Growing in the multiverse

In a million possible worlds, grow vegetables!

Jo Hunter Adams
November 02, 2026

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!

Bye bye car

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
There is a field. I'll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
The world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
Doesn't make any sense.

Rumi

We recently had to say goodbye to our 27-year-old car. I was irrationally sad. It was a source of great pride that we had managed so long with it, especially after my dad was in a bad accident last year. I felt solidarity and connection with people with old cars held together by paperclips, duct tape, and baling twine.

I hope I’m not inevitably going to be a different person now that we have a different car… I read a study that found that luxury car drivers, as a whole, tended to drive more selfishly and aggressively than other drivers. (Lest you were worried, we did not get a luxury car). It made me think about the drivers’ trajectory, and all the small choices that led them to that point. I doubt anyone sets out to become selfish and aggressive. And yet… I will inevitably get used to having aircon, and all the other things, until those become our normal baseline. A car is an object, yet with it we have changed our trajectory a little, and the question is how do we shape our trajectory to remain open and in solidarity?

It feels like the world is barrelling forward on a trajectory with massive unintended consequences, and those consequences are either not known or ignored. We see a simple daily choice, when maybe we should see the direction that a choice moves us towards.

The piano my mom grew up with in Zimbabwe… found its way to Durban where we grew up with it, then to my sister’s, and last week to our Community Container.

The trajectory of our lives is constantly changing, and it’s beautiful that we can never fully predict our impact or the full consequences of our choices, or even if they take us in a good direction.

Growing changes your trajectory

The reason I grow, farm and teach is not fundamentally about sharing competency or skills. This can make this newsletter a little abstract, sorry! I don’t have many growing insights that you couldn’t find elsewhere. I am just practicing and learning.

Growing is about trajectory and practice, and it’s one thing that everyone can do to create a trajectory of connection and smallness. Paying attention to small things, and becoming satisfied with observing and intervening in small things, changes who we are. Most of growing is just a matter of getting smaller and slower.

Simple as it is, it’s quite difficult to do.

We have many pomegranate trees, and we’ve been struggling for pomegranates for years, and finally are seeing more fruit this year.

Why get smaller and slower?

Our farm life seldom feels small nor slow, but it is also seldom abstract. It is human-scaled, with the constant invitation to observe and get quiet. That makes it small and slow, because what is in front of us is what we must attend to. Before farming I had, over many years, grown to value my mind, yet in growing I discovered my mind was my body, and my body was my mind.

When we look at our trajectory, sometimes we look to ideas that are so big and abstract that we get stuck. When we seek a honourable ideal for the whole world, we can end up absurdly off course, because our perspective grows so big that it makes our daily lives invisible The violence of small things is set aside because one is focused on a theoretical grand goal.

When you see life and death in the tiny choices of whether to kill a caterpillar, we realise that we should seldom take grand stances for all time or circumstances. When we see what it takes to make good soil, or strong and happy animals, or kids, or our own days, it’s harder to say what the ideal should be. Usually, our lives occupy the messiness of doing things imperfectly.

If we can make those choices visible, and live into them, then perhaps growing is a route out of hypocrisy, towards knowing and helping one another.

This plum tree gives us hundreds of plums, and crazy amounts of joy, even though I never thought much about plums before planting it.

A million futures

The questions of growing what you’ll eat, or even growing what grows well, are less important than just deciding that you will take some time, every day, to grow. You don’t need to have a clear goal (self-sufficiency in three years!), and perhaps the goal can even be a hindrance. You just have to invest time in the basic work of supplying your body with the things it needs. And then, doing that again and again until you see your environment change.

Our environment is full of baby chameleons and baby tortoises now, and it’s hard to measure the impact or how we got here. It could never have been a goal. But it matters.

You can look back and find your favourite newsletter in the archive, here, or share an article from our blog. You can also buy our ebook on Growing Veg in Cape Town.

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