After a month of grey, rainy weather, the garden is slowly growing, but the weeds and grasses are taking over. Without a lot of time to deal with it, I can easily get overwhelmed. More and more though, I'm learning to try and work with it instead. For instance, I see the Clovers, Vetch and Yarrow exploding at the edge of the garden. Tall grasses are shooting up through the fence. It looks like a jungle. When I think of it that way, my instinct is to get in there and rip all that stuff out. The key word is it "looks" like a jungle. Does the garden care? Actually, yesterday with the sun finally coming through, the plants are growing madly. They don't seem concerned with the messiness. Then, when I stop to look at those "invasive" flowers, I see they are being visited by bees. In fact, the bees are loving them. Sure, I'll pull some of the weeds just to avoid too much competition, but for the most part I'll leave it alone. Having the garden look tidy and neat satisfies my human desire for order, but is not necessarily what the garden needs. It needs the pollinators more than it needs to look pretty.
When I first began gardening here with our clay and rock, I laboured with my shovel, fed up, frustrated and exhausted. Then I caught on. Don't dig, just build up. Ever since, I've been piling the old bedding from the animals around the garden, and using it to mulch everything like crazy. My happy little flock of free range chickens then comes in. They scratch it all around, eating the bugs and breaking it up to fine bits. I just leave it alone and let it break down. In a year or so, I have a whole new garden area virtually ready to go, with very little work on my end (other than hauling all the bedding over there in the wheelbarrow). Even better, is that the earth worms love it, so they get in there and start working the clay from underneath, improving it all the time.
This area has incredible wild Roses. They grow along roadsides making fantastic thorny tangles literally drowning in fragrant flowers. I have to do a bit of strategic planting to encourage them at our place, but now I'm going to let them spread. They make a wonderful animal barrier for the road side. I'm hoping that eventually, these and Blackberries will wrap a good chunk of our road edge, keeping the animals in, giving something to the birds and the bees and berries for us.
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| Buttercups and Snow Peas |
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| Ripening blueberries...Yum! |
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| A jungle of Clovers, Buttercups, Vetch and Wild Roses, all growing at the base of a Plum Tree. |
As humans we do have a desire to control, shape and dictate how and where things should be. It's quite liberating to just let the farm be what it wants instead of fighting with it. We do guide, nudge and steer it so that it is pleasant and efficient enough for us too, but working with it instead of against it is so much healthier for us all. It's a slower way to go. It would be faster to just get at it with machines and chemicals but I find this slower method of working with nature quite magical to experience, and it works for me. It's a slow, gradual building, but the results are quite magnificent. It also feels so good to know I'm providing a little sanctuary for the birds, bees and other creatures that are increasingly faced with the hostile world of habitat loss and poisons. In the end though, we seem to be reaping higher yields every year from our farm, and I'm seeing the quality of the soil and growth improve all the time.
