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Growing Mondays: A growth mindset
Nothing is fixed, we can all grow
Jo Hunter Adams
April 14, 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 share ideas to help you grow edible and medicinal plants.
Did I win? Did I lose? Those are the wrong questions. The correct question is: Did I make my best effort?
The baby chameleons have grown into their colours! (saffron bed in background)
No matter what your ability is, effort is what ignites that ability and turns it into accomplishment.
Our abilities and skills can change
I’m reading Carol Dweck’s Mindset, which contrasts Fixed Mindsets and Growth mindsets. Her findings seem helpful when applied to our growing journeys.
In the book, Dweck described how positive and negative comments throughout our lives can fix our mindset and make us rigid. For example, a parent might tell their child “you’re so great at Maths” or “you’re so sporty”, or “you’ve never been artistic”. The problem with even a seemingly positive comment is that we then begin to protect that part of our identity. If we’re told we’re great at something, we become terrified of failure or anything that might suggest we are not innately brilliant. When we make a mistake, rather than figure out where we went wrong, we want to cover it up.
The alternative is a growth mindset. If we are told “wow you must have worked really hard to achieve that”, it affirms our effort without suggesting we have an innate ability that we need to feel good about ourselves.
Some growing examples of fixed mindset:
You’ve got green fingers!!! You’ve got a black thumb!
My kids are such picky eaters, they won’t eat ___.
It’s impossible to grow seed organically
I can’t grow cauliflower (that’s one I hear a lot)!
I’m too busy to grow ____/I’m too busy to attend to this problem in the garden.
I’m a lazy gardener
I’m a master gardener/I’m very experienced!
I always/never do x.
I am a details person/big picture person
I feel super encouraged to let go of all these labels and just see how can improve each season, including through failure. Failure, if we can look at it as a teacher, is a great tool.
We can improve in a peaceful way, knowing we’ll never reach any pinnacle. We can just keep exploring our capacities, and try to be open to whatever avenues of learning and growth are available.
Here’s to endless growth with you all.
This is still a great time to be planting autumn crops, and those pea seeds can still be planted! Wait on onion seedlings if you’re in Cape Town, until around mid May.
We have fish that help to eat mosquito larvae in all our water collection vessels. Hana loves to catch them with her hands and move them between vessels. We noticed that Chris quietly feeds the fish a few grains of spent barley each day, and felt a pang as he moves on down the street to Chris and Eva in a couple of months. The homestead is always changing.
Autumn seedlings - we sell a few thousand seedlings, before a final round of planting out a few thousand ourselves.
Workshops
19 April 9-10:30 Medicinal Plant workshop with special guest René Nägeli 5 July 9-10:30 Kimchi workshop |
First olives in a long time. We have about 20 times this much, and we’re going to have to learn how to process them. (don’t ask us about the terrifying olive oil experiment…)
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