Welcome back to Blogville my friends, thanks for joining me today. I am drinking a lovely Caribbean Chai tea as I write today’s blog. I’d like to offer a warning to gardeners out there as this is a story about carrot failure/success (lol) but it is also much more about what I learned. 

I have a half barrel in my front yard that came from my husband’s family. For generations this oak barrel held many wines made by his grandfather, his uncles and his father. Sadly, just like many other traditions, these activities have been lost as these family members left us. Those are incredible family memories for my husband, so, many years ago when we moved into our then new home, my neighbour kindly cut one of those barrels in half for us. I repurposed the barrel by filling it with soil and starting a new tradition; experimenting with planting different seeds in my new ‘garden’. 

My father, an avid gardener, thought this experiment was not only hilarious, but destined to fail. When I planted purple potatoes I thought my dad would fall over laughing, that is until I sent him pictures of my fall harvest. Sure there were only 8 or 10 of them but they were healthy and pretty good sized. Each spring he started asking what the big experiment would be this year. After dad passed, I would think of him every time I planted, tended, and harvested (most of the time) something new I had tried growing in the barrel. 

Lately, my young granddaughter has been helping to choose the ‘crop’ and prepare the barrel to plant seeds. It is wonderful how she takes each tiny seed in her little hand and places it gently into the soil. Each time she visits she looks in the barrel to see if there are any new sprouts. If an errant ball, frisbee or badminton birdie launched by her brothers or cousins happens to land in the barrel, the guilty party is given her best stink eye and a warning to be more careful. She will then rush over to make sure all is well in the barrel.

This year we planted heritage carrots, the multi-coloured ones, in our barrel. They really weren’t doing well and as she inspected them she found the ones that were growing, were only growing on one side of the now somewhat tipped barrel. She inspected the carrot tops and suggested to her grandfather that the barrel was ‘too tippy’. So my husband and our young grandsons heaved and pushed and finally lifted that barrel until she and I were able to shove an old patio stone under the sinking side of it. She inspected the crop, and announced that things should be better now.

In all actuality carrots should be planted in a garden, not a half-barrel, if you want them to do well. So what did we find at harvest time the other day? We found 16 of the tiniest carrots I have ever seen. The biggest one was just the size of my palm and the smallest, just slightly bigger than my thumbnail. What did my granddaughter see? As she pulled each one up she marvelled at it’s colour, she had never seen a yellow carrot! Or a red carrot! She was enamoured by the fact that they were the tiniest, most colourful carrots she had ever seen. Her narration of the size or colour of each carrot that she pulled from that soil reflected a pride in her crop that only a child could feel. 


I noticed that when she plucked the first carrot, with the excited vigour of a young child, and saw how tiny and fragile it was despite the large green foliage above ground, she immediately reigned in her harvesting technique and began tugging ever so gently and with such care. It was incredible to see that level of caution from such a young child based solely on what she thought the carrots needed. It was a proud grandmother moment for sure.


As I watched her caring for, and then harvesting her little crop so carefully, I suddenly thought about adoption and that barrel. The ‘natural’ place for carrots to grow is obviously in a garden, but I saw in my granddaughter great pride in what these little carrot seeds had achieved while living in a different environment than most carrots. When I witnessed the love and care my young granddaughter  invested in these little carrots, I felt it was much like the love and care my adoptive parents gave to me, and it was enlightening. Since the carrot seeds weren’t planted in their ‘natural’ environment, she instinctively felt they needed extra care and attention; just like children in adopting or kinship families. 


We need to stop telling adoptive parents that they should raise their adoptive children ‘as if born’ to them, because the truth is that they were actually born to another set of parents. Instead, we should simply advise adoptive parents to do their best raising their children, and like all families before them, seek support from their extended family and their community because parenting is a tough job.


There is much research today about the negative impact of adoption on the adoptee. While I concur with much of the research, and agree in principle about the impact, I also wonder about the impact of not having been adopted. If adoption didn’t exist, I might have grown up in foster care or group care, eventually aging out and being abandoned by the ‘system’, much like the unplanted carrot seeds left behind in the the little packet. 


Though the trauma of adoption has stunted my emotional growth in many ways, my parents always took great pride in who I am and in what I could accomplish, just like my granddaughter is proud of her little carrots whose seeds she rescued from a little packet and gave them a chance at life. I believe that so many feelings of self-worth and self-image are impacted, even mitigated, not by how you were valued when you were born, but by how you were valued by those who nurtured you.


As always, your comments are welcome here, or by sending me an email at [email protected]. ‘See’ you next time.