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.

In other news, I also had the back step fixed, and I took it out of the concrete molds myself this morning. The original step was this broken down, narrow brick thing which was an accident waiting to happen until it actually did. A busted knee, ankle and hand later, I decided it had to go sooner rather than later. Here is the original brick step

and here is the new step, which is made from concrete that I exposed the aggregate on.

It was actually a lot easier than I thought, and it was done without any of that special chemical used to keep the top from setting … basically just a brush and a bit of water, watched carefully over a day or so. The exposed aggregate basically matches the concrete used on the rest of the patio, and will be the same treatment the side of the house will be getting when the new step is poured to replace out the rotten deck we removed. I used a larger brush on the overall surface, and (funny enough) a little nail brush on the top part to get under the sill. I redid the treatment 3-4 times over the course of a day and a half, after waiting for the initial set period, until it was a look I liked. On the last time, I also brushed the sides (once the frame was removed) and scrubbed some of the extra off the bottom. I still need to clean it up a bit more, but I really like it! I think the trick is to not use a heavy hand on it—you can always go back and do more, but you can’t replace that which you have scrubbed too hard on! So I poured a bit of water on it and lightly brushed the surface until I was happy with what I had.