InstagramIf Oprah Winfrey is bummed about being snubbed by the Oscars, she's not showing it. The TV mogul—who failed to secure a nomination for Best Supporting Actress at the 86th Annual Academy Awards on Thursday, Jan. 16—has instead turned her attention to another one of her greatest passions: gardening.
Widely seen as a shoe-in for the annual awards show, Winfrey—who earned raves for her performance in Lee Daniels' The Butler—was overlooked in favor of Blue Jasmine's Sally Hawkins, American Hustle's Jennifer Lawrence, 12 Years a Slave's Lupita Nyong'o, August: Osage County's Julia Roberts and Nebraska's June Squibb. The film, which was also blacklisted by the Golden Globes, received zero nods.
Instead of moping about the missed opportunity, however, Winfrey found solace in the outdoors. She shared a picture of herself on Instagram and wrote, "Harvesting beautiful greens even in January!"
Winfrey grows a number of fruits and veggies at her farm in Maui, Hawaii, including artichokes, avocadoes, beets, fava beans, figs, kale, radishes, strawberries, tomatoes, turnips and zucchini. In fact, along with health expert Bob Greene, the Mississippi native sells locally grown food to her neighbors.
"Ninety percent of the food on the island is flown or shipped in from outside, which makes it very expensive to buy—not to mention the carbon footprint involved in getting it here. We realized if we could grow delicious food ourselves, we could share it," the OWN network creator wrote in the May 2013 issue of O, The Oprah Magazine. "So we designated 16 acres for farming, and last summer, with the help of a brilliant natural-resource-management group called Bio-Logical Capital, we planted a single acre with more than 100 species of fruits, vegetables and herbs."
"Our soil is now so good and so rich that we're already producing 145 pounds of food each week. And everything grows five times as big as you'd expect," she continued. "We can grow tomatoes all year long, and they taste like real tomatoes. We're still figuring out the best way to make use of our bounty, but for now I walk down the road with bags of lettuce, going, 'Hi, would you like some lettuce?' I grew it! I feel like I can't waste it."
For Winfrey, gardening gives her a chance to connect to her true self. "I've come to see the process of growing things as a metaphor for living. In life, as on a farm or in a garden, we get out of it what we put into it. Whatever our dreams, ideas, or projects, we plant a seed, nurture it—and then reap the fruits of our labors. That lesson was there for the taking way back in Mississippi," the Color Purple star wrote. "But I needed 50 years, thousands of miles, Bob's great example, and a whole lot of big, beautiful tomatoes to really learn it for myself."