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Growing Mondays: Envisioning the difficult work makes it easier
If you can imagine the steps you have to take, then you are steadier taking the steps...
Jo Hunter Adams
November 17, 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 practicing the hard things- physically practicing, or even just practicing in our minds. Envisioning the hard things can be a powerful way to push through to the hopes and dreams we have for our community. And ultimately, growing must always be about community, not just about our own bodies.
Gobble king 2.0. Like everything, our turkey story is the story of community- the awesome Meghan (and her example of a great company in Theonista) suggesting turkeys as an important addition, a few years back. Of the amazing Lara and Wildwood homestead sending eggs from the Eastern Cape, of new friends Anne and Brad transporting a turkey from Robertson, It’s been slow and steady, and now we have hopes of breeding.
“Store my meat? I store my meat in the belly of my brother,” replied the hunter.”
Every year I make vision boards. I suppose a bit like pinterest boards on an A4 piece of paper. Yes, it makes me feel like a pre-teen. In fact, I sometimes make them with my pre-teen. I print them out and carry them around in my diary. It’s a little ridiculous. And yet…there’s something to the visual.
The piece of paper is a way to remind myself of what I value, and what we’re working towards, when I get stuck.
I read that a lot of people make vision boards that bear zero resemblance to their current life. They envision things that don’t look like their actual lives, so the vision doesn’t help them love their days or do the hard things that make us all grow.
Instead, behavioural specialists recommend creating a vision that is more immediate, and that involves actually visualising the difficult and uncomfortable work that needs to be done. Because the vision is actually the work. We have to learn to love the work. If we can visualise the steps, suddenly we do the work and learn to be less focused on the outcome.
Growing with nature, we can never fully control the outcome. We can only commit to looking carefully and doing the work with as much wisdom as we have at this point in our lives.
In summer, the work is making sure that our plants are well composted, well watered, and harvested and eaten on time (sometimes in the belly of a neighbour). It’s the work of trellising and weeding, even in the relentless wind or the sun. Sometimes gardening is gentle and relaxed and early morning harvesting or sunset checks. But often it is fitting in the work with the time we are given, and learning to love what is not intuitively easy.
Broad beans this year have been a joy because I planted just enough for us to enjoy them, and not so many to get overwhelmed. They don’t tend to sell well (yet).
This time of year, there’s the hard push to finish projects, coupled with the promise of rest and reflection. This year that impulse is particularly acute. The city is visiting, our profile is more public, and we want to convey the deep and detailed work so that others can follow in our footsteps if they want to.
Even the hope of rest is a bit ephemeral, because the summer is beautiful, never-ending, work.
And yet. If the work and the rest can be part of a shorter cycle, a cycle that is never focused on a destination. The cycle waxes and wanes. The work gets difficult so that we can truly enjoy the cool water break at 4pm, gets abundant so we can enjoy sharing.
Here’s to the cycle, and to good work.
May the work build and not involve too much time in your car, as we head towards the end of the year.
Living on spring onion
Workshops
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One of my biggest joys at the moment is knowing which chameleons are pregnant (they keep eggs in their bodies until they are ready to hatch), which have already given birth to gorgeous tiny babies, and where those babies like to spend time every day. And then, to see chameleons crossing the road from our property to spread out and find more habitable places. When we first moved here we saw chameleons only very rarely.
There are no privileged locations. If you stay put, your place may become a holy center, not because it gives you special access to the divine, but because in your stillness you hear what might be heard anywhere. All there is to see can be seen from anywhere in the universe, if you know how to look.
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