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Growing Mondays: We all change
Grow the things you want to like
Jo Hunter Adams
November 18, 2024
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 edible and medicinal plants.
It’s said that you should grow what you like to eat, but I think you should grow what you’d like to like. It’s very hard to know what you like to eat before you’ve grown it for a few seasons.
Bathroom sweet potato propagation zone. We all need one.
Grow vegetables you don’t like (yet)
We can always change. We learn until we die. The loveliness of change makes me hopeful. We can actively make things better by improving our thoughts or actions. We start little ripples in the fabric of the universe all the time, and we never know which ripples will grow into something bigger. It’s all a surprise!
How does this relate to growing?
Most of the vegetables we eat every day as a family I did not grow up eating or liking. Actually I didn’t know whether I liked most things because I had never tried them.
So if I was told to “grow what you like to eat”, I wouldn’t have started growing at all.
I think growing changes us, very slowly. You don’t have to like everything you grow. You can find someone to give your veggies to if you really can’t eat them, but you’ll be surprised by how much you grow to like things. Trust me.
On our one veggie growers’ workshop someone admired the celery, and I said, “I don’t know I’m going to do with all this! It doesn’t seem to sell and I don’t eat celery.” And G. said, “oh, why not?! celery is great!” So I started eating it and feeding it to our family. And it WAS great! Who knew?! The key thing she said was that it was great in soups and stews. I had thought I just had to jump right in and gnaw at it, which would have been too much of a leap for me. But I didn’t. Though now perhaps I could.
This season I also ate my very first fennel. Delicious.
I could tell the same story for so many other vegetables. Our dear neighbours brought me special sweet potatoes from Portugal a while ago, and gave me runners. At the time, I didn’t eat sweet potato. Another friend grew out lots of runners for me to sell for them, but no-one really bought them, so I planted hundreds. Those two events began my sweet potato journey, and I’m so excited to see where it leads. Last year we began eating them and I reckon in a couple more years they’ll be a staple.
All to say, you never know where the journey will lead. The point is just the general direction.
It’s getting to be too hot to plant certain things, but you can still plant peppers, beans, sweet potatoes and maize. Especially if you’ll be able to water the seedlings frequently to get them established.
Evening berry prep
Workshops and 2025
It’s our 10th year on the homestead, so it feels like a good time to pause and take stock so I’m not doing December workshops this year. I also still want to keep supporting growing in our community next year. So if you have ideas, keep sending them through!
Green hummus. Time consuming (all that dehusking of chickpeas) but really really good.
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