What happens when you bring together all the ingredients for things to grow, plant a few seeds and coax a few perennials to spread their roots? All kinds of life moves in and starts to thrive. I wish I could be more poetic about this, but ever since we decided to start growing things, it's been one amazing revelation after another. To paraphrase Michael Pollen in his very enjoyable book "Second Nature", the gardener is simply another force of nature, consciously selecting or "cultivating" some life forms while inhibiting others. Bermuda Grass and Fire Ants will always be here, but by constantly uprooting and annoying them and filling their habitat with something we want, hopefully their vitality and numbers will gradually diminish. This takes time.....
Incoming note from the future: I have never seen either of those pests inside a Pennyroyal patch. Pennyroyal is a tough, dense ground cover that is not nearly as invasive as other mints. It is shorter and may only need mowing two or three times a year. A side benefit is the explosion of smile-inducing aroma, making mowing less of a chore. Hence, my long term goal is to help the Dutch White Clover, Pennyroyal and any kind of low growing perennial herb like Thyme take over the space between all the fruit trees by transplanting chunks of them whenever I have the opportunity. My longer term goal would to get rid of the gas powered mower.
Back to the summer of 2004: Gaia had reacted to all our clearing and digging as though they were wounds on her skin that must be healed immediately to prevent erosion and loss of nutrients from the soil. Never before seen creatures, both animal and vegetable appeared on every bare patch of ground. Everything grew rapidly, and critters of all kinds found a new and abundant food supply in the fresh green things that we planted. I guess that's why gardening books tell you to start out slow with a small piece of ground: it can be overwhelming.
So what follows is a sampling of the natural colors, textures and life forms that magically appeared in our backyard that first year.
Close-up of a shovelful of genuine Georgia red clay, infused with minerals and probably organic compounds from the surface.
Coincidentally, the same color pallet shows up in these Arugula flowers.
A young Ginkgo tree that we adopted with a promise to give it a safe place to live. These trees have been reported to live for 1000 years, so you can tell we are thinking long term here.
Since no big flowers had been around long enough for the hummingbirds to notice, we put out a feeder for them. The ants found it way before the birds did by following the Wisteria which was simply looking for anything to climb on. Or... are they in cahoots?
We watched this female yellow garden spider roll up a large grasshopper in a sheet of web. They are always welcome in our garden although they do look quite menacing.
This turtle probably used to be able to walk uninhibited and unnoticed through our backyard, and now he was determined to go through a fence, poor thing. He eventually did find his way back to the pond.
So did we actually grow anything that didn't have legs? Yes...
This was our first garlic harvest.
And we had more sweet and hot peppers than we wanted.
There were plenty of tomatoes in the upper garden.
The main lower garden (where the pine trees were) was still being contemplated and was left mulched all year. The "mulch" in this case was an annual cover crop of buckwheat to aerate and fertilize the soil and out-compete the weeds. You can see the head of a stump monster that won the digging contest. So we drilled holes, packed them with compost and decided to let time and millions of microbes work for us.
Along destiny lines, I was learning to propagate any "useful" or interesting perennials from seeds and cuttings. Above is a semi-shade part of the yard where the young plants could develop some roots. Also, the dozen or so bare root fruit trees we had planted last winter were just getting a foothold.
Now that we knew it was possible to grow stuff, our research and "calculations" led us to attempt to make a living growing "diamonds" and selling them at farmers markets. By diamonds I mean highly value, high quality produce that did not take up very much garden space, like LOTS of homegrown organic heirloom tomatoes and garlic.
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