This morning when I woke up, the ideas started pouring in. They’re all the same ideas I’ve been playing with for a long time, I just couldn’t put them into exact words. Now I only need to start with a few simple words to explain what this all will be about. I LOVE IDEAS.


This blog is about ideas. We all have them, some adopted and adapted from other peoples’ and some born in my backyard, by digging around in the dirt, sparking up a conversation with a friend or stranger, or perhaps just looking at something and finding a new use for it or... the list is infinite.


I believe there can never be too many ideas and I’ll try to record them here, maybe inspiring you to think about and feed your own.


LE JARDIN


For my first post, I should probably say many of my ideas relate to gardening, food/cooking, food politics, and other issues. I have a little obsession I like to call a “hobby” when I’m around others but it truly isn’t just a hobby, in fact I’m not ashamed to say it’s a way of life because more than a few of us are moving in that direction. And that’s a GOOD thing. Even though my obsession with all kinds of plants is disguised as a hobby, and one that can be a relatively exhausting and pricey at times, it can also be highly accessible for others to learn about. I try to think of it as an investment in my future, and in yours.


At the risk of sounding cheesy and a bit cliché, it all started about fifteen years ago...


My family and I were living in Ketchum, Idaho. My dad worked for my grandfather at a company that helped find funding for environmental and social groups. And my mother took care of my brother and me during the week and spent a lot of time gardening. When they divorced when I was six, it was only then that I remember the gardening thing really taking off for her. Even then, I had a deep emotional connection with my mother, maybe a little more intensified because of my parents' separation. But because she is amazing and so resilient, she truly gardened a broken heart away. And we had a paradise of a garden to show for it.


I can remember all the sweet-peas vining up the trellises she’d built over raised beds and the sugar snaps we’d eat right off the vine. Lucky enough to be living on the edge of a dense wooded area, there was no obvious boundary from garden to forest, as it should be.


Now, the “hobby” obviously didn’t started then for me, but the proverbial seed was planted. My mother's obsession was not yet a skill set to be envied or modeled after...my brother and I would argue with her not to purchase yet another fern or succulent at the grocery store or nursery, and what would she do? She'd buy two.


Before gardening was about plants, for me, it was about more fantastical (and yes, nerdy) things. I equated gardening to fairies, and legend, storytelling and magic...BUT I am also of the Disney generation and don’t deny it, I know many children were and still are like this. Maybe the magic is still responsible for some of the appeal! And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.


When my mother helped found a community garden project in 1994, I learned more about gardening skills and understood that creativity, and not just knowledge and passion, are involved.


Now, as I embark on my own journey into horticulture, I remember her devotion to the community. It wasn’t about making the land on the side of Highway 75 more aesthetically pleasing (though that is a huge plus). It was more about reawakening and reinvigorating her innate ability to grow things and explore ways to foster that ability in others. We can foster in ourselves and in each other a truly amazing feeling of self-sufficiency and well-being, all by planting a seed.


I want to start this written journey by including some photos depicting my own garden’s evolution in the last couple of years. This is not only to show how amazing it turned out this season (due to not only my work but the helping hands of many, many other happy smiling people), but it’s also an incredible example of the fairly speedy transformation of an unhealthy and unloved back yard into a lush healthy forest of food, flowers, and thriving life. I should also note I was inspired by the photos on another’s blog. http://www.bumblebeeblog.com/2007/11/07/nine-months-in-a-bumblebee-garden-110707/


So here it goes!!




This was the sad state of affairs behind our house in April 2010. My brother and I ripped everything up and I wanted to keep the original raised beds, until I realized they were half in the shade.

Around the same time I was embarking on my first season of growing veggies, my boyfriend Michael and good friend Kyle designed and built a little greenhouse studio with attached pergola to house our little growing sprouts and growing population of tropical plants (most of which were inherited from Mom, "oh what? Finally realized you have no where to put that last wee plant? Sure, I'll take it!" Uh-oh.

After much thought and discussion of the price of lumber for raised beds, I settled on some galvanized window wells, which we then cleverly formed into the shape of a flower and planted up with tons of greens, herbs, tomatoes, and much more. Because of the close proximity of the plants, weeding was needed only sparingly and everything fared pretty well. Just west of the "flower" bed, I fashioned a mounded bed, which was double dug (learn about this awesome low till method here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W85QmZgDxFk ) and contained by recycled concrete pavers.

The garden in late June. It was a hot, dry summer in 2010 and I was busy interning at another farm/community garden so there were definitely days that the garden went more ignored than it should've, but all in all Mike and I still got A LOT more produce than I'd imagined. It continued to grow and I added squash, strawberries, herbs, and more tomatoes around the beds and planted about a dozen containers with more edibles, herbs, and ornamental plants, but you get the idea. Hand watering could be a pain, and quite inefficient, so that was one of the first mental notes I made out to correct the next season.

So in April 2011, work began on the soon-to-be-greater second season garden. First, here is what the site looked like after spring cleaning and some prep work had been done.

We chose to keep our cute little window well bed, but removed the concrete pavers surrounding the other bed to use in some hardscaping work. We’d also had some edible and beneficial landscaping done in the fall of the previous year, and decided it was time for a more comprehensive overhaul. We didn’t care for the lawn anyhow, so why not rip it up and make the garden bigger? And so we did. And Mike went to work building three beautiful untreated redwood/cedar raised beds that would be completely irrigated using efficient low-pressure drip lines and sprayers, saving us time, money, and water (yay!).

Friends often came by to help, knowing I badly needed a hand getting things started while Mike was at work all day. And probably knowing that if they helped me even for half an hour, it would make my week (thanks friends!). We planted a whole bed full of rows of beets and carrots with a trellis for snap-peas in the shade on the edge. And the flower bed became all greens: chard, endive, spinach, arugula, lettuce, and a sweet-pea bamboo and twine trellis in the middle.

By Mother's Day, some amazing progress had been made. All we needed was some more sun, the irrigation system, and an additional dose of compost tea from the farmer's market before it was ready to GROW!

Even the area around the pergola would get some lovin', with a little clematis and tons of wildflower seeds.

The first harvests of radishes and arugula made my heart burst with happiness.

With all the work I did every day, planting beds, weeding, etc., there were definitely a couple weeks there when I forgot to step back and just breathe. Then, after a week away from the garden and an amazing dose of sunshine, suddenly it looked like Gaia herself had exploded the back-yard. And by early July, it was looking like this!

The peak of summer was yet to come, with far more bountiful harvests and a few surprises too. For example, without any kind of planning or idea of how they would grow, my friend Annie and I filled in the space between the new raised beds and the old ones with mass sprinklings of wildflower seed. Before I knew what had hit me, there were tons of Cosmos, Zinnias, wild Chamomile, sunflowers, and tons of other plants whose names I don't know growing out of every blank square of dirt. They loved the far sprays of water around the vegetable beds and soon enough, there were honeybees, predatory wasps, and butterflies galore. I hardly had to do anything about pests this year. Those beneficial bugs did all the work for me! I'd known this was the ecology of organic and biodynamic gardens for years, but I had never seen it happen in action in such a small space, practically overnight.




I am as happy as can be that the garden came to life in such an amazing way, and to be able to share this oasis with others was and still is the best part.

Before we knew what hit us, our sunflowers stretched to over 14 feet tall!

The back yard became a great place to have barbecues, informal gatherings, and hang out with friends. Lucky me I have many friends who are avid gardeners themselves, like Amy and Marion pictured here. We've spent many hours talking gardening, cooking, and food politics in the back yard, wine or watermelon in hand.

These are two of the last shots taken of my garden before leaving Boulder, Co to embark on a two-month long road trip adventure where I'll visit and get the chance to work at some of California's urban and rural organic horticultural ventures. Even though I'm leaving my own garden a bit prematurely, after much thought and research, I know I'm ready to explore what others are doing outside of the Boulder area. California is an agricultural and foodie mecca, in some good and some bad ways. But either way, there's so much going on there, and I have so much more to learn about my own path (career or otherwise) in this field. In fact, the first stretch of my trip is dedicated to learning. I begin a Permaculture Design Certification on Saturday September 17 (more on this later), hoping to expand on my knowledge and meet some like-minded folks along the way.

So please continue to check back on this blog whenever you can. I'll be filling it with lot's of cool information, photos, and useful and interesting links to other websites and blogs. I can only hope that even a fraction of this written journey might inspire you to make a simple change in your life, to decrease your impact on the earth, and to help everyone collectively move towards a more sustainable future where access to good, healthy food is seen as a right and not as a privilege.


"One touch of nature makes the whole world kin." - William Shakespeare