I can be overly vague about my growing values.

There seems to be so much to prioritise. I want to grow enough for my family, enough for there to be some veg on our table to sell on the weekend, teach people to grow food and raise animals and compost and make good food, I want to save seed, not overshoot our water capabilities, cover our staple food needs, grow heirloom seedlings for the community. Grow our food forest, grow only heirlooms ourselves, be financially sustainable, be independent of commercial animal feed, eat only from scratch. I could keep going for a while…

These are too many different priorities. There are many ways to grow, but we have to focus. Otherwise, we’ll always feel behind on totally imaginary and self-imposed goals.

If you’re like me and need to focus, writing down all the things you’re trying to do in your growing can be helpful.

If you are trying to grow to eat more organic vegetables and improve your health, you might prioritise growing and eating more greens from the garden, and buying what you can’t produce. If the goal is eating well, that can be done in several ways, and you won’t necessarily want to grow everything yourself. You want to make sure you focus first on the eating.

If you want to eat more ethically, that’s a slightly different priority and requires a different life audit. What are the commercial/purchased foods you need to eliminate, and what do you need to grow to cover those gaps?

If you’re trying to be more connected to your food, you might try growing from seed, saving seed, going to seed swaps.

If you’re trying to build a community that is more food secure, you might focus on buying and supplying bulk seedlings to a few local gardens, and supporting those growers, while growing basic, bulk veg to share from your own space.

If you’re trying to grow a world that’s more food secure in the long term, you might want to improve genetic diversity of the food you and your community consume, you might focus on growing and saving as much heirloom seed as possible.

If your goal is joy when you walk through your growing space (whether garden or balcony!), then perhaps you want perennial edibles and relative simplicity, at least in the beginning.

Your priorities might overlap or build over time, and you do not necessarily need to be myopic or laser focused. But that feeling of unease may be improved just by remembering core priorities.

Articulating your core growing goals, and how those connect to your life and values, may help you when faced with opportunities to compare yourselves to others, or when you feel overwhelmed. For our family and our Agroecology Hub, this changes from year to year as our kids grow and our community context changes.

So if you haven’t done this for a while, take some time this week to hone in on your priorities, and see what you might need to stop doing. We all have limited time and energy, and if your growing can become an integral and joyful part of who you are, then you’ll be able to spend your whole life growing.

Workshops

Grow our newsletter

If you are enjoying our newsletter, consider forwarding on to someone in your community. If you received this from a friend, you can sign up here