It's not mystery or even laziness that stops people like myself, it's the consequences of screwing up. I'm happy to explore the mystery if I can afford those consequences.
I've found this does indeed stop a lot of people. Either they are afraid they will damage something or they will "look stupid." A number of studies have pointed out that kids who just take failure as an intermediate step for success continue, and those for whom failure has been programmed as a deeply "bad" thing, either stop when things get rough or never start.
It is important to learn how self limiting this can be. Don't be afraid of screwing up, look forward to it. Look forward to learning something new and getting a better internal understanding of the world around you. Your parents/friends/spouse/etc will still love you.
Fear of failure is not always about things that other people understand.
Anxiety and fear are powerful emotions and they can have severe impact on behaviour.
Some children do not ask for help feom teachers because they fear looking dumb, even though a teacher's role is to take questions and provide help.
Some schools recognise this fear of failure is paralysing for some people and they run programmes to overcome it. Here's an example of a good girl's school in England that runs a failure week. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-16879336
The fears involved in a vegetable patch might be:
+ I never complete projects and this is going to be another one of those
+ I don't know what I am doing and I am going to waste time and money
+ I don't know what I am doing and people will mock me
...and so on. These fears are real, but can be overcome with reasonably simple techniques.
Those techniques include saying "it's just a vegetable patch; you can't screw it up", but probably using slightly different wording.
If you read between the lines, the article isn't about how anyone can build a vegetable patch, it's about how anyone can build (or do) anything, if they can just figure out that it's possible.
Anyone should be capable of adjusting that mentally to cover what they can and can't realistically do themselves once they stop and think about it a little bit.
