Cleaning a Garden

I am terrible about cleaning up gardens.

I struggle with the idea of removing plants before they have completely died.  It is as if I feel this psychic connection with the plants in my garden.  They have survived the initial planting.  They have survived the rains of summer and the crazy  heat.  And so I hold on to them until the very last, dry leaf falls to the ground or it gets far past the season.

In point of fact, gardens are to be managed just like any other resource, especially if you want to get the most benefit out of them. True gardeners are regularly swapping plants in and out as soon as they have completed their prime production season or if they are simply not working out  in terms of production.  When the garden is a matter of survival, it significantly changes the view of it and how it should be managed.  It is no longer a hobby but something which needs to be carefully monitored and the waste removed from the system.

And then in a moment of shock, I realized that my life is no different.

I tend to keep things - hobbies, relationships, even just simply things - long past the date of their usefulness.  They integrate themselves into my life of course, and then they feel like they have always been there and need to be there - in fact, to remove them sometimes feels like a betrayal.  But the reality, much like my garden, it that they simply do not serve the purpose they were originally brought in for.  In fact, they may become so overgrown that they bury the opportunity for anything new to take bloom as they choke out the attention and resources that could be deployed to them.

I am better than I was, of course.  I am more likely than not to remove things, possibly before the end of the season.  But I have yet to truly reach the point where I am viewing it as a battlefield and my plants as soldiers, needing deployment (and perhaps removal) to help my reach my ultimate tactical goal.

Would that I could bring the same level of management to other parts of my life.