On Letting My Vegetables Flower

Updated on January 4, 2024

“It is worse to stay where one does not belong at all than to wander about lost for awhile and looking for the psychic and soulful kinship that one requires.” – Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype

The act of “bolting” in a garden happens when plants start setting seeds, usually because they’re intolerant to summer heat. My way of putting it is, plants are stressed out and preparing for their deaths, and in doing so shoot up into the sky, adorning themselves with blossoms that will eventually form into seeds and drop themselves to the ground. A new generation continues on.

I’m a mindful, compassionate vegetable gardener. I don’t kill bugs with sprays, I mostly don’t fertilize, I leave most everything where it is in the garden once it’s done growing, I appreciate weeds which means I mostly don’t pull them, and to top it off, I let everything bolt.

Yet everything I do (and don’t do) in my gardens, I do with intention and compassion. This very light hand I use allows the plants to shine with all their might, bellow their beauty towards the sky, and glisten with magic.

By allowing my plants to bolt, I’m just letting them be who they wish to be. I’m giving them the opportunity to live to their fullest potential.

Most people in this world will never know the magnificence of a 4-foot-tall flowering tower of lettuce. And if carrots never bolted, we’d never have carrot seeds, which means we’d never have carrots. So goes with all of our precious plants.

If you allow yourself to control one less thing in your life, let it be your garden. Letting your garden be what it aspires to be will allow you to bloom into your true, wild self. Think I’m crazy? A loon? Full of shit? I’m like my flowers – I’m just saying what I want to say and I’m being who I want to be.