This month’s post was supposed to be about GRI 13.5 Soil health. But as you might have gathered from the title, it isn’t.

There’s a couple of reasons for this. Firstly, because I haven’t had the results back from the RHS Soil Analysis Service, and it seems a bit daft to write about soil health without that information. And secondly, because recent experience on the allotment has prompted me to think about something else instead: failure. Or rather responding to failure, which is something I have not, historically, been particularly good at. It’s tempting to turn this into a humble-brag along the lines of “Well, I very rarely fail at anything, so I never really learned to deal with it”, but that’s not true. It’s more that I’ve never been very good at managing failure. But these days, I’m trying to be more positive and proactive when I fail at something or when some plan just doesn’t come together. My ‘standard’ knee-jerk reaction comes, I think, from an unrealistic perfectionism – the desire to get something right, no matter the cost in time or effort. This does come in useful in some situations, like when I’m working on a translation, but it’s also a drive that I’m trying to expel from the parts of my life that are supposed to be relaxing.

And the catastrophe that has triggered this worth spiral of thoughts? My onion seedlings died.

At least I think they did, rather than being dug up by a bird or similar. There’s no sign of the soil being disturbed, but the 80+ little green seedlings that I had carefully spaced out and tucked into their new beds have simply vanished. Now, I have a feeling that your reaction to this will depend on whether you would describe yourself as a fellow gardener or not. If you’re not someone who regularly raises plants from seed, you might be thinking “So what? You can buy onions in the supermarket”, and you’re not wrong, as such. But if you’re someone who has that experience of sowing seeds, nurturing them through the fiddly early stages, then carefully pricking them out and growing them on before planting them out at just the right moment, you’ll probably have a bit more sympathy for the deep frustration of losing them. And worse the ‘what if I had done XYZ?’ that sometimes comes with it.

The shallot seedlings went the same way. I always knew that growing onions and shallots from seed was the more fiddly option, requiring much more care than using sets. On reflection, perhaps the amount of time (and polytunnel space) I can currently commit to growing using this method just makes it unfeasible. I wanted to try it because it’s significantly cheaper to buy one pack of 500 seeds than multiple packets of 15-30 sets, and also because it always seemed odd to outsource the first part of the process. The practical upshot is that I’m left with three empty beds at a time of the year when it’s really too late to start again, at least with the same method. Because that’s what you’re told when you’re growing up – if at first you don’t succeed, try, try, and try again. And that’s not generally bad advice, but I think maybe we overemphasise the importance of persistence over flexibility. There’s a limit to how many times you can try to do the same thing over and over before it just becomes an exercise in futility. Of course, you could argue that one year is not exactly trying ‘over and over’, but I see no reason that the next year would be any different – I don’t imagine I’ll be able to magic up a few extra hours in the week by then. So that’s my first tip:

Ask whether you really need to do the thing you’ve failed at.

Can you outsource part of the process, in this case by buying in onion sets? Are you letting your pride (or perhaps the sunk costs fallacy) bind you into putting more time and effort into a project that is never going to work out the way you want it to?

Or can you simplify? Do I really need to grow onions? I ask this question because shallot sets are, in many ways, a better investment than onion sets. An onion set is an immature bulb – you could eat it, but there’s not an awful lot of flesh, so you put it in the ground and wait for it to get bigger, a process that doesn’t normally require a lot of intervention. But one set will only ever produce one bulb. You can leave it to go to seed and then start the whole two-year process all over again. Or you just eat it, and end up buying new sets next year, which is where the cost comes in. The same is not true of shallots – a shallot set is normally about as big as it will ever get, so when you plant it in the ground, you don’t get a bigger shallot, you find that one shallot set turns into a cluster of harvestable shallots. The beauty of this is that you can, theoretically, keep shallots from one year to the next, using one shallot from the previous year as the seed/set for the next year (with all the caveats about carrying diseases over, of course). If you’ve ever grown garlic from an individual clove, it’s the same principle. This makes shallot sets a better investment than onion sets, at least in theory. And I suspect that in most recipes, you can swap onions for shallots without any problems, so I think this will be how I adjust my tactic going forward. But is this a step I can take this year? Or do I have to wait? Well, that’s where my second tip comes in:

Don’t rush to fill the gap left by a failed project.

In this case, it’s very much a literal gap in the form of the empty beds I mentioned earlier. This feels like a particularly glaring failure because we all know how much nature hates a vacuum – something needs to be done with that space before the weeds (or worse, grass…) come to fill it. But failing at something you think you’re good at comes with a cost to your pride as well, particularly if you’re surrounded by people doing the same thing with more success, like on an allotment plot. So it prompts a desire to ‘fix’ the problem as quickly as possible, ideally before anyone notices. Don’t get me wrong, the ability to respond flexibly to failure is important, but the alternative solution has to be guided by reflection, not stubbornness.

Because of course, those kind of knee-jerk reactions are rarely the most effective option. If something hasn’t worked out, ploughing more resources into an ill-thought-out solution will normally only result in further failure and compounded frustration. In this case, my pride in my ability to raise challenging plants from seed was wounded, but the answer is not to just do it all over again, especially when there’s a simpler alternative available. I think this reaction also has roots in a desire to ‘cover up’ the failure, including to ourselves in a sort of out-of-sight-out-of-mind way. We want to sweep it away as soon as possible, rather than sitting with and learning from the failure. We might even be tempted to make some sort of grand sweeping change, which brings me to my third and final tip:

Start with the minimal (incremental) change to your process.

This is where I have to confess to another failure this year: brassicas (cabbages, cauliflowers, broccoli etc.). There were two challenges here: firstly, the weather. My allotment is in the middle of my site, which is good, in that it means my plants get plenty of sunlight without any major shade from nearby plots. But it’s also bad in that there aren’t really any windbreaks or shelter, so everything gets buffeted during high winds – as I found to my detriment, when a particularly windy night caused an entire set of shelves in the tunnel to blow over, despite being indoors (the wind always hits the short edge particularly hard). All of my brassicas seedlings were knocked all over the floor of the polytunnel, some snapped immediately, and the others were irrecoverable by the time I managed to get down there to tidy up. So I had to re-sow. Fortunately it was quite early on in the year, and I made up the lost time.

Then came problem 2: slugageddon. This spring was really the perfect weather for slugs. The consistent and heavy rain meant that it wasn’t possible to stay on top of the grass and other waterlogged patches where slugs breed. And of course, they love tender young plants, like the second batch in my polytunnel, and oh my, did they feast. The brassicas weren’t alone here - they also stripped my climbing French beans down to the ground as well (that will teach me for trying to sow early). Slugs are, of course, a perennial problem on the plot, and I’m not sure if there is a great deal I can do about them. Certainly I don’t plan to start using slug pellets or anything like that. But I have two potential minimal changes that might make a difference. The first is rearranging the polytunnel slightly, so that the shelves are in the centre rather than against the side. I also plan to cover up all of the soil in the polytunnel. I left part of it exposed so I could plant tomatoes into the ground, but actually, most of the year that just means more weeds to stay on top of. Hopefully these two minor changes will discourage slugs (and also ants,) from braving the open ground between the outside of the tunnel and the plant feast in the centre.

My second option is to try out a new sowing method known variously as seed rolls, seed snails or germination roll-ups, which is essentially a low- or no-soil germination method. You simply lay out a few sheets of kitchen towel, dampen them, lay the seeds out on the long edge edge, then roll the whole thing up like a snail. The seeds then essentially germinate hydroponically. As they get bigger, you can transplant them into rolls made out of more durable material like horticultural fleece and include a layer of soil as well, for the seeds to grow into. The idea is not so much that this method is more effective than sowing into soil, but that it saves space. And for my purposes, the fact that it saves space means the seed can be kept indoors until they are bigger and less appetising to slugs and snails.

These sound like very complicated changes, but they’re actually fairly minimal in terms of time and effort, and will, I think, deliver at least as much benefit as completely overhauling my entire growing scheme or introducing external inputs that I’ve always resisted, like pesticides. And more to the point, they are changes that I might not have identified if I had done my normal thing of just charging ahead with an alternative grand plan.

Of course, keeping these things in mind is harder when the stakes are higher.

As I said, growing things is supposed to be relaxing for me, and it’s not like I am not going to starve if my crops fail. This means that I can afford to pause, reflect and tinker in these areas. Does the same apply when it comes to more important projects, like my business? Maybe. Maybe not. But I hope that following these approaches in areas where the stakes are low will lead ultimately to developing habits that become ingrained in higher-stakes situations. That’s the theory at least.