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Growing Mondays: Finding one's way to nature
Irrigation, compost, nature, calories: finding a balance
Jo Hunter Adams
November 10, 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 finding one’s way towards “nature”, navigating questions of irrigation, compost, definitions of “natural”, and ultimately your calories and where they come from.
Big thanks to Candice Douglas who took this week’s beautiful photos. This is Marshmallow, who I think was thinking of attacking Candice while she took this photo…
Action on behalf of life transforms. Because the relationship between self and the world is reciprocal, it is not a question of first getting enlightened or saved and then acting. As we work to heal the earth, the earth heals us.
When we started out on our farm I was very hesitant to use wellpoint water. I wanted to use rainwater only. Yet we don’t get enough summer rainfall to keep things alive through the hot summer. This meant we didn’t water enough in summer, and so our farm evolved slowly.
This slow evolution meant that we purchased food that we could have been growing. And that food was, inevitably, irrigated with wellpoint/borehole water, and transported from somewhere. I felt this gave me permission to grow however I could, as long as it made our environment better than when we started.
So I came to focus on the health of people, animals (including wild insects and reptiles), trees and plants. Whatever they said they needed, I would try to give them.
Taka helps us three days a week, and I learn so much from his wisdom, and he says he learns a lot from our approach as well. As our farm infrastructure evolves, so does his farm’s.
Finding our way to nature is not a linear, one lane path. It is slow, iterative, loops back on itself, sometimes involves fish sticks and driving. The path is simply leading towards more connection.
Finding our way towards nature, inside us and outside us, is always linked to our community. It is exceptionally difficult to subsist on wild foods or not be dependent on irrigation for our food, if we’re living in Cape Town. To build more sustainable food systems we have to build bridges and understanding, and move slowly.
But this is not something to mourn, it is an invitation to inch forward collectively, one carrot or dune spinach at a time.
Carrots, parsley going to seed, lemon pelargonium.
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