You Reap What You Sow, a While Ago

Although it doesn’t seem impressive, the strawberry above is precious to me. It is the first strawberry that I have grown (and insyaAllah more to come) and have just eaten. To be honest, it doesn’t taste sweet at all 🥴. The experience on the other hand, is invaluable.

The ‘journey’ of getting to that one not-so-sweet-slightly-sour strawberry began three months ago, where I ordered a bunch of small strawberry plants from Amazon. If I have known then that it would take three months just to get one bite, I would probably not have not bought the plants. Or I would have bought one that was already laden with fruit. Anyways, I then went online and joined some Facebook groups talking about gardening. To my chagrin, I learned that most strawberry plants normally produce fruits in the second year 😫.

I then reset my expectation into thinking that I would be just looking at the plants till they grow. Then the plants began to die, one by one.

I have bought around 20 plugs/plants (since the price of buying 20 units is the same as 5 units x 2), but in the end, only six survived. I suspect that this was due to the combination of planting them too late into the ground (remember I was busy reading the Facebook group) and also bad soil (to save cost after buying 20 plants, I went out to buy the cheapest bag of compost from Aldi. They smelled awful and poopy-like). Out of the six left, they all ‘thrive’. I am not a farmer so my standard of a thriving plant is very low. 😂

And out of one the plant, is the one strawberry that I plucked above. Nevertheless I learned a lot about strawberries, such as how the flowers turn to berries, and that they send ‘runners’ (menjalar) that grow into smaller plants. It was also enjoyable to look at nature after work, admiring how plants changes slowly and almost imperceptible to us human.

All those lessons are good, but the bigger lessons is that it took three months for me to be able to eat the fruit. I also didn’t do much, Allah made the plant grow by itself, but I did put the plant the soil. Yes, it took three months but if I didn’t do anything three months ago, there would be still be nothing now. That is for one strawberry. Let’s reapply that thinking to where I, or you, are today. How far have you come, from the culmination of a continuous work or an action you took one month, a year, or a decade ago? Yes, they are given by Allah but if you have not done anything then, you would not be where you are today. Let’s go even further by thinking in reverse; where would you be in the future, if you take that one small step or action that you have been postponing?

Second lesson that relates is that when you don’t really know where to go, try to increase your chances. Admittedly I didn’t know it at that time that 60% of my plants would die, but by buying the whole lot, I had increased my chances. Imagine if I have bought only five plants and they would all die; my journey in gardening would have end and this post would have been a different one. Similarly in life, I think it is good to have a lot of interest, beneficial ones, although it would be good to focus on a few of them after a while.

Third lesson would be very clear, and something that I do often: stop procrastinating. I would have killed less plants if I had not done so. Similarly there are many moments where the result of a project disappoints me but in retrospect, it could have been better if I had not procrastinate. I still struggle with this lesson.

Another saying that is not a lesson from this, but I like to remind myself, comes to mind when writing this post. It helps when you’re stuck and frustrated with how things are. It goes,

You are not a tree. If you are not happy with where you are, then MOVE!

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Yeah sometimes life is not that easy, but still, we are not a tree.

Thank you for reading.

^{Alright I’m gonna go write my resignation letter and become a farmer now. 😂}