Control, Faith & Hope: A lesson learnt from growing my own food

So I’ve decided to make a new series for my youtube channel Herbarium which brings together plants with some philosophy. I’m not sure if that describes it too well but I hope what you read that follows will help you understand a bit better what I will be attempting to do.

Road To Knowing Thyself

As I thought about how much I’ve changed through life, I also thought about what I have learnt from my allotment. I am not talking about how to grow specific things here. It wasn’t just the knowledge I gained learning to grow my own food and the vegetables and fruit that was growing – I also grew too as I learned more about myself when situations arose at the patch of land I was cultivating and how I reacted to them. Its beautiful as well to think that these lessons I learnt from my allotment are applicable to life outside ones patch of earth that is cultivated.

For example, the feeling of being in control – in charge of ones own destiny. But how much control do we have in our lives? We can control some of it but not all of it. In growing my own food I definitely had to learn how to manage the feeling of not being in control. Sure, I can give the plants the best TLC in the world and have the greatest intentions of trying to be self-sufficient (to some extent) but I certainly can’t control the weather, the actions of pests or other people that may inhibit my intentions. That is like life. There are situations we can control and some we have little of control over – but we can react to and do our best to weather any storm that may pass or go with the tide instead of swim against it (for that moment at least).

Growing Food As Act of Faith

In a way though, gardening could also be seen as an act of faith. Will those tiny seeds I sown germinate? Will they get eaten by pests? Will, as they grow, survive environmental changes? Produce good crops? Survive if their ‘owner’ abandons them due to a life problem cropping up?

The feeling of not being in control definitely felt uneasy with me. This has taught me to have some faith when I do something and to try to manage this uneasy feeling. I learnt that my own mind likes to see the clear path ahead but life is full of turnings, u-turns etc which you can not see unless you go there. For someone who likes to be in control not knowing what lies ahead can be quite daunting.

Outside factors affect us in life and these can have knock on effects to when we we try to do things like grow our own food for example.

Neglected But Not Given Up

I had abandoned my allotment for two months in the peak growing season (early summer) due to other commitments and problems. So the weeds took hold and the lack of rain meant a lot of my crops perished due to the drought – or so I had thought.

The death of a plant due to neglect for me was like a bitter pill – like being a failure, something to be ashamed of. After all if I loved plants so much why would I let them die? Sometimes in life we let its blips cause us to give up and it is important to recognise we will all inevitably have blips. Just ride the storm – it will pass eventually. If I was to let a small blip stop my growing my own food I would of lost more plants and if I had given up I wouldn’t be here trying to inspire others to grow their own food.

Normally people would chuck or bin plants that look dead but I didn’t let my disheartened self get to me! So I watered it and nurtured it and low and behold the first green shoots emerged!