Motivated by recent advances in inverse semigroup theory, we investigate the growth of and identities satisfied by free left and free two-sided adequate monoids. We explicitly compute the growth of the monogenic free left adequate monoid with the usual unary monoid generating set and show it has intermediate growth owing to a connection with integer partitions. In the two-sided case, we establish a lower bound on the (idempotent) growth rate of the monogenic free adequate monoid, showing that it grows exponentially. We completely classify the enriched identities satisfied by the monogenic free left adequate monoid and deduce that it satisfies the same monoid identities as the sylvester monoid. In contrast, we show that the monogenic free two-sided adequate monoid satisfies no non-trivial monoid identities.