Does your vegetable garden feel overwhelming?

Last week I documented how the dream to own this property came to be a reality. It was the culmination of a generational inheritance, a lifetime of experiences, and almost a decade of pure delusion.

So when I finally got my very own vegetable garden, I was very excited. I was terrifically impatient. And I was wildly optimistic about what I could grow from Day Dot.

I turned up with a shelf of books, a box of seeds, and a lot of enthusiasm. I literally picked up the keys after settlement, and came here immediately to plant my garlic. Then I set about growing all those seeds.

But I wasn't ready to actually grow, process, or store everything I wanted to plant. The garden wasn't ready to take it. I wasn't ready to look after it.

Most of my seedlings failed. Usually because they never actually made it into a garden. I felt like a failure.

There are things I grew that first year that I haven't gone back to because it still kinda stings.

Start growing where you feel confident

I went back to growing what I knew. Potatoes. Peas. Garlic. Broccoli. For a year or two, I put aside (most of) the side-quests. Instead, I focussed on mastering how to grow and store the basics in this new environment.

The side-quests were always gonna be there for Future Me to pursue.

Only once I was confident in my vegetable patch did I begin adding new (weirder) things, as I had the capacity.

'Capacity' includes having the physical garden space. But also the time to do a bit of research, the physical storage space, and the knowledge we'll actually eat the results in the end.

If you're struggling to get started, planting the stuff you're confident you can grow, and which you will eat, is a good place to build some gardening momentum. There's nothing like a big fat failure to stifle a person's motivation in the garden.

Leave the weirder or more complicated things as an adventure for Future You. Start with some spuds and a pumpkin.

Is a vegetable garden even worth it?

A pumpkin can establish itself in the compost from kitchen scraps. It might return 3-7 pumpkins. They just need a dry, cool spot to sit until you can eat them. Low effort, decent return.

Potatoes usually work out at least cost-neutral, and they're so much fun to harvest that it doesn't even feel like work.

But peas are different. A kilogram of frozen peas costs $3.99-$6.99 (depending on brand, and whether a discount is applied).

The minimum wage in New Zealand is $23.95. Meaning a bag of peas is worth roughly 10 to 15 minutes' work.

Growing peas is fairly simple once you get the hang of it, but shelling takes forever. It'll take an hour, minimum, to shell a kilogram of peas and freeze them.

Commercially frozen peas are harvested at their peak, then processed immediately. There's no real advantage to growing and storing your own.

Now, that's not to say your own home-grown peas aren't worth having for garden snacks or fresh dinners. You may have children willing to do the physical labour of shelling them.

But compared to a bag of frozen peas, it does invite the question of "is this what I should spend my time doing?"

The question of financial return is usually answered in the processing time. Growing is kinda the easy bit (I say 'kinda' because growing itself still requires a whole lot of skills and resources).

Planting 30 shallots is easy. But 300 shallots to harvest, sort, store, and eat between two people? I had to learn that the hard way, more than once. It turns out, too much is almost as bad as nothing at all.

Shallot-harvest also coincides with garlic and catnip harvest, when my drying space is full. Meaning I've begun pushing planting time by about a month so the juggle at the other end is manageable.

This year I timed it. Planting ten shallots takes about fifteen minutes. It's enough to displace our annual spend on onions. That's the kind of vegetable-math I like.

Make the gardening decisions simple

I began running a little mental decision tree each winter as I planned my garden. It looks a lot like this:

Every effort compounds

Of course, even when you're growing the crops it makes the most sense to grow, and you're gardening within your capacity, there's still overwhelm.

That's the thing that trips me up the most in my own garden now. It's a big garden. It's easy to look at it and get hung up on all the things that seem to need doing. To the point that I freeze, and end up doing nothing at all.

I know the seeds need planting, the compost needs spreading, the garden needs weeding… but there's much of it to do.

So instead, I end up stuck in bed watching other people do it in an endless scroll of dopamine-inducing short videos.

The only way I've ever found to get around that feeling is to recognise that in the garden, every effort compounds. It doesn't need to be one big project on three long weekends a year.

Ten minutes of weeding is better than no weeding. A six-pack of seedlings in the ground is better than watching my carefully considered heritage seed collection die, or become unviable waiting to go in.

If you feel even the slightest tug to get into the garden, you should go out there and at least look at it. While you're there, pull out a few weeds. Not all of them. Maybe three. And think about what you'd like to harvest from it.

That's it. That's all you need to do to get started.

If you do that twice a week, you'll be surprised at how far it gets you.