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Growing Mondays: why rats why

Growing Mondays: why rats why

Use the garden as a tool for understanding your brand of crazy

Jo Hunter Adams
December 02, 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.

❝

Growing is only a small part of the picture. Harvesting and eating and creating good nutrient cycles is a never ending journey for us.

Tomatoes despite terrible trellising.

On gardening badly.

I did an experiment with our tomatoes: trellising some properly (or as close to properly as I can manage), some badly, and some not at all.

It wasn't so much an experiment as my pretending to myself that my yearly routine of planting too many tomatoes and not being able to keep up with pruning and trellising was intentional. Surprise surprise, I should trellis properly.

I think there may be rats enjoying one of the beds. I'm not going to show you pictures of that. Ok what the heck, maybe I should.

I can't NOT plant 100s of tomatoes, so unless my personality changes, this is going to be a yearly exercise in frantic harvesting and bottling and being embarrassed by the sprawl. We get a lot, but it’s messy and inefficient.

I did try to plant only determinate (often sauce) tomatoes, except I saw some of these Pantano Romanesco seeds in my seed toolbox and decided they would probably be fine.... hence some giant tomatoes the size of my hands.

And I have 82 bottles at the ready, for this December time of rest. Urrm…

Very careful cropping to make the tomatoes and basil look good.

Prepping even if you’re not doomsday inclined

The next few Mondays I’m going to be talking through food prepping and resilience to make it through emergencies.

I’m not a doomsday person, but I think that figuring out good options for lots of different possibilities (including just being tired after work) is a great way to change our perspectives on food, water, and labour.

Changing our perspectives on these things might just be a way to change the world. The less we need the ensured conveniences of supermarkets, malls, Amazon/Takealot, the more the world expands— if we can think deeply about our needs, then maybe we can collectively use much less fossil fuels, even in the face of quickly changing weather patterns.

I hope you’ll enjoy the series, and maybe bring some friends along for the ride. Wouldn’t it be miraculous to change consumer culture at the community level.