About five months ago I started growing herbs on my balcony. I’ve since expanded to tomatoes (mistake), spinach (ongoing experiment), and what I’m optimistically calling a “pepper situation.” Here’s what this whole thing has actually taught me.
Feedback loops are different here
Software engineering is a domain of nearly immediate feedback. You write code, run tests, see results. Deploy, observe metrics, iterate. The loop is tight.
Plants don’t care about your sprint velocity. The basil doesn’t give you a stack trace when the soil moisture is wrong — it just slowly droops over three days until you finally notice. The feedback loop is slow, the signals are ambiguous, and the consequences of inattention are gradual and then sudden.
This is uncomfortable for someone who has optimised their life around fast feedback. It turns out I’m not as patient as I thought.
Attention is a practice
Checking the plants has become a morning ritual. Not in a productivity-hustle way — in a quiet, deliberate five minutes where I actually look at each plant individually. Is the colour right? Are there new leaves? Does the soil feel dry two centimetres down?
This kind of slow, embodied attention is genuinely hard to cultivate if you spend most of your day context-switching between screens. The garden makes me practise it. I’m not sure I’m getting better at it, but I’m at least aware that it’s a skill.
The tomatoes were a mistake
I planted two cherry tomato seedlings in large pots on the advice of a YouTube video that did not account for a south-facing balcony in a highveld climate. They grew. They flowered. The fruit set, tiny and green, and then… nothing. Barely ripened before the first cold snap.
Lessons:
- Match plant selection to your actual conditions, not ideal conditions.
- YouTube gardeners are often gardening in England or California. Their advice may not transfer.
- Don’t let optimism override your observation of what actually thrives where you are.
Failure is faster than success
The basil I killed with overwatering in October was gone in a week. The rosemary I’ve neglected for five months is currently thriving and about to need a larger pot. Failure is fast; success is slow. This asymmetry is true about software too, but gardening makes it visceral.
The spinach is doing well, actually
I started spinach from seed in a long trough pot — this was my most successful experiment. Baby spinach ready to harvest in about six weeks. It’s going into salads. It tastes like spinach. This feels disproportionately satisfying.
What grows despite everything
Mint. Chives. Rosemary. The plants that have asked the least of me have given back the most consistently. There’s a metaphor in here about over-engineering and over-tending being real failure modes, but I won’t push it too far.
What I will say: growing something is good for you. Not because of the vegetables (though the vegetables are good). Because it requires you to show up, pay attention, accept outcomes you can’t fully control, and find satisfaction in small things going right. That’s a skill worth practising.