For those of you kind enough to have visited this blog in years past, you will recall it a failure. I didn’t keep up with it in a timely manner and, eventually, I gave up all together. In my defense it was 2021 and the effects of COVID on my circle were pretty rough. I just didn’t do so well. But here we all are, 3 years later and definitely thinking differently about everything.
This blog was intended to be about my journey as a gardener here in Bonner County. But it morphed into something quite different. As I looked at what few garden vlogs there are available it occurred to me that most of them are really about homesteading, which is very exciting, sort of a two for one experience for the viewer. I had been watching Next Level Gardening and Epic Gardening for a few years and felt I had gleaned all I could from guys gardening in California, not Idaho. Most of the basic information about compost, water systems, soil amendments, micro climates and more is about the same. Growing what my family will actually eat, or what to do with the weeds, or are those plants really weeds or are they edible?? That’s a whole other topic.
This time around I want to try a different angle, a view I practiced this past summer and it changed the way I think about the garden space and those I invite into it. The way I think about my vegetable garden, my flower garden and the orchard has for the most part been impacted by how I was brought up. In short, the garden was a place of toil where weed removal was often used as punishment. In her defense, Mom had 6 kids and Dad wasn’t home much so her methods of corralling kids and keeping them occupied were rather limited. She wasn’t really the teach, work, reward kind of Mom. I learned to hate gardening. Fifty years later I learned to love it.
I bought the last 15 acres of my parents land which had been my home growing up. It was becoming more than they wanted to manage and they were happy to live quietly and let someone else take all the responsibility. I quickly started cleaning up around the buildings, planted some potatoes, bought some chickens, build a chicken coop, and added onto the barn. I tilled up a big garden space the second year and within 10 years was doing no till gardening, harvesting fruit and nuts from the orchard, selling eggs and produce, and living the dream of someone desperate to return to a place in time that never really existed, and yet, somehow, did.
Before you think me off the rails, consider what we imagine to be our “dream vacation”, or our “dream house”. When we have these dreams they come from a combination of memory, of imagination, of hopes and a will to manipulate everything to bring that dream to life. Otherwise our dreams remain just that, dreams. A person who succeeds in building a dream property has captured something in their heart and mind that reminds them of something else, only better. Just sitting in a chair beneath the nut trees as the warm afternoon wind comes through the neighbor’s meadow and into my orchard, I am there, in that place. This is my garden. God is my refuge, but the garden is where I meet Him. And lately it is where I meet my grand children, my horse looking for a carrot, my cat nudging me for a bit of attention, and the afternoon breeze.
I would live here if I could but that is not in the cards at the moment. It will be, but not this year.
So last year I included the whimsy element in my garden. I took an old purple bathtub and buried it on three sides to plant dahlias. As the beautiful flowers grew tall and created a back drop the grand kids played in a tub of water, splashing wildly, watering the garden, laughing, and living their best life on a hot summer day. When they were done I simply closed the gate and sat down beneath my beloved nut trees and let the breeze envelope me in the peace God has granted me there.
It is now November 1, 2024 and the garden is harvested awaiting the next fall application of mulch, leaves, and compost. The garlic will go in this weekend along with the tulips and daffodils, right inside the vegetable garden. I have made room for all of it :0).
Snow is in the forecast. My beloved breeze has ceased and one from the northeast will take its place. It will be time to batten down those final hatches and let everything go to sleep. And, it will be time to experience the whimsy of searching for the perfect Christmas tree. November seems like a good time to start many things, and so I will. Thank you for reading. I hope to write every week on Friday. Feel free to comment as you wish. I am just one soul on a journey to experience my garden in a way that both honors my love for the land and honors God for His creation of it.
Until next time, be blessed.