Gifts from gardening.
I love this time of year. The last few warm days of summer, you can still go swimming, and the garden explodes with some of my favorite gifts! As you may know, I moved a year ago from the city to the burbs with my family. We have an entire house all to ourselves and a beautiful outdoor space. You can frequently find me there entertaining friends at the fire pit or making some s’mores with my kids.
This is the first time I’ve ever planted a garden. I have cucumbers and tomatoes and it felt like Christmas morning when I found full size cucumbers hidden under their leaves. Tomato and cucumber salad all summer long. It really feels like a gift. Gardening does not come without challenges though. I bought sprouted plants from the farmer’s market and had to transplant them into my backyard. I had never done that before. It was like sending your kids off and watching how they grow. Sometimes animals come along and want to test your goodies and you need to find a way to deter them and not hurt them. I learned about the usefulness of Cayenne pepper on the leaves and ground surrounding. I got some kind of fungus that attacked some of my cucumber plants and found a remedy and saved most of my crop. I had to be creative and inquisitive about what to try.
My dad is a wise guy. He’s had a garden at various points of my life. My dad is someone that I go to for advice on everything. He’s a smart guy. So naturally I went to him about my gardening adventures. One of his tips stuck with me for gardening and beyond….. my tomato plants went from small little stems to huge bushes, where you could hardly see the tomatoes. My dad told me that sometimes you have to break branches off that don’t have new tomato flowers or aren’t producing anything in order to give strength to the ones that do. Wow. That makes a lot of sense. In life, over the years, I have found myself doing the same.
I left my FT job 4 years ago at a top NYC hospital. It wasn’t until I left that I realized the work toxicity was draining me. It was around that time that I started to really pay attention to the people in my life that drain my energy, Leaving the job freed me up to notice the rest of my life. I started to weed out friends, those that drain my creativity, and those that don’t have a lot to add to my life, and those that trash my dreams. It’s hard to let people go that have been friends for a long time, but I found that it was ok to let them go because it gave me room for other things. Once I got over the initial process of grieving their departure, I found that it freed me up to focus on the things that I needed to.
Have you ever had people in your life that don’t add to it? Maybe they seek you out when they need something. Maybe they seek you out for advice but never are there when you need any. Maybe they bring your mood down every time you get together or cause unneeded drama. What do they take from you? Time, energy, mood, give you feelings of resentment? Pay attention to that. Whatever they take from you is preventing you from giving that energy to something else in your life. This is a call to you to either set boundaries with that person or let them fade away. If you don’t, you might be giving energy to something and not something else.
I took dad’s advice and broke off the parts of the plant that were not producing or growing. Now I can see the tomatoes when they are growing, they grew a lot faster, my plant got a lot more manageable. It went from a plant toppling over to a plant that stood firm and tall. I know that would not have happened without losing some of it’s extra growth. I’m taking this lesson into my life. How would it fit into yours?
