Tangled Roots

"Yes, the roots of all living things are tied together.  Deep in the ground of being, they tangle and embrace.  This understanding is expressed in the term nonduality.  If we look deeply, we find that we do not have a separate self-identity, a self that does not include sun and wind, earth and water, creatures and plants, and one another.  We cannot exist without the presence and support of the interconnecting circles of creation-- the geosphere, the biosphere, the hydrosphere, the atmosphere, and the sphere of our sun.  All are related to us; we depend on each of these spheres for our very existence." - Joan Halifax

A little over five weeks ago we lost Kevin's Uncle Steve to cancer.  The morning he passed our friend Eric cut a little volunteer off a Juneberry tree.  We took it home, put it in composted soil, fed it rain water & sun, & cared for it as we honored Steve's passing.

See that green shoot?  New growth.  We'll plant it in the ground adjacent the conchord vines in about a month.  Everytime we tend the tree, or receive its fruits, we stay connected to Steve.  His presence is with us.

Food Forest. It's happening.

Kevin & I are slowly transforming our suburban home into a small farm.  Or, we're working towards sustainability, both in terms of sound environmental stewardship & being rewarded with food from our land.  Our home & property are fixer upper's so there have been long periods of preparation.  We look forward to having the space more self-sufficient.  Maybe that's a pipe dream.  Maybe we look forward to just maintenance work.

We called in some friends & spent a cool, sunny day installing some delicious new fruit trees, bushes, & vines!  In the space between our clothes-lines & our neighbor's garage, we built raised beds for conchord grapes & a fig tree.  The garage will give some nice wind barrier for the fig.  We plan to construct a trellis out of bicycle rims about a foot from the neighbor's garage.  That will give the conchords something to climb.  For fun, I planted sweet peas at the base of the clothesline posts.  My hope is to train them up the posts.  We'll see if it works!

Our backyard is full of roots & rocks.  We've been sheet mulching the yard even while we plant food in raised beds.  The raised beds allow us to grow vegetables to keep us encouraged!  It would be years before the soil was sufficiently root free & healthy enough to give us much of a food yield.  This way we can slowly support the soil while getting the quicker rewards of raised bed gardening.

After clearing the weeds we added some weed barrier.  Cardboard works great!  It's water permeable & will break down within a season or two.  This first growing season, when weed prevention is crucial, it will function just fine!

We added composted soil on top, planted the conchords & fig, & ran soaker hoses to give the new guys a long drink.

We went through the same process across the yard along our neighbor's fence.  We're calling this area "blueberry hill."  After prepping and building beds we planted 10 new blueberry bushes & transplanted two existing bushes that were struggling in a shady area of the yard.

 Lots of sun & drainage on blueberry hill!  Perfect.

At the far end we planted a persimmmon tree.  When it reaches full size at 15-20 ft it's shade radius shouldn't interfere with the blueberries getting lots of sunshine.

 A close-up of one of our new arrivals.  We planted a variety of blueberries for nice cross pollination.

We also planted two hugelkultur beds of raspberries & blackberries.  There was much debate about where to create the berry bramble.  We worked with what we have & created two thickets in front of four new fruit trees.  We planted two varieties of apple tree that cross-pollinate well, a black cherry, and peach tree.

Lots of fun talk of what to plant next & where.  Kevin made home-made pizza for the workers.  We happily soaked in sun before getting back to work!

Stay posted as these new additions take root.

Burying Debt

I fantasize about taking my television or laptop into the backyard and shooting it. I resent the time I've wasted on mindless browsing and watching, and I crave the catharsis that destroying TVs and computers might bring. Today, I did something with similar symbolic implications. I buried my credit card statements, my mortgage statements and other papers indebting thousands of hours of my life to institutions that I have no power over. Many of those documents are now providing a weed barrier for the new raised beds I installed over the winter. Though this action was purely symbolic, though in fact the bank still owns 75% of our house, and I owe Visa nearly a thousand hours of my labor, this small action felt really, really good.

Over the winter Maiga and I were cleaning out our filing cabinets. At the end of the day we had a large brown bag filled with documents we no longer needed. These documents had lots of personal financial information, so we didn't want to throw them away, but we didn't want to take the time to shred them. I put them in the basement and figured I'd throw them into a campfire this summer. 

Today as I was gathering up cardboard to act as weed barrier in the raised beds, I noticed the heaping pile of papers. As I threw rich, black composted soil over the bills I felt incredible. Here's to planting seeds of independence and interdependence, to putting our bills to better use, to shooting our televisions, and to designing the lives we want to live!

(This post was written on 3/16 for later publication.)