The people at Lost Creek Farm were back on the news a few days ago, talking about the success of the cleanup party. David Desmond, the owner, said something that really struck me—basically, that he didn’t regret a thing about the way the storm turned out, because he learned a lot from the experience about farming and community. I think that is an important lesson to all gardeners, regardless of how big your farm is. How do we learn from our experiences and turn them into positives?

Although not as drastic, I have some recent examples of this from my own experiences:

We had a week of heat, and my broccoli bolted.

Most gardening handbooks talk about flowering as the end-all of your crop, so I feared the worst when some very nice weather brought out the flowers in my nearly-finished broccoli. I ran out to clip a few of the heads as soon as I noticed, but some had already begun to flower. What I learned is that although some of the stems got a bit tough on the flowered heads, the flowers themselves were pretty delicious and looked very pretty in a nice summer salad. By clipping the main heads, I also gave some secondary heads (smaller but greater in number) the time to develop in the following (cooler) week, which turned out to be some of the most delicious and tender broccoli I have ever had. And a head of flowering broccoli not only looks beautiful, it brings many beneficial insects to my garden. Who wouldn’t want a bright display of edible flowers like this in their garden?

Those pretty butterflies are destroying my plants.

A few days ago, I found a little white caterpillar in my green beans, nibbling on the leaves. Curious to know what it was, I looked it up online and discovered those pretty white butterflies I love are actually Cabbage Butterflies, and their caterpillars are eating my vegetables. I thought about it for a while, and decided that I like the butterflies more than I care about them nibbling a few leaves off my green beans and broccoli. So I put the little guy back. The thing is, people are so quick to eradicate and spray off every single thing in their garden. But doesn’t it feel better to just let it go a bit and see what happens before you turn to mass extinction? You can see it sitting on a broccoli leaf in the top picture below, and flying between the strawberries and the brussels sprouts in the bottom one.

Plants will survive things that would surprise you.

I bought a bunch of plants for a variety of projects around my house because I was looking for specific hard to find things. When the projects were a bit delayed, I had to figure out what to do with the plants. I am actually surprised at how they have survived hot days in little plastic pots, dry weather, heavy rain, living in a temporary dirt pile, and getting moved around. I would have never done the things I have done with them if I hadn’t needed to, and it taught me a lot about planting, repotting, pruning and watering. Although it hasn’t been without casualties—here are my poor clematis vines after a hard prune because their tops dried up:

I am hoping that my experience in bringing them back to life will provide me with heartier plants and a better understanding of growing the vines in general. I think this is all an important reminder that life, like gardening, is not on a pass/fail system—it is all just one big experiment and the important part is what you learn along the way.