How to Cultivate Relationships Like a Farmer
Love is proven in small, repeated attention
Love usually shows up as action long before it shows up as a feeling, and most relationships don’t fail from one definable event... they fade from neglect.
Some of my earliest memories are from growing up in my family’s nursery and flower fields in Santa Cruz California, Antonelli Brothers Begonia Gardens. I remember walking alongside my grandfather and my dad and watching how they moved through the hundreds of rows of begonia bulbs. They didn’t rush as they surveyed the crop of the year, they took their time to pay attention to the details.
They would catch things I couldn’t see with my untrained eyes. A leaf that looked slightly yellow. Soil that wasn’t holding moisture the way it should. A stem leaning just enough to tell them something had changed. Even in the big begonia fields, they could tell the crop’s condition without kneeling down every few steps.
It was obvious they were intimately familiar with these fields. This is what happens when your hands have been literally in the dirt for years and your eyes learn to read small signals before they become expensive problems. I didn’t have language for it back then, but I was learning the art of cultivation.
I was learning something else too: most failures don’t announce themselves all of a sudden… they start small, stay quiet, and then one day you look up and you notice it’s “a problem,” even though it’s been there slowly growing and spreading.
This is exactly what happens in relationships and I have had the privilege (sometimes heartbreak) as a Pastor to counsel individuals, couples, and even entire families who all of a sudden noticed something had been eroding and tearing apart their once intimate connection.
I’m going to share my best tips for cultivating relationships the way you cultivate flowers… and I’ll also call out the pitfalls that quietly and slowly erode them.
The Phrase That Keeps Following Me Around
This year I keep coming back to one phrase, and it’s almost embarrassingly simple: Do the simple stuff. It shows up in ordinary moments. A paper towel left on the counter. A task that would take ten seconds. Something I could step around and tell myself I’ll handle later.
I’ve noticed how easy it is to live like that, not because we don’t care, but because our brain is always ranking what matters, and the small things rarely win. The urgent thing wins. The visible thing wins. The thing that someone will notice wins.
The little things are easy to postpone because they don’t demand anything from you right now… but the little things are where order is either kept or slowly lost.
If you want relationships to stay strong, you can’t only show up when it’s urgent. You have to nurture the small things and over the long haul.
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How Relationships Actually Drift
Most relationships don’t break because someone stopped caring. the break down because the connective tissue starts to “thin out” because people stop tending to what used to be automatic. Most often this isn’t because anybody is being mean or cruel, it is a side effect of life getting loud and chaotic.
You think about a friend and don’t call. You see a text and decide you’ll respond when you have a minute. You mean to set up a dinner, but you keep pushing it because the week is packed. You assume the people closest to you already know you love them, so you don’t say it, and you don’t show it, and you don’t notice how long it’s been since you asked a real question.
Then one day you realize the connection didn’t disappear in one moment. It faded in a long string of moments where you noticed something and moved on. That’s why this topic matters. It’s not about grand gestures. It’s about attention.
Life and strong relationships are a gift, and I don’t want to wake up one day realizing I was physically present but emotionally absent, so I’m choosing to stay engaged, notice, respond, and love people on purpose, especially the ones closest to me.
What Cultivation Really Is
In the nursery, nothing stayed healthy by accident. The strongest plants weren’t the result of one heroic day of watering and care. They were the result of someone doing the basics, over and over, and paying attention early enough to make small corrections instead of waiting to until it became visible and then jumping into damage control.
Relationships work the same way. People need to feel your attention land on them in a way that isn’t transactional, or rushed, or distracted.
And here’s something I’ve learned the hard way: when you cultivate relationships on purpose, you stop taking them for granted. You start treating them like something living, not something guaranteed.
This is where C.S. Lewis has always helped me, because he refuses the modern idea that love is mainly a feeling. He pushes you toward action first. Toward practice. Toward choosing the good before you feel like it. He captured it with a line that’s simple enough to remember and strong enough to bother you: “Act as if you did.”
“Do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbor; act as if you did”
What Lewis says next (paraphrased): When you behave in loving ways, your heart often catches up. Action can lead feeling. He even notes the reverse is true too: when you repeatedly act in contempt or harm, your dislike grows. Source: C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity.
Where This Gets Real for You
If you’re waiting for the perfect moment or the perfect schedule, you already know how this ends. You’ll keep meaning well, but soon you’ll wonder why certain relationships feel colder than they used to.
So don’t turn this into a big plan. Make it small enough to do today in 3 steps:
Pick one relationship that deserves attention that’s been quietly thinning out inside your home or the friendship you keep thinking about but never act on.
Do one simple thing… call and leave a real message if they don’t answer. Send a text that isn’t a “hope you’re good,” drive-by. Say something that actually means something. If you’re not sure what to say, keep it plain: “You’ve been on my mind and I want to connect with you. How are you doing?”
Break the pattern. Put your phone in another room, sit down without multitasking, start a conversation focused on connecting not tasks. If you’ve been distant, don’t explain it, just tell the truth “I miss you. I don’t want us to keep passing each other in all the busyness.”
These steps will make you a master at cultivating relationships… if repeated one small step at a time… and over and over again.
A Quiet Anchor for the Next 24 Hours
“Let us not love with words or speech but with actions and in truth.” (1 John 3:18, NIV).
Let this verse guide you and bring love down out of the abstract and into easy repeatable acts in your daily life. If someone came to mind while you were reading, treat that as a signal from the Lord. Don’t overthink it or wait until you feel more “in the mood.”… Do the simple stuff… and
As you try one small act of cultivation today, I’d genuinely love to hear what happened.
Antonelli Brothers Begonia Gardens
Antonelli Brothers Begonia Gardens was founded in 1935, and the original retail nursery at Capitola Rd & Maciel Ave (in Capitola California) effectively ended after the March 8, 2005 fire, with the site later becoming a residential neighborhood. There is a lot of rich history to explore with this local family business that had both local and global fandom, but we will explore this in another essay.
I love how you connect tending flowers with tending people. It makes the whole idea of ‘showing up’ feel so grounded and doable
I have a work connection I can apply this to today. Thank you, Chris.