– by Antonia
I’ve been planting ya’ll! I started a petite herb garden last month. I was super excited when they started to sprout about a week and half after I planted them. But then after a while, nothing changed. They didn’t seem to grow past the little height they had reached. Figuring something wasn’t right, I did some Googling and found out that the plants had gotten to the point when they needed to be thinned, meaning I had too many sprouts in one pot and I had to cut all but a handful of them in order for them to grow more. With too many sprouts, there was too much competition for food and survival.
About two weeks in. Here’s when they seemed to stop growing.
Even though these are just herbs (that, hopefully, I will eventually eat), it was actually pretty hard to cut down my cute little sprouts. I had watched them grow. I had become somewhat invested in all of them and also was worried that if I cut so many of them, what would happen if the ones that are left don’t bloom?
I did what I had to do. I killed my babies, as my high school English teacher used to say. And about a week later I saw new leaves emerge from my parsley. This all sounds silly as I write it. We’re talking about herbs after all! But there is a (probably obvious) extended metaphor here.
The aftermath of thinning!
Sometimes in life you’ll find there are things that stifle your personal growth. Those things might be people, a job, bad habits, a way of thinking. And although you’re used to having those things be a part of your life, you get to a point where not letting them go is detrimental. It’s normal to worry about what lies ahead and what might fill the void that you’ll at first feel when you “kill your babies.” But “thinning” is a necessary part of herb gardening and it’s also a necessary part of living.
It’s hard to imagine that this tiny flimsy little sprout can grow into something so much larger (like an actual oven-sized bush, from what I’ve read). But it will grow because other people have grown herbs and have said that’s what lies ahead. I’ve Googled it, so I have that to go on. But of course there are somethings in life you can’t Google. Situations that you live through can be so unique that there is no blueprint, there is no reference picture of what will be. I guess in those cases you have to rely and trust in the fact that you feel yourself suffocating or stagnating and that being in that state isn’t good enough for you.
New leaves booches!
I like to look at letting go not as losing something but as making room for something new. Even though you might not have an exact idea of what that new thing might be. You’ve at least set yourself up to receive it or be it.
Let’s talk! What are some things that might be holding you back. Tell me in the comments below!
