When Jealousy Destroyed Something Precious

The day my jealousy killed something precious 

By Chizobam Ada Odido-Onuoha

There are some memories that still make me laugh at myself… and at the same time leave a little sadness in my heart.
This is one of them.
Since I was a little girl, I loved growing plants and rearing domestic animals. I still remember the avocado seed I planted at age ten. I remember the walnut an elderly woman gave me — it grew beautifully and produced abundantly.
I checked my plants every day as if something magical might happen overnight.
I developed this love because I watched my late parents, who were teachers, adore nature deeply. They taught my siblings and me the art of planting, nurturing with patience, and treating nature as living beings with spirit.
And somehow… it felt magical.

(We’ll talk another day about whether plants truly have spirits or if that’s just the imagination of children raised close to the earth. Lol.)
One day, I planted an orange seed and added a cube of sugar into the soil. My reasoning was simple: if I planted it with sugar, the orange would grow sweet.
Then came the yellow pepper.
Not the one in the picture — this one was special.
It was aromatic Nsukka yellow pepper. My mum brought the seeds from one of her trade trips. She planted them carefully, and together we nurtured them. I watered them most mornings before school and checked on them more times than necessary.

When they began to produce fruits, I was overjoyed. The plants were healthy and beautiful. We started harvesting, and they kept producing generously.
Then one day, heavy rain fell — the kind that leaves the soil soaked and soft.
The next morning, as always after rainfall, nature’s quiet workers appeared: earthworms, insects, and millipedes.
There was a particular type of millipede I disliked intensely — the clustered kind that moves in thick waves. Thousands of them together.
Even writing this now, I can still feel the irritation. I couldn’t even bring myself to post their picture.
We had been told that pouring kerosene on them would kill them quickly. They were not harmful, but kerosene is dangerous for plants.
Guess what I did.
I didn’t tell my mum.
Maybe it was irritation.
Maybe impatience.
Maybe even jealousy that these creatures were sharing space with our pepper plants.
I poured the kerosene.
The millipedes died.
The next day, our precious Nsukka yellow pepper began to look weak. The leaves drooped. The plant lost its strength. Within days, it started to wither.
I watched it every day, hoping it would recover.
I watered more. I added compost. I silently prayed.
But it was too late.
The surprising part? My mum never scolded me. Not once.
That silence humbled me more than any punishment could have.
Even now, I can clearly picture where we planted that pepper — near my uncle’s house. I remember the clustered millipedes. I remember the guilt.
Did I learn something that day?
I believe I did.
About interference.
About impatience.
About how trying to “fix” something too quickly can destroy what was already growing well.
Perhaps that was one of the early lessons that later shaped how I think about farming… and even Farm4Two.
This is where my journey truly began — loving the earth, getting my hands dirty, and sometimes learning life’s deepest lessons the hard way.