Being okay with where your garden is at any given moment can be hard as a beginner gardener. There are so many wonderful gardening and homesteading accounts to follow on social media. The problem with this as a beginning gardener is that there is a tendency to compare your garden to theirs. It is important to remember that a lot of these accounts have been gardening for many seasons. When you compare yourself to them you may feel like you don’t know what you are doing or may even want to stop all together. Do not forget that you may be on your first chapter/season of gardening, but you have many more to grow through. Below are a few tips to help you feel more confident in your gardening skills.

• Be Okay With Empty Spaces – If you are trying to grow with succession planting please know that there will be empty spots at times as you wait to sow the next succession in that spot. A lot of gardens on social media show full beds, but not the time between. It will be more noticeable in the beginning of the season. Fear not, because you will eventually get accustomed to the open space and know that it will soon be filled with new fresh plants. 
• Start Small – You may see large garden spaces filled with so much food, flowers and herbs. Please know you do not to start with a large space. In fact I suggest starting small, based on what you think you can actually handle. You can get a surprisingly large amount of harvests from a 4×4 garden with proper planning, succession sowing and amendments. You can always grow a larger garden as you are able to manage more. You don’t want to overwhelm yourself with a garden that it too large. Especially if you are also learning how to preserve the harvest or cook from scratch.
• Grow What You Love – You will enjoy gardening so much more if you are growing food that your family wants to eat. Instead of focusing on what’s popular on social media and growing it for content, grow what you really want to eat. Definitely experiment and try new things, but keep your largest growing area for those things that your family will eat regularly. When you love what you are growing, it makes it easy to keep going when things get tough to you come across challenges.
• Harvest Often – The more you harvest the more you will have to eat from the garden. This not only feeds your family, but gives you the opportunity to grow your cooking and preserving skills.
• Make Mistakes – Don’t be afraid to make mistakes, this is perhaps the best way to learn in the garden! You can learn so much from the mishaps in the garden. It’s an opportunity to ask yourself what happened, what can be improved, changed or done differently for success the next time. Gardeners everywhere, no matter how long they’ve been gardening kill plants. It happens, try to learn as much as you can from it.

It can be hard to feel confident in the garden when you are a beginner. As time goes by your confidence will grow. In time you will learn not to compare yourself to other gardeners who have been doing it a lot longer because your experience will have grown. Being comfortable with your skills in the garden comes with time and hands on experience, it really is the best wya. Remember to start small with a garden size that you can easily manage, you can always for bigger in the future as space allows. Focus on growing what your family loves to eat, do this by breaking down recipes into their ingredients and grow what works for you and your season. Don’t be afraid to make mistakes and kill plants, this can be the biggest teacher in the garden. Experiment, have fun and give yourself grace. Soon you will be the one teaching others how to garden!