Garden Diary No. 4 | June

A month of bugs, blooms, and coming back to myself

Jun 29, 2026

A tiny yellow bird with black markings on its wings landed on one of last year’s dead sunflower stalks outside the kitchen window. It pulled Fransisca out of another thought loop, wondering whether she had what it took to be a good writer or if she had simply been getting in her own way.

The stalks had gone from flowers to Halloween decorations, or in her house just decorations. The little finch pecked at the dried sunflower head, searching for seeds that were no longer there. Ironically enough, it was probably the same little finch that ate all the seeds last year.

It’s okay, little one. I forget all I’ve done from time to time too.

She wanted to tell it to fly into the garden instead.

There are zinnias blooming back there. One of your favorites last year.

But instead, she stood there in silence, scrubbing the same spot on the spoon long after it was clean, watching the little bird. A squirrel wandered a little too close, and within seconds the finch disappeared into the perfectly blue sky.

Envy quietly settled in her chest.

She wondered what it would be like to be that free. Free to roam other people’s gardens. To travel wherever the wind carried you. To soar beneath a perfectly blue sky where even the clouds looked hand-painted.

Maybe freedom wasn’t about where she could go.

Maybe it was about finally quieting the thoughts that convinced her she couldn’t.

June is by far my favorite month in the garden. Every day after work, I walk through it excited to see all the new growth. The garden is lush, buds are starting to swell, and some plants are already in full bloom.

My daily garden walks are one of the ways I ground myself. I will admit, I’ve felt far away from myself lately. Stuck in thought loops that drain my energy and slowly tuck away parts of myself I’ve worked so hard to uncover over the past couple years. Every time I sat down to write, nothing came out. Or worse, I forced something onto the page that didn’t feel like me.

But every time I stepped into the garden, I heard her say, Breathe. I’m still here. Put the phone away and just be with the plants. Focus on their beauty. Keep looking for the beauty in life. It will bring you back to me.

So by mid-June, I finally listened. I put my phone down and took a break from it all. The writing. The posting. Social media. I let myself be bored for once.

I spent time in the garden, and yes, I will admit I still took a gazillion pictures with my phone. But I stopped thinking that everything had to be turned into content and let myself simply experience the magic of the garden.

Once I slowed down and was truly present, my head was on a constant swivel as the entire garden seemed to sparkle, calling for my attention. The zinnias are starting to bloom, each new layer of petals unfurling day after day. The volunteer sunflowers somehow grew so quickly they are already taller than me.

As the dahlia buds continue to swell, I find myself guessing what their blooms will look like and welcoming the surprise of them. Always gorgeous, of course.

Then there is the volunteer black-eyed susan that is very clearly the baby of a Prairie Sun and Cherry Brandy variety from last year’s garden. Its petals are a deep burgundy red near the center, fading into fiery orange gold tips. I’m so glad I didn’t pull them out in April.

The snapdragons have been blooming nonstop all month. They were the stars of the garden in June. I’ve been able to cut enough flowers to fill four or five vases and enjoy their beauty indoors.

I even saw a bee napping in a flower. A tiny reminder that my garden is providing a safe and welcoming place for pollinators.

It’s funny. We spend so much time looking for the next thing, focusing on the past, or worrying about things we cannot change that we miss what is right in front of us. The garden doesn’t ask me to be productive. It doesn’t care about algorithms, subscriber counts, or engagement. It just asks me to show up.

And while a lot of the meticulous work was wrapped up in May, I still had plenty to do in June. Watering is a must and can take me a good forty five minutes to get through the garden, the plants around the yard, and the front yard garden. We had a pretty wet June, though, so Mother Nature handled about 80% of the watering for me, which is actually better for the garden. My babies got the good stuff.

But a lot of rain and heat can also mean two things: weeds and the bugs from hell rise.

Bugs are part of gardening. There is no way around it. It’s a package deal. My tolerance for them has improved drastically over the years, but there are still some that make my skin crawl.

I’ve gone to war with them in the past, and they still haunt my nightmares. They take up so much space in my head that they even made it into my novel.

And those bugs are earwigs. 🤢

Let’s go back about two years to when I was a gardening noob and had no idea what I was doing. Armando, my husband, spent the spring building the garden enclosure. I was ecstatic about my first big gardening season. Everything was grown from seed, the plants were thriving, and I faithfully sprayed pesticides so the bad bugs wouldn’t destroy them.

Things were peachy until about mid-June.

One morning, I walked into the garden and found several of my zinnias completely decimated. Their leaves were gone, leaving behind nothing but skeletonized stems. I was devastated but had no idea what had done it because there wasn’t a bug in sight.

A quick Google search pointed to earwigs, but in order to know for sure, I’d have to come out at night because those fuckers are nocturnal.

That night, Armando and I ventured into the garden armed with nothing but our phone flashlights. I swear to you, the raised beds full of zinnias and dahlias were covered in earwigs. Not just a few here and there. Thousands. It looked like someone had smeared a thick layer of dark reddish-brown moving goo over the plants. Their long, segmented bodies squeezed into every crevice, and they scattered in every direction the second the light hit them.

We started spraying them with soapy water and dumping diatomaceous earth everywhere. It looked like a bag of powdered sugar had exploded over the garden. We even setup soy sauce and oil traps. No matter what I tried, I couldn’t completely get rid of them.

But they didn’t stay in the garden. They tucked themselves deep inside the petals, waiting for me. Every time I cut flowers to bring into the house, one would eventually tumble onto the counter... or worse, onto me. Eventually, I started putting organza bags over every flower bud because otherwise I wasn’t sure I’d ever see a bloom.

After extensive research, I realized what I had done wrong. I disrupted the balance of my garden’s ecosystem. When I sprayed harmful pesticides, I didn’t just kill the pests. I killed the beneficial insects too. And without their natural predators to keep them in check, insects like earwigs came back with a vengeance.

Gardening Tip #1: Do not spray pesticides in your garden that are full of harmful chemicals. Instead, put native plants that will attract beneficial bugs into the garden. They will help keep pests in check. If all else fails, use organic pesticides like Neem oil and Sluggo Plus with caution.

Last gardening season was the first year I completely stopped using harmful pesticides.

And guess what? Everything balanced itself out.

Are there still earwigs? Unfortunately.

Do some leaves get chewed up? Yep.

But it’s not nearly as bad as the years before. In fact, I started noticing more ladybugs, praying mantises, and other beneficial insects doing exactly what they were supposed to do. Even earwigs have their place. While they nibble on flowers from time to time, they also feed on aphids and other pests. They’re all part of the same ecosystem.

Sometimes the best thing I can do for my garden is step back, interfere a little less, and trust that balance will find its way.

Now, weeds are a different story. Since I don’t spray herbicides in my garden or around my house, I spent a good portion of the month pulling them by hand.

Garden Tip #2: Remove weeds regularly from raised beds and containers. Weeds compete with your plants for water, nutrients, and space, so keeping them under control will help your plants thrive. That said, I don’t stress about every single weed. A weed is just a plant in the wrong place, and I’ve learned to pick my battles. The raised beds get my attention. The rest of the yard enters a bit of a survival-of-the-fittest situation by mid-summer. May the odds be ever in their favor.

I will say, we do let the weeds in our front lawn grow and flower. Pollinators need them, especially in the spring when most gardens aren’t blooming yet. One of my favorite sights is seeing bees and birds enjoying the dandelions. I’m learning that not every weed is an enemy.

The weeds we should actually fear don’t grow in the grass. They are the ones that take root in our minds, quietly draining our peace. The looping negative thoughts and doubts. Toxic people who latch onto you and steal your energy. Anxieties that spread through your mind like invasive vines, filling your head with worst-case scenarios until they crowd out joy and everything feels muted instead of vibrant and full of color.

I’m learning that pulling weeds from my mind is hard and takes time. I’m still working through it, and just like gardening, it will probably always be something I have to do. Sometimes that means setting boundaries with people who drain me, even if that means removing them from my life completely. Sometimes it means putting my phone down. Sometimes it means asking myself hard questions and being honest about the answers.

Like, do I really need a break... or is this self-sabotage?

But I’ve also learned that the best way to keep the weeds from taking over isn’t to focus on them all the time. It’s to plant more of what I want to grow.

More creativity. More writing. More time in nature. More laughter. More joy. More things that make me feel like myself. More actually living life.

Until next month,

Christina