The Garden Was Growing Me
How growing food changed the way I think about business, attention, and life.
There was a season of my life when I lived in a little mountain town.
It wasn't part of some grand plan. It was simply where the desire to ski daily and live on a mountain had taken me. I had a house with a surprisingly big yard, four real seasons, and something I hadn't yet experienced living in Los Angeles Metro: winter.
The town didn't have much. There wasn't even a gym.
So every morning I'd walk outside with a pickaxe and a shovel.
For the first nine months I mostly dug holes and hauled rocks.
That was my workout.
I wasn't building a beautiful garden. I was simply moving my body.
Looking back, I think that's why it worked.
There was no pressure for the garden to become anything. I wasn't trying to become a homesteader. I wasn't chasing self-sufficiency. I wasn't trying to impress anyone.
I just wanted to move while I waited for snowfall.
Slowly, the yard began changing.
One bed became two.
Then four.
Then twenty.
I built compost bins.
Started raising worms.
Then chickens.
Every season the garden grew a little larger, and without really noticing it, gardening became my morning practice.
I'd wake up.
The sprinklers would already be running.
I'd wrap up in the bathroom, grab a cup of coffee, walk outside, and spend an hour in the garden before work.
It became my favorite part of the day.
At some point I started researching the Farmers' Almanac.
I had heard people say there were certain days that were better for cutting your hair if you wanted it to grow faster, or slower if you wanted it to stay short. It sounded ridiculous enough that I got curious.
That rabbit hole led me somewhere unexpected.
At first I honestly didn't care whether it was scientifically accurate.
I wasn't looking for cosmic gardening secrets.
I was looking for relief.
If you've ever had a garden, you know the feeling.
There are always a hundred things that could be done.
Should I plant today?
Should I weed?
Should I fertilize?
Should I transplant?
Should I harvest?
Should I dig another hole?
Every morning began with decision paralysis.
The calendar removed the decision making.
It simply told me…
Plant.
Or weed.
Or mulch.
Or harvest flowers.
Or dig roots.
One instruction.
That's all.
And something inside me relaxed.
That, more than anything else, was the gift.
Not bigger vegetables.
Not better tomatoes.
Relief.
I knew what today's work was.
I didn't have to think about next week.
Or next month.
Just today.
If today was for planting, I planted.
If today was for weeding, I weeded.
If today was for building fences, I built fences.
I never questioned it.
I just showed up and did today's work.
Then I went inside, took a shower, and got on with my day.
Months later, almost by surprise, I'd harvest something I had forgotten I planted.
The calendar had quietly been setting me up for success all along.
Over the next two years something remarkable happened.
My grocery bill slowly disappeared.
Not because I was trying to eliminate it.
It just… happened.
The garden eventually supplied nearly all of my fruits and vegetables.
The chickens gave me eggs.
I was mostly going to the grocery store for butter and milk as I contemplated getting a cow.
That still amazes me.
A quarter acre.
Over 180 edible and medicinal plants.
Enough food that the supermarket slowly became non-essential.
My neighbors couldn't believe how much food was coming out of such a small space.
Neither could I.
Every seed seemed to become food.
Turnips especially shocked me.
You'd toss this tiny seed on the soil, almost as an afterthought, and a few weeks later there would be this enormous, beautiful vegetable waiting for you.
Nature felt unbelievably generous.
Then something even stranger happened.
I realized the garden wasn't teaching me how to grow vegetables.
It was teaching me how growth works.
Not just in plants.
In everything.
Here is the thing I couldn't see while I was standing in it, and can't stop seeing now.
Nothing in that garden grew because I forced it.
I never once pulled a plant taller. I never willed a turnip into being. My whole job — the entire job — was to show up on the right day and do the one thing that day was asking for. Plant when it was time to plant. Water when it was time to water. Leave things alone when it was time to leave things alone.
The garden did the growing.
I just kept the attention flowing to the right place at the right time.
And somewhere in the second year it occurred to me that I had spent most of my working life doing the exact opposite.
In business I was always pulling on the plants.
Forcing the launch before the thing was ready. Staring at numbers as if staring harder would move them. Starting five new projects in a week because motion felt like progress. Trying to harvest before there was anything ripe to take, and then wondering why it all felt so thin.
I had been treating every day as identical. Wake up, look at the endless list, and pick whatever screamed loudest. No seasons. No sequence. No sense that today might be for one kind of work and tomorrow for another.
The garden never let me do that. The garden had a rhythm, and the calendar simply told me where I was standing in it.
What if a business had the same thing?
The more I sat with it, the less it felt like a metaphor and the more it felt like a description.
A business is a living thing. It has a life force, and the life force isn't money — money is more like the fruit, or the stored root you live on through winter. The actual thing keeping the whole organism alive is attention. Yours. Your team's. The finite flow of focus you point at one thing instead of all the other things.
And attention behaves exactly like water in a garden.
You can't store it. You get a fresh amount each day whether you use it well or waste it. Point it at the right work at the right time and it compounds into something that feels, later, like a gift you don't quite remember earning — the harvest you forgot you planted. Point it at the wrong work, or scatter it across everything at once, and it just… runs off. Nothing rots faster than a business whose founder is watering ten things a little and nothing enough.
The garden had a part for everything, and so does a business.
The leaves are your output — the content, the product, the actual work that turns attention into something real. The roots are your systems, the quiet infrastructure nobody admires and everything depends on. The flowers are your marketing, the part whose whole job is to be seen and attract the pollenators. The fruit is your revenue, the harvest you gather from work already done. And the seed — the seed is the win you learn to plant again, the thing you did once by luck and turn into something you can do on purpose.
You don't tend all of them every day. You tend the one the day is asking for.
That was the whole secret the calendar had been teaching me in the dirt. Not what to do — I always had opinions about what. It taught me when. It gave each morning a single focus and let the seasons handle the rest, and in doing so it quietly removed the one thing that had been draining me for years without my noticing:
The Decision.
So I built the same thing for the part of my life that had never had it.
It's called the Attention Almanac, and it does for a business exactly what that old lunar calendar did for my garden. Each day it gives you one focus — build, or be seen, or fix the foundation, or take the harvest, or rest — based on the same natural rhythms farmers have followed for centuries. It won't tell you what your business is. You already know that. It tells you what today is for, so your attention has somewhere to go before the noise starts.
I still don't know how much of the old lunar wisdom is literally true. I've made my peace with not knowing. Because the gift was never really about the moon.
The gift was waking up and knowing what today's work was.
The gift was doing that one thing, fully, and then letting it go.
The gift was trusting that small right actions, done in their season, quietly compound into a harvest you couldn't have forced into being if you'd tried.
I learned that with a shovel, in a backyard, in a town without a gym. Just a few ski lifts.
I just didn't realize, at the time, that the garden was growing me.
The Attention Almanac is free. Come find out what today is for.
