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Growing Mondays: a great collective
We inch forward together
Jo Hunter Adams
November 03, 2025
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 talk about growing- vegetables, fruits, animals and, well, people. This week I talk about our growing efforts as a collective. We are potential heirloom growers helping to normalise and reproduce genetic material that would die out without us. This makes our efforts sacred.
We have hundreds of rare and not rare frogs reproducing on our farm.
The more people grow, the easier it is for the next person.
By learning what not to do, you make it easier for the next person. By buying seeds from a rare seed producer, and then growing them out and sharing them, you make it easier for the next person.
Each of us practicing agroecological/permaculture/organic farming is limited by our space, our physical bodies, our mental capacity. Noone is capable of reproducing the kinds of genetic diversity needed for truly biodiverse food-producing ecosystems.
Many of you that have brought seeds here over the years, and some of them have become part of the local plant scene, because they’ve done well and adapted to our context.
I’ve witnessed community members insist that something can grow here, sometimes sourcing genetic material at great expense, and then…succeed!!! And their success facilitates a proliferation of whatever it is that they’ve spent so much effort on.
Compared to ten years ago, there’s vast local knowledge about chickens, ducks, goats, fruit trees, vegetables.
Part of that knowledge is just from sticking with things. Staying put, and pressing on. Consistency and being willing to share our successes and failures, even at the smallest scale.
None of our efforts exist in a vacuum. We cannot grow anything without seeds, baby animals, Black soldier fly eggs, worms — basically some material— to start with.
The easier it is to access those seems, young fruit trees, chicks, etc, the easier it is to try, fail, and try again.
We have a sacred role as small-scale producers, even when we fail. As stewards, we slowly learn to propagate and grow together, and it is only as a collective that we can continue to build a more diverse food system, and a more diverse ecology.
Even if we’re just learning to sprout something or grow some microgreens- we are learning to understand the basic workings of growth, and how to fit that within our daily lives. So here’s to pressing on and continuing to learn and share.
Workshops
If you have a company group or a group of family or friends that you’d like to learn composting, growing, chicken rearing, sourdough baking, cheesemaking or some other topic, let me know. It could be a fun way to connect with colleagues, friends and family. |
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