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Growing Mondays: A year of growth
We become great growers through practice.
Jo Hunter Adams
December 30, 2024
Hi! I'm Jo, writing from Heart & Soil homestead, a 1-acre homestead in the Far South of Cape Town, South Africa. Every week I share inspiration and education for your growing journey. Thanks so much for reading!
Welcome to Growing Mondays, where I share ideas to help you grow edible and medicinal plants.
It was the strangest thing, how happiness came out of nowhere and inflated your soul.
I was finally patient enough to wait for the spanspek to be ripe, and now we can have one every day with dinner. Together with plums and cherries we froze from our annual Klondyke visit.
Here’s to a year of growth
Thanks so much for your presence through this year of growth.
In 2025, I know we’ll keep growing and learning together.
For the first time, we grew more than enough of some key staple foods, including carrots, tomatoes, cabbage, squash, peppers, peas, onions, spinach, strawberries and beetroot, and grew many more heirlooms than we have previously. I felt moments of real abundance: how could I possibly need more than what we already have.
In a famous experiment, described by James Clear in Atomic Habits, students in a photography class were split into two groups. Some were told they’d be graded based on the quantity of photos they produced. The others would be graded on the quality of just one photo. All the best photos came from the students producing quantity. Whereas the quality group was agonising over one perfect photo, the other group was just practicing taking photos.
The findings suggest that we focus on quantity, and quality will emerge through practice.
Extrapolating to gardening, this doesn’t mean we should stuff millions of vegetables into one tiny bed. What it does mean, I think, is that we become great growers through practice.
It’s ok to fail, and it’s ok to grow terrible veg. I’ve been there. If you keep focusing on the basics: soil, water, sunlight, you’ll keep improving.
And remember to keep harvesting and eating what you grow. Vegetables are useless if they’re not eaten. Small incremental changes in our diets, multiplied over hundreds of weeks, change our bodies, our communities, and then perhaps even the world.
Here’s to 2025 and growing our world together.
Giant cauliflower, little spanspek
2025 workshops: Vegetable gardening, homesteading, changing food systems.
I’ll announce the dates for 2025 workshops this Friday! Here’s what to expect:
1. Monthly veg growing workshops, where you can just join me in whatever I’m already doing that month, so that you get some support and a chance to ask questions every month. I hope this is going to work well for many of you, and also build a community of growers.
2. Homesteading skills workshops, including kimchi making, cheesemaking, creating a food forest, and growing medicinal plants.
3. Leveraging food systems change. Think global and act local. If you’re in an academic institution or group, be in touch. We’d love to host discussions that focus on changing our food environments for the better.
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