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Growing Mondays: Something to be enthusiastic about
Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim.
Jo Hunter Adams
November 24, 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 something to be excited about, and focusing on that in your growing.
These new veg beds have been badly hit by every kind of insect. But the cauliflower is coming in now, and it is glorious! Together with hopes of brussel sprouts. This is enough to keep going and keep growing.
We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about.
This time of year it can feel like life accelerates and that we are not able to make active decisions about our direction.
Today, I want to encourage you to find a tiny aspect of your life you’re really excited about right now, and use that to give you energy and direction.
Duckling a few weeks ago, learning to hunt flies
All grown up and wanting cuddles.
Growth is just about finding the next step you need to take. Just finding one small thing to be excited about is enough to keep you growing.
Our farm has what seems like seven million pressing tasks right now. When there are so many tasks, sometimes I can’t face them head on. I procrastinate by making lists and trying to decide the most important task.
But I just need to find one exciting thing, and if I can support that thing, it leads seamlessly into a natural flow of subsequent tasks, and soon the prioritisation happens in the doing. It’s all about the doing.
Our bed of cauliflower is almost ready, and it’s easy to get excited about that: clearing lower leaves/diseased leaves and giving them to the goats and guinea pigs, seeing how many cauliflower need to be harvested this week, making space on our weekly menu for lots of cauliflower. Spending some time making a challenging bed into a bountiful one. I know it’ll only take about 40 minutes and have a measurable impact.
I know when I do that, it’ll be easier take on the next task, because I’ll feel more confident about the impact of my interventions, having seen it play out in the cauliflower bed. First cauliflower, then brussel sprouts, then all things will be possible!!!
Here’s to possibility and growth this week.
Quince
Frog on Quince!
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I realized then that one day I am going to be an ancestor. When I have passed on and my spirit is left to lead my children and their children, they will talk about me, about my legacy, about what I left undone or what I did to change things. I realized that these photos are an actual embodiment of sacred life…. So, I remember my ancestors. I remember what they have left for me, and I remember what was left undone. I look at their pictures, searching their eyes for stories they may never have told us when they were alive. Instead, they visit us in dreams, reconnecting us, helping us imagine a new way forward, a way of peace. One day we will become ancestors, but until then, we whisper to our long-gone ones, asking that they remember us.
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