Seeing the Garden Again

Friends,

It’s been a couple of weeks since I’ve written.

Ironically, it wasn’t because I didn’t have anything to say.

It was because I had too much.

I’ve noticed something about myself.

When I have one observation, I can usually sit down and write it.

When I have twenty, I often don’t write at all.

Everything feels important, and because I don’t know where to begin, I don’t.

So here I am, beginning anyway.

The last couple of weeks have been full.

I spent several days immersed in a Food Forest course, surrounded by people who think deeply about plants, ecosystems, and our relationship with the land. Then my little bird left the nest, I drove to San Diego with Teresa to help Kacia move into her very first apartment.

One season ending.

Another beginning.

And somewhere in the middle of all that... the garden just kept doing what gardens do.

The apricots are finished.

The plum tree that gave us bowl after bowl of fruit is finally resting.

There are still a few different plum varieties ripening lower in the food forest, but the frantic harvest has mostly passed.

The grapes are beginning to color. Not the whole bunch yet—just a few grapes here and there, quietly announcing what’s coming.

The apples are slowly sizing up.

The pears are patiently waiting.

The berries have mostly finished for the season.

And the papaya...

Friends, the papaya is thriving.

Every time I walk by, there seems to be another fruit forming. Every new leaf feels like a little celebration. I’m ridiculously happy about it.

The blueberry had a rough couple of weeks.

I forgot to water her.

I felt genuinely guilty about that.

She looked like she might not make it, so I put up a little shade cloth to help her recover. Pretty much all her leaves dried up…and dropped.

Thankfully, she’s bouncing back.

It amazed me how I could walk by it for so often without actually seeing it.

Sorry, blueberry.

One of the gifts of the Food Forest course wasn’t simply learning new plants or new techniques.

It was learning to see.

I came home looking at my own food forest with different eyes.

The buckwheat I planted means something different now.

The thimbleberries.

The ceremonial tobacco.

Even the plants we’ve purchased over the years from the Occidental Arts & Ecology Center suddenly carry richer stories because I understand a little more about where they came from and how they fit into a larger pattern.

One of the instructors said something that has stayed with me all week.

The Americas were always a gardened place.

That sentence stopped me. I was like…wait…what?

I’ve spent years trying to build a food forest, but I realized I was still carrying this quiet assumption that nature and humans were somehow separate. That gardens are where people are, and wilderness is where people aren’t. And also that wilderness is better off without us there.

But that isn’t the whole story.

For thousands of years, people tended these landscapes.

Not by conquering them.

By participating in them.

That idea shifted something inside me.

Another speaker offered a simple question:

When you approach a system, don’t ask what you can take. Ask what you can give.

I’ve been carrying that question into the garden every morning.

Not...

“What can I harvest today?”

But...

“What does the garden need from me today?”

It’s a very different conversation.

One of my favorite new words from the course was ecotone.

It’s the place where two ecosystems meet.

The edge between forest and meadow.

Creek and woodland.

One community blending into another.

Apparently, these edges are often the richest places for life.

There was another phrase that followed:

Resilience through diversity.

Maybe gardens know something we are still trying to remember.

That strength doesn’t come from everything being the same.

It comes from relationships.

From differences.

From connection.

Even the moon surprised me.

I had never considered that tides don’t just move oceans.

They move through the soil too.

Imagine that. I mean really try to imagine that…so crazy.

The earth beneath our feet quietly breathing with the moon, whether we notice it or not.

I think that’s what these past few weeks have given me.

Not just more information.

A different way of seeing.

And once you begin seeing differently...

It’s hard to look at things the same way again.

Until next time, friends,

Teacher Todd