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Growing Mondays: Find one small habit
Growing habits are eating habits, and eating habits build slowly
Jo Hunter Adams
January 13, 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 and eat edible and medicinal plants.
Let’s move forward with love, not conquest; humility, not righteousness; generous curiosity, not hardened assumptions. It is a magnificent thing to be alive in a moment that matters so much. Let’s proceed with broken-open hearts, seeking truth, summoning courage, and focused on solutions.
Annual preparation of vanilla extract (and some propolis, since that also goes in vodka). It just takes five minutes to split some vanilla beans and put them in vodka… and then a year of waiting.
One small habit at a time
January is a time of goals. Over a few years, for our family it has, instead, become a time of habits. Over the years, these habits build on eachother.
January is a good time to look at what comes into your home and body (food, energy, water), and what goes out (waste), and where waste goes.
If you can build one small habit that changes something, that can build the momentum for many more habits. Just the act of looking for a few minutes, without any plan to change anything, can yield interesting results.
There may be things beyond your power. For example, we buy commercial cat food and, having tried a few options, I don’t see a good way to persuade our cat to be more flexible. But I noticed she does like certain whole farm foods that could supplement her diet, so I do see small ways I could offer her more of those foods. Just saying out loud that I’d love to reduce the plastic and the commercial food seems to have some power, even if not much changes right now.
All of our actions are nested in a web of millions of other actions, infinitely complex. Changing our habits is finding small points of inflection, leaning into them, and then finding another and another. Knowing we can change, that our environment can change, and that our community can change, is energy to keep on growing.
Our veg garden is a mix of strong growth and death this time of year. I suppose that’s always the case, but somehow when the heat and the wind start it can feel like I’m doing something wrong. Making peace with this time of year as a time of observation and harvesting, eating and planning helps me to feel better, and more able to see all the remarkable harvests underneath the imperfect looking veg.
A time of seed saving… Lesya pepper.
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