Cut back to flourish

I recently posted a photo of my tomato plants with the caption "send help, they are huge but not producing any fruit". Mind you, I have a brown thumb if that's a thing and a novice gardener at best so I was relying on my plant parents to help me out.

I got responses about mending the soil, moving my plants to a shadier area, give them eggshells and coffee grounds and staking them properly, all of which sound like great things but surely I'll never do. I will keep my espresso and omelette for myself thank you very much. But one response stood out to me "pinch them back, to help them flourish" As I went down the tomato care rabbit hole on "how to prune tomato plants", I couldn't help but to notice how this intertwined in my own life.

If you think of a plant having a cup filled up and the contents inside are it's energy then as the plant sends energy to the roots for strength, the stem for larger growth and to the leaves for increased photosynthesis for a chance of survival it only makes sense that producing fruit becomes the low man on the totem pole and by the time creating juicy tomatoes comes around, there isn't a lot left in that cup. Hence why all my flowers were falling off. By trying to just survive, my plant was killing off the best part of itself.

Just like tomato plants, we have to be aware and intentional about how our cup is being emptied or what we are expending our energy on. If you feel like you've started a new project every week but you don't have the energy to see it through, you are like the tomato plant sending out branches in every which direction reaching and hoping for anything. If you are constantly being pulled by friends and family and are committing to areas in your life that don't align with your needs then you are like my beautiful heirloom running herself wild, trying to appease everyone in every aspect of life, branching out in hopes to survive. Often we think, if we do everything for everyone, if we spread out more, branch out more, reach a little bit more then we will have made it, but at what cost?

If I am a tomato plant with hundreds of leaves flourishing, what good if there is no fruit to bear.

Sometimes just like our plant friends we need to prune back aspects of our lives that don't align, snip back those things that no longer serve us or leave us feeling empty and dig a little deeper to produce the juiciness we are searching for in life.

Lessons from plant friends.