Log # 01

Before you get into gardening, most of plant maintenance you may know revolves around watering the plant, good sunlight and sometime – de-weeding. Once you get a little more into it, you will also come across the concept of ‘suckers’. Now this is not in the sense of using a negative word for someone, but the idea certainly fits. Suckers are those leaves, stems, or branches in a fruiting plant that do nothing for the plant or fruit except to grow itself. Being a fruit bearing plant that idea is that each part of the plant must play a role to produce more and more fruit. However, suckers – as the name suggests – work on sucking the nutrients, sunlight and all resources to get stronger and stronger, producing only bigger leaves and stronger stems. The idea can be applied to many different plants but mostly where I have used it is on my tomato plants. As important as it is to de-weed your garden so that your plants get all the nutrients and water and they don’t have to fight for the resources, equally important it is to make sure you also find which stems on your plants are suckers and cut them out. You may think its part of the plant and important for it, but you will not realize that the reason your plants wasn’t able to produce the best fruit is because you didn’t help to get those suckers out.

Now apply the same analogy on your life. Sometimes you know the kind of people (weeds) that you absolutely need to cut out for your own good. Other times, you may have difficulty to find and cut out the people who pretend to be your well-wishers but actually are harming you with their existence (suckers). Both these kinds can be near you in the form of a friend or a relative. It’s only you who needs to find them and have no mercy when cutting them off of your life. People who never have the guts to take these actions and cut out especially the suckers, end up hurting and harming their plant (family) a lot. The fear that they just cannot do it and it’s okay my plant (family) will figure something out on its own causes so much more harm that they even realize.

Your plant is your responsibility only and ensuring that it gets all the attention, love, care, and resources is your job. Letting weeds and suckers grow around and in your plant has always been the cause of an unhealthy or worse, a dead plant.
If you get it, you get it!