Making the transition from gardener to farmer, even on a scale as small as mine, is quite a dramatic shift. While the goal is still to grow beautiful things, there is the added factor of producing things in volume, and in a way that results in a never ending supply so that there is always a product ready to go to a consumer.

After all, when you are farming, you’re hoping and planning to make some amount of money, at the very least enough to cover expenses, not to mention making a living that would support a family, as much bigger operations do. If you invest the money, time, effort, and resources to plant a particular crop, you really do want and need it to produce and be worth the square footage it occupies.

So you arm yourself with as much knowledge as you can gather about the plants you grow, their specific wants and needs in terms of light, water, spacing, fertilizer, optimal stage for harvest, conditioning, and what plagues may assail them so that you can be on the lookout and take appropriate action as soon as trouble is detected. Ideally, trouble never develops.

Inevitably, though, one morning you visit your growing beds and find that despite your best efforts, trouble is brewing. You find your yarrow that is all in bud infested with aphids,

the dahlia you were counting on toppled by cutworms,

and your sweet peas that were just coming into bloom mown down by a woodchuck.

Certain rough words are spoken with increasing intensity with each successive unwelcome discovery. Hey, I’m human.

In the face of such discouragement, I have learned that I have a tendency, if I don’t stay alert, to zero in on what’s going wrong, rather than giving equal attention to what’s going right. So after making all these unpleasant discoveries this morning, I felt my feelings for a while and contemplated throwing in the towel on this whole farming thing. But then I turned and looked over the garden as a whole, and this is what I saw:

A gorgeous swath of orlaya grandiflora and towering peach foxgloves in bloom. I was reminded of yin and yang, light and dark, up and down, things going well and not so well, and of balance.

Yes, there are crop failures, but also crop successes. If I let the challenges defeat me, I lose out on the beauty of the successes. And to give equal attention to the successes sustains and enables me to address the challenges and live in hope.

In hope I will continue to praise the lady bugs for their voracious gobbling of the aphids, and help them out a little in their work with a blast of soapy water.

I will accept that I will have losses in one dahlia bed this year and give thanks for the other 2 dahlia beds I have that have no sign of cutworms. And I will thank my husband for baiting the hav a hart trap with delicious melon that, if we’re lucky, will prove more enticing to the woodchuck than the sweet peas. And I will do my best to keep things in perspective, giving the things that go well at least as much attention as the things that don’t.

Balance.