Spend time every day

One of my permaculture teachers, Morag Gamble, has a wonderful tip for increasing how much you eat from – and generally benefit from – your garden: spend time in it every day.

This doesn’t mean you have to work in it every day. Just spend time.

I believe she’s advocating for connection, and for using whatever your garden is offering to you that day – baby carrots that you notice could be thinned, herb leaves for your morning cuppa, five minutes to sit and reflect, or just a place to be and do nothing – a highly rewarding activity.

In a children in permaculture course I did a while back, the daily homework was to do a ‘sit spot’. A sit spot is place in our garden or outdoors somewhere where we sit without any intention of achieving anything. We were taught that twenty minutes or longer was ideal, as this allows native creatures to resettle after the disturbance you cause as you arrive.

There’s lots of beautiful articles online – probably written by people without young children – describing the magic created by repeating your sit spot daily and in complete stillness and silence. In some ways it becomes like a meditation. They advocate taking in information from all your senses – your eyes, of course, but also your ears, your skin, and your sense of smell and taste. If you have a sixth sense – such as intuition – you can let that play its role also. Rather than the quality of the spot, it’s about the quality of your attention.

Those romantic articles discuss how a sit spot supports well-being, connect us with beauty and our innate belonging in nature, and creates space for noticing our thoughts and feelings. It also deepens our knowledge of the land, or our garden, and what it needs and how best to interact with it. In fact, the sit spot (coined by Jon Young in this book) is a great opportunity to practice the first permaculture principle, one of my favourites, ‘Observe and interact’.

In the wise words of Charlie Mgee in his song about this principle, called ‘Look Around’:

All you have to do is stop
And take a look around
Before you intervene
Don't do anything
Come to all your senses
They'll tell you everything

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My goal to follow Morag’s advice to ‘spend time in your garden everyday’ this Djilba season has been challenging. In part this is because of the amount of sickness we’ve had in our household. I’ve noticed a tendency when it’s raining and cold, and especially when we’re all sick – and getting meals onto the table, clothes washed, and self and children cared for feels like all I can manage – we retreat into the house. We forget to get outside every day, and to be in our garden.

In response to this realisation, I invented ‘rug gardening’. This isn’t a sit spot. I’m not silent or totally still, and I am doing, but not much. Rug gardening is whatever gardening I can do while sitting (ideally in the Djilba sun) with a rug over my knees.

It’s just some gentle weeding, mostly. It isn’t about making progress or getting something done. It’s just remembering, inspired by another permaculture principle, that I can start ‘small and slow’, especially when recuperating from sickness. And it reminds me of what I’m often reminding my clients when we talk about how to make gardening rewarding and feel achievable – lowering our expectations.

It may sound odd coming from a gardening professional, but many people who garden regularly will admit that if you’re always focusing on the outcome of gardening, or wanting things to feel ‘done’, you’ll generally be disappointed or frustrated. It’s the process, and the feeling you gain while gardening, that’s most important. And I would add, especially if you’re also parenting.

I feel like I’m always parenting. I love parenting, and because I’m the default parent (credit Anna Cusack) it dominates my life. So making my personal gardening and my parenting work together is critical. I sometimes liken them – the children – to those wild animals mentioned in the sit spot articles. They need some time to settle – especially after a day at school – and sometimes they can hardly believe that I’m not racing around doing endless tasks, and that they can play and return to me as they need, knowing I’m not moving far from this spot in the sun, pulling a few weeds with a rug over my knees.

Given how sensitive our attunement to our children can be, and theirs to us, as our nervous system settles, theirs is more likely to settle. I acknowledge this can be difficult – it often feels like there’s always another task to complete to keep heads above water.

I’m reminded of the circle of security I studied as a new parent, learning how our children need us to be a secure base from which to explore the world. And how rarely many of us are actually able to be a secure base that stays in one spot for more than a few minutes so they can come and go from us, or see us from their own sit spot, knowing where we’ll be each time they need us.

Young children naturally find sit spots from which to get to know their world. And I would hazard a guess that this is particularly the case for highly sensitive children. Highly sensitive children have a stronger ‘pause-to-check’ system, as Elaine Aron calls it (author of books including The Highly Sensitive Person and The Highly Sensitive Child) when she discusses the brain system that causes sensitive individuals to pause and carefully assess a new or changing situation before acting. Wouldn’t a familiar natural spot provide a calming setting from which to feel safe while observing new or changing situations?

At the moment, my other somewhat corrupted but achievable version of a sit spot is an outdoor seat where I eat a few meals each week, looking out into the garden and the trees beyond. My big achievement has been covering it, so I’ve been eating out there during Makuru and Djilba rains, loving the sound of the water falling, and the ways the trees move in the storms.

If you’re going to give a sit spot a try, and especially if you’re a busy parent of young children, I suggest starting small and making it achievable. Don’t try sitting at the bottom of your garden (where you might stress about not hearing the kids wake up) or needing to walk too far from home. Maybe just try the backstep. Or your patio near the bird bath. Maybe your experience won’t be as profound as those able to practice it daily, and in complete stillness and silence, but your nervous system will benefit anyway, as will your connection with your garden. And who knows where it might lead.

You know another good place to spend time every day? Your own body. Gardening done mindfully is a great way to connect to your body. And at each Mother Nature Circle, I run a short grounding practice which helps us to settle into our bodies. It’s not complicated. It’s just like one achievable step in the sit spot process – ‘arrive and allow’.