The plot thickens - literally!

Well. Hope all are well and not too worried by the flu outbreak. It is a good reminder that we may as a species think we have 'conquered' the wild beasts, but the smallest microbes can outwit us still! A gentle way of working with your body to support it through this is with homeopathy, and/or flower essences, the Bach flower essences or Perelandra essences work extremely well, and if you use kinesiology you can help yourself and others.

A nice link for you is to the Sheng Zhen form of healing QiGong. You can do this at home courtesy of the Sheng Zhen Society video on YouTube here

Anyway, back to the garden!

I left you as I had just started to tackle developing the 90 x 5ft bed in my garden plan. W- e- l- l. I may have zipped through the other smaller beds, but I kid you not, double digging the first 10 ft of this bed, took me forever. Days. It seemed that no matter how hard I worked, turning over the virgin sod, piling it up in the center to make a raised bed including the vegetation to rot down, whenever I measured, which was often, I still needed to dig more feet to get to the 10 ft mark. And I was tired. And I didn't want to do it, it was bloody hard work!

I couldn't think how I was going to ever prepare this massive bed, it was a joke, what was I thinking??? I was a failure and a wimp. Old. Tired. Heck arthritis was a problem. The pits.

Then I got to thinking and connecting in (finally!).

What had worked so well last year? Why had I started this in the first place? To slavishly follow the holy grail of neat beds, and rows of tidy well behaved veggies? Heck no! My veggies are waiting to be wild, muscling in with the wild plants and claiming their space and existence, their rude wild health, and then get with their mates to set that into seed for the next generations and on!

So what on earth was I doing ?

Right then I 'happened' again on Masanobu Fukuoka and his no dig method. Rapidly availing myself of the fabulous resources of the Holistic Agriculture Library, in Tasmania, Australia (link listed on the right), where you can download a copy of his out of print works, I was re-energized, and re-booted into action.

What was I doing with that huge pile of sycamore leaves gently rotting on the compost heap?

Bingo. The rest of the 90 ft was simply covered in a 1 ft layer of not quite rotted leaves, and that my friends, is what I have planted. The entire rest of the 80 ft bed took me about 3 hours!

The other 60 ft bed followed in the next 2. Could it really be that simple?

Well that is the experiment.

According to my plan, the 90ft is divided up into sections, one slightly larger than the others for potatoes, and the rest planted to a variety of root vegetables and beans, corn, spinach etc.

Some are being raised in flats, and some sown straight under the mulch in little balls of mud to get them started.

So far, (lost my download cord for pics), the potatoes are poking their leaves up through the mulch perfectly, AND I only have to water every three days. I checked. It's gorgeously damp and warm under there, but airy through the leaves. As far as I can tell, near perfect germination and growing conditions!

I can't tell you how excited I am to see those potatoes!

The other 'normal' beds have been sown and covered with a light layer of mulch and hay that I cut from the grass you saw. And that is another great discovery, I bought a really great scythe.

It is as tall as me and cuts through the grass wonderfully with no noise, and very little effort. It's actually very calming, as demonstrated by another video link for you which I recommend before bed, better than warm milk! Scythe to sleep .

More later, enjoy the wonderful spring!

Spring in the new garden - Raw land = raw hands?

Well. This working with nature is a lot of fun! It's been one surprise after another after what seemed like a lot of waiting, but was probably just me being slow in getting the right pieces in place. I've been chomping at the bit wanting to get the new garden physically started but at the same time somehow not having the energy, or letting things get in the way of actually doing it. Quite a frustrating opposition of wants ! But looking back a huge amount happened to set the scene on a different level.
Over the winter months I used some of the Perelandra energy processes, clearing stagnant energy, to start preparing the new land for a 'wild' cultivation partnership. I got the impression that the longer the time I left between doing these processes and starting physically on the garden, the better. Seems such a sensible approach, and participating in these processes felt like an introduction, a care-full intention, and an all round brilliant way to start listening to and making peace with the land and all it's creatures. It signalled both to me and the land the start of a dialogue of a different kind on a different level of communication. I was listening with all ears, and hoping that nature would put up with such a novice! I fully expect that I will do the intuitive communicating equivalent of some of those ghastly embarrassing mistakes that can be made while putting sentences together using a foreign language phrase book. What I get back from that thought is the sort of feeling you would have watching a baby of any sort working things out with furrowed brow!
Those energy processes were very interesting. Turned out that the land needed quite a bit of releasing and balancing, both the land, the soil itself, and the atmosphere above. What came out in the flower essences that were needed was a sense of embattlement from outside, which of course was exactly the case, and rebirth. Pretty amazing. So it was really good to have this clearing and healing work addressed before any other work began.
As any of you using the Perelandra techniques know, one of the key processes to help you work well is to set your intention. To do this clearly you do a DDP, set your definition, direction and purpose. Here is part of mine for this garden...

Garden DDP

I want to set up a co-creative garden where I, and others, can learn how to grow food and other plants in partnership with nature, in such a way that the plants and the entire garden environment can also thrive, evolve, and be happy, and to grow enough delicious, sustaining, and highly nutritious food for our whole family to meet our daily needs, with some extra to sell as income.

So, I got the general garden plan sorted, 6 beds, one 90ft x 5ft, one 14ft round bed in the center flanked by two 12ft square beds, one long 90ft x 5ft bed at the far side, one 60ft x 5ft above the center, and two more 40 and 50ft x 5ft beds above that.
Great. The prospect of digging those was just impossible to contemplate, but I was looking forward to getting started! So I just got on with it and didn't think too hard about what had to be done. Breaking free from my stasis at last I started merrily with the three small central beds, digging the lovely soft gopher turned soil with it's topping of gorgeous 'weeds' over, making raised green manured heaps. Felt great that I had the energy to do those in one day, the rest will be a breeze! So far so good. And then having completed those I got the distinct impression that the center one should be turned into a pond. Yes! I love ponds, and the garden creatures will love it too when it gets hot. So popped off to get some very smelly pond liner which I let offgas for a few days in the sun, then got a distinct sense of urgency to get it installed. So the kids and I dug down a few feet at one end, made a shallow 'beach' at the other, lined it and filled it up. It just instantly made the garden magical, and then we discovered to our delight, that we had completed it just in time for that night's full moon. So late that night saw us, flashlight in hand, popping down to the field to look at the moon reflected in the new pond. Moon/water/land, a very appropriate link for a garden that will have some very specific watery needs come July.
We just need some trees to shelter the pond so the birds can drink and bathe without becoming 'sitting ducks' for the hawks.
I have something in mind for that.
Anyway getting late, I'll tell you the rest of the story later, things took a turn for the worse.......