By Linda Knudsen

My aspirations were as high as the noonday sun.

I was bustling around the yard, digging holes for all my newly purchased plants. It had been years since I’d planted a garden, and this year, I had big dreams—I was going to grow pumpkins for the kids. Just thinking about our own homegrown pumpkins for Halloween made me giddy.

All summer long, I watered and weeded, carefully tending to that little patch of soil. As the days grew hotter, so did my anticipation. I watched the blossoms daily, waiting for them to turn into pumpkins. But as summer faded into fall and school began, still—no pumpkins. And to make matters worse, squash bugs had started ganging up on me. The plant was wilting, and my hope was too.

Meanwhile, my friend at the farmer’s market was selling the kind of plump, bright-orange pumpkins I had pictured in my mind. So I bought a few. I’ll admit—I even considered sneaking them into the garden and letting the kids believe we’d grown them ourselves. But they weren’t fooled. “Nice try,” they said. Shucks!

Curious and a little deflated, I asked my friend why her pumpkins had thrived while mine had fizzled. She explained something subtle, but simple—something I hadn’t known.

With pumpkins, you need both a male and a female flower to produce fruit. While some plants contain both parts in a single bloom, pumpkins require two separate flowers to come together. The male flower has a large bloom that grows directly from the stem. The female flower has a tiny bulb—what will become the pumpkin—at the base of the bloom. To ensure fruit, you can even hand-pollinate by shaking pollen from the male bloom into the female one.

It was a simple lesson of the birds and the bees.

Suddenly, a lightbulb went off.

How many times had I planted the seed of an idea, nurtured it with belief and effort, only to see it never bear fruit? How often had I wondered if the laws of thought even worked at all?

It took me years to understand this particular law. Honestly, I used to think it sounded a little hokey, so I brushed it aside.

But now I see—our ideas have parts, like “male” and “female” components, and both must come together in harmony for fruit to appear.

Take, for example, the time my husband and I made a major financial investment. We believed in the company. We studied the opportunity. We were excited about the possibilities. We practiced positive thinking and aligned our energy the best we knew how.

Then—almost overnight—the dividends stopped.
And soon after, we realized we had lost everything.

We had applied what we thought were the right principles. But the parts hadn’t come together correctly. What we lacked was education. We didn’t fully understand the mechanics of the investment, and that blind spot cost us dearly.

Sometimes, we think we know enough—until life teaches us otherwise. Whoever said “ignorance is bliss” was clearly not dealing with large sums of money.

Just like pumpkins, an investment needs all its parts present to grow. And just like gardening, you can’t rush or skip steps—you have to know what each part requires.

So what do we do next time?

Do we give up on gardening—or investing—because our last crop failed to grow?
Or do we take the lessons we’ve learned, add to our knowledge, and move forward better prepared?

I choose the second option.
Because next season, I still plan to grow something beautiful.

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