Cure your perfectionism! And other reasons (you’d never thought of) to grow your own vegetables
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Happy New Year!
Is there room on your list for one more resolution? I’d like to whole-heartedly recommend growing your own vegetables but – hear me out! – not for any of the reasons you might typically imagine. Forget lofty ideas about nature connection or feeling smug about having organic produce without the price tag, here are my top five reasons (you’d never thought of) to start planting in 2024:
1. Combat loneliness
Spamming people with pictures of your vegetables is the perfect way forward when you want to connect but you don’t quite know what to say. It really doesn’t matter what you’re sharing – the first successful shoots, weird and wonky fruits – it’s a light-hearted way to keep in touch and get a conversation started.
2. Cure your perfectionism
It won’t grow straight or evenly or perhaps at all. It will drive you slightly mad up until the point where it just… doesn’t. Less perfectionism. More patience. You’ll come out the other side a better person, I promise.
3. Enjoy new rituals
No matter how much or how little you manage to grow, you now have the makings of a ceremonial dinner. The more comically diminutive the vegetables, the more important the occasion in fact. Decorate the table, gather your loved ones, put your bountiful harvest on your fanciest plate and pay tribute to the wonders of nature!
4. Amuse your neighbours
Do you have climbing tomato vines instead of curtains? Runner beans instead of rose bushes? Are you regularly spotted trudging around with buckets of compost or bouquets of lettuce? Always remember – it’s ok to be different and it’s good to be interesting.
5. Enhance your CV
It is genuinely wonderful to all be encouraged to bring our authentic selves to the office now, but just getting through the day and making ends meet might not leave much room for anything else sometimes. A few seeds in pots is all it takes and congratulations – you are a grower! Ready and able to share details of your hobby whenever the world demands it.
And the great thing is that these benefits are available no matter what size green space you have access to – just because I have an allotment now doesn’t mean I didn’t start out with just a windowsill.
I hope you’re suitably convinced!
Wishing you a happy new year and a great growing season ahead.
