I live in a suburban house in Cape Town – and have small, inexpertly cultivated vegetable patches. How can this be jungle gardening?
It’s the week of the autumn equinox here in the southern hemisphere.
That means the days are drawing in, and in my garden the tomatoes are now long dead, brown stalks hanging mournfully from their trellises.
The brinjals that I planted too late in the year are trying hard to pretend they’ll produce fruit but I am dubious.
On the other hand, two bean plants that I sowed (out of six seeds) are threatening global domination in their wall boxes.
There are places where the grass is dead, and places where it is surrounding pot plants with menace – see the picture above of an upcycled blue sink.
In short, it’s just another week in the chaos that is my jungle garden.
What’s a jungle garden?
I first encountered the concept of a jungle garden in Jane Griffiths’s Jane’s Delicious Garden. She writes that her jungle style of vegetable gardening combines permaculture, interplanting, succession and companion planting:
“Lettuces, needing a bit of shade in the summer heat, snuggle up under umbrellas of summer squash. Tomatoes grow tall and strong next to robust spikes of red amaranth. Shiny purple eggplant tower majestically over a thick carpet of baby Asian greens. The aptly named “Bright Lights” chard, with their iridescent stalks jostle with chillies their purple red and orange pods shimmering in the sunlight.”
I should be so lucky.
Try as I might, I never quite live up to this vision, and my garden is more neglected than it is a verdant jungle.
How to be organic by not doing much
But the approach she takes is one I follow: letting the garden lead the way, rather than trying to control it. In that frame of mind, it’s possible to garden organically – you learn to live philosophically with bugs and diseases, rather than lying awake at night plotting how to kill the next infestation. (I’m told there are gardeners who do this.)
Nevertheless there are many days when I wander out into the garden and look at it in a dissatisfied frame of mind. There are so many small maintenance tasks that I somehow never get round to, so many little adjustments that would make things neater, better, prettier. And then I feel overwhelmed by the gap between the jungle garden vision and the mess that is before me, and I do nothing.
Toxic preconditions, is what that is
Which is why an email from the wonderful Oliver Burkeman hit hard.
His subject is toxic preconditions – the things we tell ourselves before doing something, that determine whether we then think we did well. He uses the example of the morning routine so beloved of productivity gurus – a list of “three or four things you might beneficially do each morning, in order to feel happier and get more done”. That list then changes into things that you must do – and then, when you can’t do them because real life intervenes, you find yourself feeling at a disadvantage, and/or mired in self-criticism, with no option but to promise yourself you’ll start afresh tomorrow, and do things perfectly from then on.
He says that the problem is that we think these preconditions will lead to permanent change, which stems from our desire for certainty and security. He says:
“As the great Elizabeth Gilbert puts it: ‘You are afraid of surrender because you don’t want to lose control. But you never had control; all you had was anxiety.’ Getting past toxic preconditions is less a matter of being willing to step into the unknown than of realising that you’re already in the unknown.”
And there’s my garden – chaotic and out of control, and me wandering through it feeling anxious and cross.
No more!
Instead, I am going to try to remember his powerful conclusion:
“You never had control; all you had was anxiety. And when you let go of that, even a little bit, what you’re left with is one of the most powerful reasons imaginable for taking any action that feels as though it might make life more meaningful or vibrant, which is that frankly, at the end of the day, you might as well.”
In that spirit, I might as well just weed that blue sink that is gloriously filled with weeds – or perhaps I’ll just leave it and see what happens.
After all, my jungle doesn’t have to be like Jane’s. It has to be what I can manage, when I can manage it.
I am, though, going to try planting Bright Lights chard again this winter. Maybe, just maybe, this time it will actually get eaten by us before it gets eaten by bugs. And I will definitely not be lying awake worrying about it.
Main picture: The blue sink in my garden, March 2025
OTHER THINGS I HAVE WRITTEN
How to fail at being middle class | Safe Hands – Being middle class is supposed to be a comfy, complacent sort of thing. But there are silent struggles everywhere you look.
How to (not) be a middle-class homesteader – Homesteading means living a self-sufficient lifestyle, with little help from others. Can you be a homesteader in a Cape Town suburb? Sort of…
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