The Power of Growing Things

Hey, I'm Laura and I'm part of the Headstrong Team, and I just wanted chat to you today around growing things.

Now, I've never been particularly green-fingered. I actually managed to kill a cactus once, which I think is pretty impossible to do. So I was quite surprised when over lockdown I made the decision with my daughter to try and grow our very own tomato plants.

So we looked in the fridge and we had a couple of kind of quite mouldy tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, and we cut them in half and all we had really to plant them in at that time was an egg carton. So we filled it with garden soil and we scraped a little bit of the seeds into each of the compartments and we watered it and popped it on a windowsill.

Now, a couple of weeks after that, we were amazed that it actually started growing. There was little shoots coming up everywhere. And it was incredible to think that from something that we probably would've thrown away we were actually getting things growing.

Little bit further on, and we have plants about this height and we separated them off into some really old, just the little plastic plant pots that you can get really cheaply and we moved them outside. And actually, since lockdown, I now have about 20 established tomato plants in our garden. We're gonna be literally eating tomatoes forever.

And I don't know if you can see this, but we have actual tomatoes that are now growing. We have loads of them.

And the whole process of this has just been really amazing, to have something that really is depending on you to look after it, just so it can grow and it can be healthy. And it's been amazing to kind of reconnect a little bit with nature, and through that, kind of reconnect a little bit with God and just being able to, again, realise how incredible creation is and the way that things grow.

Now, my daughter has actually just decided to have a go at growing something herself. This is Bella. Bella is a spider plant. She's 6, she tends to name things. And actually, spider plants are really great because you can't really go very wrong. They're really hard to kill, so spider plants, cactuses, peace lilies are all really low-maintenance plants that perhaps you could have a go at getting hold of and looking after.

And I just think there's something really good for your soul about being close to nature and being part of being able to nurture something and it takes the kind of focus, maybe, off you and just really helps you to be able to sort of channel that into taking care of something else.

So maybe go and get yourself some seeds, maybe start off in an egg carton if you want to and just see what happens and I hope you have fun with it. So, I'll talk to you soon. Thanks, bye!