Another installment from Anneli Carter-Sundqvist’s collection of blog entries, A Homesteader’s Year on Deer Isle.

There are as many books on gardening as anyone could ever want; still, I have yet to read one on how to deal with a gardener’s weak nerves.

There’s no hiding it anymore—I’m a nervous-souled gardener. Some days I even find myself wishing, in secrecy, that the whole season would be over so I would know that everything went all right.

The spring is so full of promise—promise of sun-ripe tomatoes, juicy strawberries, wonderful flower arrangements and sweet, sweet carrots. But so many obstacles lie between now and then—only when the harvest is secure in our cellar, in jars, boxes and on shelves will I know I outsmarted the slugs, kept ahead of the weeds and timed my actions with the sun, the rain and the frosts.

Do I take it too seriously? Oh yes, but I believe I have reasons to. Our garden grows our food for the whole year. The monetary value of the produce is hard to estimate, and it’s even harder to see that we would happily go to work outside our farm to make that money. Our economy, and therefore our life here, is closely tied to a successful garden.

My lack of experience definitely is a key factor in my fretting. A while back I planted hundreds of feet of carrots and it took almost a month for them to sprout. I went from hope to despair and back to hope again. Could it really be that all the seeds were bad? Was April too cold? Was it too dry, or had I planted the seeds too deep or fried them in my generous doling out of compost? Anyone with more than a few years of doing this would know to wait patiently and it would be all right.

My high ambitions might be what keep me going—I want every garden year to be the best across the whole range of crops—and that desire certainly keeps me on my feet.

Sometimes, people say things like, “Oh my God, look at your Brussels sprouts!” and I’m thinking, “Of course they look like that since I spent a full day hauling manure and turning it in, another day spreading seaweed, several mornings of being up at 4.30 a.m. picking slugs and at least three nights awake wondering when to cut the tops.”

There are so many decisions to make—when to start the tomato seeds, how many plants to grow, when to plant them outside and where to put them. And why do they have those wrinkled leaves, don’t they seem a bit yellow, what if it doesn’t rain at all in July and did we really have a cold enough winter to kill off the bugs? The thoughts are rolling over and over in my mind.

I think of my old neighbor at our summer house in Sweden, the only farmer left in the village. How he walked the fields just as generations before him walked the fields, looking at the sky and the hay drying on the racks. Isn’t that what they say? That for a farmer it’s always too warm or too cold, too wet or too dry?

But maybe at the end of the day I am just a person with weak nerves doing something that depends on so many unknown factors—the weather, the bug population, the quality of the seeds and some plain ol’ luck. Perhaps I can settle one day: I will have the experience, be better at managing my undertakings and I might even have grown stronger nerves. Perhaps I will have to eat fewer carrots some years but I still might get as many beets. I know the garden can be wonderful even with half the ambition, none of the worries and all of the sleep. I just need to learn how to cultivate that. 

To purchase A Homesteader’s Year on Deer Isle and learn more about the hostel Carter-Sundqvist runs with her husband, visit www.deerislehostel.com.