The Fun Begins

We knew that our future included an easy to maintain, abundant organic garden. Visions of biting into perfectly vine-ripe, sun-warmed tomatoes danced in our heads. Memories of munching on sweet-tart raspberries as a kid, and the thought of filling the kitchen with the fragrance of savory herbs and fresh flowers started us dreaming about suburban self-sufficiency. In theory it's possible, but you have to start where you're at, learn the skills and "cultivate" the life you want.

I was (and still am) a computer programmer who likes to build and fix things. Patty was an IT business analyst and still is an expert "maker of lists" and "lover of life". We thought briefly of selling the house and moving "off the map" away from all stress. But one sunny morning as we were having "coffee talk" on the back porch swing, something whispered, "you are not finished here". It was the spirit of the Great Blue Heron that landed in the pond a few years earlier (before we met) and told Patty to buy this property.

We started to realize what a special place and opportunity we had and decided to make it our home for the indefinite future.

So, over the next few weeks (and months), we read and thought about it a lot and made a sun chart and map to help us understand what was where. I'll describe that a bit in the next post.

We were very ambitious .... and a bit clueless, like this Muscovy duck that was contemplating US!


One thing that became clear was that 35 pine trees were in one of the prime growing spots (they know). So our priorities sealed their fate and down they came:


We had slight misgivings ... until we saw all that space and the view of the pond opening up:


We couldn't get any big machinery into the backyard, so we dug up the biggest stumps by brute force:




Here is the biggest "Stump Monster", which I think we built a burn pile over to make it go away:


We were going to have raised annual garden beds and rows of berries, grapes and unusual fruit trees and lots of tomatoes and garlic and whatever other food we could figure out how to grow! (We didn't even know Kiwiberries existed back then). But we knew for sure that a shed needed to be built for garden tools and stuff:


This treeless panorama taken Jan 2004 shows the completed shed, the branches chopped to mulch, the compost bins, burn pile, the back fence and one lonely little pear tree ... a promise of things to come:


What does all this have to do with a Hardy Kiwi Nursery? Well, sometimes inspiration comes by tentative strokes on a blank canvas. All the dormant fertility saved in the clay soil of a temperate forest and pasture for generations was about to be released.

"The earth laughs in flowers" - Ralph Waldo Emerson