that exact piece of soil, in that exact space, and location through that exact series of seasons, with your exact pair of eyes.

Let it teach you. Show up. Pay attention. And yes, when something tells you to do it differently, trust it.

Until next time,

S