The Garden That Changed Our Plans

Some mornings begin with a plan.

This one did.

We were going to head into town early and order the wood for the next stage of the villa.

That was the plan anyway.

I walked past the fruit trees with my coffee and immediately knew we weren’t going anywhere.

I’d noticed them the day before.

And the day before that.

I was hoping they could wait just one more day.

They couldn’t…

Our dry season has reached that point where watering by hand once a day simply isn’t enough. The trees were asking for more.

So before the heat arrived...

we pulled the drip irrigation supplies out of the shed.

They had been sitting there for weeks.

Not because they weren’t important.

Because something else always seemed a little more urgent.

As I pulled them out I smiled because… that has become our life.

Every evening we make a plan for tomorrow.

And by tomorrow morning...

the land usually has a different idea.

Maybe that’s what intentional living has become for us.

Not sticking to a schedule.

Simply paying attention.

In this weeks video diary we tend to what became urgent and then began building a living system that will feed us for years.

Building the things nobody will ever see

After the irrigation was finished, we finally headed into town to order the wood.

Around here that doesn’t necessarily mean the wood arrives today.

Or tomorrow…

Sometimes it does.

Sometimes it doesn’t.

We’ve stopped asking exactly when because life moves differently here.

A pace that frustrated us when we first arrived has slowly become something we’re learning to appreciate.

The work is honest.

People stop to talk.

Nobody seems to be in quite as much of a hurry.

So while we waited...

we started building something nobody will ever see.

The soil.

Healthy living soil isn’t something we can buy here.

It has to be created.

Layer by layer.

Season by season.

Using whatever the land is already offering us.

As we filled the beds, I realized each material we are using had been sitting somewhere on the property waiting for its turn.

The old palm ends that became our roof months ago.

Corn husks we’d saved.

Dry leaves gathered from the mountain.

Old wood.

Coconut shells.

Finished compost.

Even the native soil that most people here would probably never think twice about.

Every pile we’d been stepping around for months suddenly became exactly what we needed.

Nothing is wasted here.

One thing we were careful about was soaking everything before it went into the beds.

Dry materials can steal moisture while they begin breaking down, so we wanted to give them a head start.

Green materials were a little different.

We talked about it while we were filling the beds.

If green material dries out here instead of decomposing...

it simply becomes another carbon source.

Not bad.

Just not what we’re trying to create.

We’re learning as we go.

Trying things.

Changing things.

Paying attention.

I honestly don’t know exactly what these beds will look like after one rainy season.

Right now they’re filled with hope as much as they are compost.

Native soil...

old palms...

leaves...

corn husks...

finished compost...

We’ll look back in a year and see what all of this became.

One of my favourite moments this week wasn’t something we planned.

We had almost finished filling the bed when one of the banana trees fell over.

We’d been talking all morning about how nice it would be if we had a banana trunk to add as green material.

I remember saying, “Maybe we’ll wait and fill the next bed.”

A few hours later...

the mountain answered for us.

It still amazes me how often that happens here.

Not because I think nature is performing miracles for us.

But because the more closely we pay attention...

the more often we notice how everything has its season.

The bananas were ready.

The tree had finished its work.

And now it had another purpose.

Before covering the beds, I made the mixture that will surround the outside edge.

Crushed biochar.

Corn cobs.

Gravel.

The biochar had already been soaking for days in homemade liquid fertilizer so it could become alive before it ever went into the garden.

That little detail mattered to me.

We’re not just filling raised beds.

We’re trying to build an ecosystem.

After everything was in place, we covered the beds with mulch, tucked plastic over the top to hold in the warmth and moisture, and soaked the whole thing with more homemade fertilizer.

Then...

we walked away.

Nothing to plant.

Nothing to harvest.

Just time.

Sometimes doing nothing is part of the work too.

Late that afternoon, the wood finally arrived.

The men climbed out of the truck, looked at the woven palm panels on the villa and immediately started trying to explain that we’d built the wall all wrong.

Those are sleeping mats.

Not walls.

At least that’s what we understood through our very broken Spanish.

We laughed.

Pointed.

Used far more hand gestures than actual words.

Eventually they realized this wasn’t the finished wall.

It was an interior divider.

The real walls would come later.

Everyone laughed again.

Before they left, they stood looking out over the ocean.

For almost twenty minutes no one said very much.

Then one of them turned to the other and quietly said...

“What a beautiful life.”

I’ve thought about those words a lot since.

Because that’s what we’re trying to build here.

Not just a villa.

Not just a garden.

A life.

A slower one.

One where the plans change.

The land has a voice.

And we’re learning, little by little...

to listen.

Have you ever had a moment where life changed your plans... and looking back, you realized it was exactly what needed to happen?

-Angie