A Lesson from My Balcony Garden

The first month that I earned $10,000 in revenue, I decided to buy a plant to celebrate.

I walked all around Swanson’s — a terrific garden store in North Seattle — until I set my eyes on what I wanted. The small plant was called a kalanchoe, and the one I bought had lots of tiny red flowers on every leaf.

Money was tight at the time, so spending $50 on a little plant and a nice planter — which had no real business purpose or ROI — felt abundant to me. I wanted this little plant to represent success in my business and so I dedicated myself to taking good care of it.

The flowers eventually shriveled up and fell off, but I kept tending my little kalanchoe plant until it was obvious that I needed to repot it. When I took my plant in to get repotted, a lady at the garden store told me that a lot of people threw that particular plant out when it stopped blooming. I was horrified.

Plants are living things, so I can’t imagine throwing any plant away unless it’s dead as a doornail. Last May, Scott and I moved into a new apartment. From our balcony, we can see a handful of our neighbor’s balconies. At the beginning of summer, our neighbors all installed planter boxes and bought flowers to fill them. But as our flowers continued to grow and bloom, everyone else’s slowly withered, browned, and died.