Farm Update: In the Garden

Pictures and commentary from our garden. Plants that get a particular mention are pawpaws and sweet potatoes, and there are brief references to quite a few other food plants/herbs, most of them with links to further reading if you're interested..  

Moving from Control toward Intelligent Interaction, in Gardening and in Life

What gardeners do is somewhere on a continuum from controlling  the life (and death) cycles in the garden, to managing them, to interacting intelligently with them. We tend to default to control because of our culturally ingrained assumption that without control there will be chaos and anarchy.

This has implications far beyond the garden. How do our assumptions about the need for control shape our world?

Bananas for Mulch Production and Erosion Control

The possible uses for bananas--the fruit, the foliage, and the trunks--seem almost endless. In this article I share lots of images and ideas for using banana patches as mulch producers and for an erosion control project.

1 Garden Meal per Day: Simple Strategy, Abundant Benefits

I'm convinced that the best way to get more effective at growing your own food is to make it as easy and simple as possible to eat something--anything--directly from your garden on a daily basis. Here are 5 categories of low-maintenance food plants (or plant parts) you might have been overlooking, along with strategies for using them to build more food sovereignty into your life.

5 Questions to Help You learn from Last Year and Make the Most of This Year

This year instead of just setting New Year intentions, I looked back first to see what I could learn from last year. The results were revealing, and I feel good about what I learned and the intentions I ended up setting. In this article I’ll share the journaling process I used. It works for New Year rituals, but it also works for other endings/beginnings too.

Difficult Emotions are Allies in Disguise

This started from a gathering of few recent entries in my personal journal and grew into a post about difficult emotions, where they might be coming from, what might be amplifying them, and why it's important to be gentle with yourself when they show up. 

Ginger in a RealFood Garden

Ginger has thrived at our place since I learned to think about what it gives and what it needs in terms of its connections to the other plants around it, to me as the ginger-grower, and to me and my family as the ginger-users.  

Connections in a RealFood Garden

My definition of a “RealFood garden” is a garden that’s easy to maintain and meets real, basic, every-day needs for food and medicine. Plants that thrive in such a garden do so because they connect to other plants and to the gardener's kitchen and healthcare needs in mutually beneficial ways.