My neighbors and I are having trouble with our gardens. We put out seedlings — chard, beans, artichoke, lettuce — and something swooped down or crawled up during the night and stripped many of the new plants clean. The garden guy at the nursery said it could be anything — slugs, birds, even rodents. We’ve put out iron phosphate and pepper tablets and may have to go to netting soon.
My neighbors were a little upset. After all, we spent some money on the plants. I should have been more upset, too, but I wasn’t. My neighbors are new to gardening whereas I’ve got a little experience and know something they don’t: the biggest danger to my garden isn’t all the insects, birds, or furry little animals in the world. It’s me.
Perhaps you’ve had this experience, too: you build your garden box, tack on the chicken wire (to keep out the gophers), and fill the box with dirt and compost. You drop the seeds in the ground, de-pot the seedlings, and build your bean trellis. All goes well for a while. You’re watering, weeding, plants are growing; you take in your first harvest and then another.
And then one day, life takes over. You get busy, forget to water, much less weed. Days and weeks go by. When you return to your garden, the scene is devastating: drooping, brown leaves, withered vines, vegetables rotting on the ground. It’s an embarrassing, yes shameful state of affairs.
Investment portfolios aren’t much different than gardens. They require regular tending, too, even when life gets busy. And the biggest threats aren’t external; they’re the slow accumulation of small acts of neglect year after year that leave the portfolios dry, withered and small compared to what they could have been with proper weeding and watering, month after month, year after year, and across the decades.
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