Garden Advice
So that’s my garden advice. It is a framework. You fill in the details — those plant lists and design ideas — based on your place, your needs, your community.
So that’s my garden advice. It is a framework. You fill in the details — those plant lists and design ideas — based on your place, your needs, your community.
To dig my spirit out of this dark depression, my body needs, my sense of home and happiness and comfort needs, I need to be rooted in this hygge garden.
Growing food is just like every other exercise – no one learns to rock climb, knit, box, embroider, run, dance, make art, build things, etc… without a LOT of time being less productive than they’d like to be to get the skill set.
Anyone can produce a plentiful harvest with a similarly small plot of raised beds growing a wide variety of simple food plants that are adapted to many conditions.
In fact, we don’t seem to realize that this living soil is the necessary foundation of a garden. Soil is not dirt.
There are all types of gardens. I think Silver does a better job of teaching this important lesson even as he restricts his list of plant allies to a few that work for him. That is the point.
So don’t go by the book. Go by the garden. Learn what is there and how it fits into its community. Then fit yourself into that community.
So as I was already grousing about the pantry, I decided to review my garden plan for next year… and found it woefully inadequate.
Hopefully I’ve convinced you to plant a fruit or nut tree or two in your yard. They can be tucked into a garden, only need pruning twice a year, and they give you pretty flowers, nice fall colors, and lots and lots of food.
So…imagine that somewhere, or in many places at once, a self-replicating Gaia movement were to start, whose adherents call ourselves, simply, “Gaians.”
That gardening works always takes me by surprise. I put these hard and cold and seemingly inert nuggets into dirt and, wondrously, plants happen.
We are at the mercy of our climate, which is as it should be. Nevertheless, we have ways to push our seasons a bit, and most take very little effort and are pretty cheap and easy to do.