Life Lessons from a Curious Beginner…Gardener.
Life Lessons from a Curious Amateur Gardener (pt. 1) ...is brought to you by my Asparagus plant.
Back in May, friends of mine brought over some of their extra sprouts they had been nursing in their windowsill: future brussels sprouts, tomatoes, peppers, cauliflower, and kale…
Lovely little green saplings with tiny leaves, cute and healthy as can be.
And as a bonus they also gave me a dried-up, dead-and-fried squid-looking thing and said “That’s asparagus root..You may be able to plant that and see if anything happens...”
It was a real eye-sore in our garden, but I gave it a dinky, plastic pot, and some water.
I watered that thing every day for weeks. Pretty quickly, my little cauliflower started getting taller, the leaves got larger, the kale started looking like kale, the tomatos and peppers stalks got thicker and stronger.
But that stupid asparagus thing continued to look like a dead squid.
5 weeks later, after NO change was detected, I gave it what I thought was its last drink, and said “This is a hopeless case.”
3 rainy days went by and I didn’t get outside to check on my veggie babies.
On the next sunny day, I came outside and saw a …
2 foot-tall stalk growing right next to the dead squid root
as if a Fairy God Asparagus cast a spell, sang a song, and played a flute that got this thing dancing out of the ground…..
You don’t know what’s happening below the soil.
Often, growth is either invisible or far too minuscule to be detected.
In our product-focused society, it’s easy to forget that it can take a really really long time to get any results, let alone the result you want to see.
You can’t always see that if you give it a little water, warmth, and work each day, what you’re really working on is the roots; not a flower, vegetable, or even a strong stalk that will eventually hold the weight of all the fruits of your labor...
Sometimes you’ll surprise yourself with what looks like a growth spurt, which it is, but it wasn’t that last drink that made it sprout, but the result of continuing to keep those roots healthy.
In his book Atomic Habits, James Clear refers to this idea as the “Plateau of Latent Potential:”
the moments when it feels like no progress is being made despite continued consistent effort, energy is actually being stored up for a leap (or at least a noticeable step) forward.
Now, we shouldn’t fool ourselves into thinking the growth spurt is now the new standard!
It’s just a little reward for the effort you continue to devote. If you’re doing it right, you’re going to hit another plateau, maybe even a dip.
But keep watering. Keep warming. Keep nudging yourself forward just a little each day,
and trust there’s a barely-detectable but powerful rumble happening benaeth the surface. Your roots are thanking you!
PS I learned soon after the sprout I can’t even harvest this Asparagus for 2 years!!
But watching it grow is giving me plenty of nutrition for my mind and soul. Even if I never get to eat it, I’m going to keep at it and watch it do its squid-asparagus-magic.