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Growing Mondays: On garden lists...
Practice the art of small daily discomforts
Jo Hunter Adams
October 06, 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 lists… and the discomfort of improving systems.
Up the mountain next to our house, looking down our neighbourhoood, with our kids and our neighbours’ kids.
It is common to think about what you would like to accomplish. It is less common to think about what must be discarded to make space for your new endeavors. The time must come from somewhere. What do you need to give up to make space for what you would like to achieve?
Keeping track of everything that needs to be done on our farm can be incredibly complex. There are peoples’ needs, animals’ needs, plants’ needs, and also people and systems outside the farm that we need to interact with.
Like many of you, I am in a stage of life where there are a lot of important priorities to choose from.
So every Monday I try to start by setting aside time in the week to prioritise my most important values: connection & relationships, to myself and others.
It’s banana time! We’re harvesting as bananas ripen, rather than cutting the whole stalk down at once. This means the bananas are really good when we harvest them!
Practice the art of small daily discomforts. Modern life is optimized for convenience and comfort. Your food can be delivered straight to your door. Your car seats can be heated. Your favorite show is available at the press of a button.
We all enjoy convenience and comfort, myself included. But our bodies and souls yearn for challenge. We want to be stretched.
Only then do I start to think about the tasks related to the farm. And those tasks, as much as possible, are set up as systems rather than as individual little blocks of time.
As systems, our animals are fed and kept healthy without it being an explicit to-do item on my list— they are fed and watered as a matter of habit, by my parents, our kids, and me. Our vegetables and trees are kept alive without setting aside a lot of time to hand-water. So though we have to always maintain the systems around us, many discrete tasks are habit rather than list-worthy. This helps.
So what is left is considering the systems with discrete tasks that change frequently: composting, seed planting, weeding, clearing, seedling planting. This is where lists can be helpful.
to do - first the list then finding the time.
The discomfort of list-making is in facing reality, being overwhelmed, and then recognising that it’s all ok.
What’s important to do now, and what can wait? What is the impact of frequent visitors to the farm, and how much capacity do we have right now for visitors? Is there a system we could create that could remove things from my list?
What tasks will have the most impact on the farm, and what can be postponed for a while?
Then it’s possible to return to values: the basics of eating well, for example, means returning to a clearing task with the thought of where the veg that is being cleared can go to humans, then goats, then chickens/ducks, then worms/black soldier fly.
The systems are incredibly complex, because there are so many moving parts, but having systems means not leaving things to chance, and gradually building layers of resilience. We can allow reality to just be, without trying to change it.
What are your most important systems for your environment, and how are you designing them for more resilience? How do you face the reality of your available time each day?
mystery duck arrived at our property last week- we’re not sure how.
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. |
Clearing beds meant prepping a lot of veg for sale this weekend.
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