Thoughts from the Editor

My wife is the resident “green thumb” in our household. We have plants all over our house, in nearly every window and corner. I seem to knock one over each time I try to open the kitchen window. So, naturally, during our days at home in 2020, we built a garden and planted a small orchard in our backyard. My job in this process was to dig the holes and put the plants in some dark and rich soil. After that, Lori assumed her role as grower and caretaker.

We are now the happy owners of an “orchard” of 12 unique fruit trees that are the source of a lot of sticky hands and smiles during the summer months.

For anyone new to tending and growing fruit, there’s a lot of care that goes into beautiful and delicious fruit. I was, and still am, pretty unaware of the effort that goes into the cultivation of a plentiful harvest. What I do know is that for fruit to flourish, the tree can’t be left on autopilot. It needs timely attention.

Last week on an evening walk around a nearby ponding basin, my wife began to share that she had thinned the crop on our yellow nectarine tree. If you’ve never owned a nectarine tree, one of the ways to take care of the tree is to remove, or “thin,” the small fruit from the tree. As she told me about her seemingly counterintuitive efforts and shared her observations, the process started to sink in with deeper significance—there was more to it than delicious fruit.

You see, a healthy tree’s natural instinct is to produce fruit. A lot of fruit. Too much for its own good. So the process of thinning excess fruit helps the tree put energy and nutrients towards the remaining fruit. This allows the fruit left on the tree to mature and ripen into the tasty treats my kids snack on, in between cannonballing into or laying out around our pool.

By removing fruit, the tree is able to focus on quality over quantity. If all of the fruit remained on the tree, we would have a series of issues to deal with—least of which would be some small and unsatisfying nectarines. But when there’s less fruit on the tree, the focused effort creates sweeter, larger, and healthier fruit; fruit that you can’t wait to eat and enjoy.

As we walked and Lori continued to elaborate on all of the benefits of removing fruit, she illustrated some of the things she was learning, and I began to understand the importance of thinning in my own life.

Similar to a fully-loaded tree limb, my life can often get weighed down by an excess amount of things. Good things. Coaching, speaking, volunteering, writing, helping people, beginning a new home project, the list goes on. These are all beautiful and legitimate investments that I want to make. The problem is my natural inclination to try and do it all right now. In my impatience, I overload my life and sap the energy required to give my best to my family.

The lesson of the tree is slowly starting to sink in for me. Having and doing it all right now doesn’t necessarily yield a rich life. Sometimes less can actually produce sweeter results.

Eric Riley Executive Editor Lifestyle Magazine President / Owner Topograph