I’ve said so on this blog before. I’ve always hated gardening. I have the opposite of a green thumb. I can kill mint!
So of course I have decided that we’re going to turn our steep, 1-acre section full of scrappy trees and muehlenbeckia into an urban regenerative market garden. And it won’t just be my husband and his father (the landscape architect) doing the work. I’m going to help.
This was my inspiration: a TED talk by Niva and Yotam Kay of Pakaraka Farms.
As I watched it for the first time, I said to myself, “We could do that.” After watching it for the second time with my husband, we ordered the book. The third time I watched it, I dragged my younger son John over, and after he’d watched it, he went and looked up the rules for stalls at the Dunedin Farmers’ Market. He’s keen to come on board as a business partner.
The book arrived. We read the first three chapters. We did as it instructed and went down to the garden with cups of tea (well, homemade lemon cordial) and discussed it. And today, the actual work began.
Me being me, I started a weather diary in the back of a cute little notebook on Saturday, and this morning I drew up a family Kanban board.
So far we’ve cleared some ivy off the house to prevent flooding (it’s complicated), decided on a spot to start in, and Sam and John have begun work on another new piece of path.
In The Seven Storey Mountain, Thomas Merton wrote that the daily life at the Gethsemani Abbey contained a great deal more farm work and much less time for solitary contemplation than he expected. The contemplative life has long been attractive to me—possibly because life with three small children is so much the opposite! Perhaps, just perhaps, I can start to build something in the same spirit for myself.
Worms 
This is very exciting. Also looks like required reading…