Photo credit : Daniel Oberg ; Unspalsh.

To grow and to nurture.

A few months ago, while I was talking to someone on the phone, I told him that my Dad was on the roof of the house plucking mangoes. Although to me it was quite amusing, there’s a lot I’ve derived from my dad and his farm-garden.

The mango tree started growing a few years ago, and since then it was just this year that we could really eat ripe and succulent mangoes from it.

Btw the fruits were so nice.

The farm-garden also has the story of abundance and non-abundance, because there had been times when nobody really paid attention to it, and there had been times it had all the attention it needed.

Last week, I cooked a whole pot of Afang soup using the water leaves gotten from the farm, which saved us some money. I used bitter leaf from the farm as well when I cook bitter leaf soup.

There was a time we had pineapples tomatoes, okra, water-yam, and Ugwu leaves growing there. All because we made conscious efforts to care for the garden and nurture the crops.

A few days ago while doing the dishes, I saw a big snail. It made me quite excited, not because I hadn’t seen big snails before, but because it was somewhat hanging around our garden.

When I called my dad’s attention to it, he told me there were a lot of them, and that they mostly came out at night. I asked him one or two more questions about them and he had very satisfying answers for me.

For a moment, I wondered how does “this man”, my dad, knows so much about farms and gardens. The simple truth is this, he had been intentional about the things he had been doing there recently, so much so that he got himself a farm overall that he rarely misses wearing when he needs to attend to the crops.

Why talk about snails and mango trees? Here’s why.

I’ve come to understand that people and things can be likened to nature. If we don’t intentionally nurture the relationships, businesses, or ideas we have in a way that they’ll grow, then we risk losing them.

Like that mango tree, some things take a longer time to grow, but the results are almost always worth it. If we don’t, we risk damaging the things that may matter most in our lives.

For example, we could plant Pumpkin seeds to get Ugwu leaves before, but these days we haven’t been fortunate enough to have that luck. This is most likely because the soil isn’t right for it.

In the same way, there are some things or people, that no matter how amazing they are, we just can’t keep them in our lives, because they’re not meant to be there.

I didn’t talk about weeds earlier on, but weeds are very key parts of a farm. Weeds have to be pulled out to enable plants to grow properly. While some weeds like waterleaf are very essential in “our kitchen”, most weeds don’t serve any important purpose on the farm. Many weeds are harmful.

As a matter of fact, the weeds take up some of the nutrients and the sunlight the other plants need to survive.

Weeds on the farm can be related to people and things in our lives that aren’t serving any purpose. They’re just there “just because”. I have formed this habit whereby I review the purpose of people in my life and it helps me a lot.

Finally, the other organisms on the farm. The insects, the snails, birds, etc. From our farm-garden, we’ve had many fruits that were eaten up by those organisms, thereby making most of the fruits inedible.

In our lives, the organisms are the people that take and take but never give. They drain us dry and clean and only come back when they need us for something else. They can also be people with really toxic traits that dampened your “true self”. We must stay away from people like that.

Nature is a beautiful thing to learn a lot from. The sun, the moon, seasons, etc, we can also learn from other things around us.

One important thing to keep in mind while learning is how to apply things, and that is where “being intentional” comes in. To be a better person and have to lead a better life, we have to become intentional.

Being intentional has helped me in so many ways, and I can never be too grateful.

I hope you dare to become intentional.

Till next time, don’t let snails into your garden, they would most likely eat your plants.

Love always,

Ekab.