Last Ditch

It’s been a minute since I wrote anything here. It has been… a wild couple of years. In between a lot of personal loss and some real tough stretches of months, I was able to come back to the garden as a place to just exist. A place to relax from the many ills of the world and to just drink coffee and stare into the great green void. I like that about gardening. It is always there to come back to. It takes very little effort to get re-acquainted and before long, the deck is full of containers again. Gardening to me is hope.

In the spring of 2021 we bid on a small house on Pender Island in the hopes of accelerating a life dream but quickly found out we were priced out of that market as well. I don’t see property ownership as a solution to any larger issues but I can’t help but feel it’s still one of the safer investments (I type as real estate markets begin to buckle). It was a weird year.

Then last Fall (2021) I signed myself up for two courses through Oregon State University extended learning. The Permaculture Design Certificate and the Whole Organic Farming course. Both gave me a launch pad for some ideas but more importantly, served as a place where I could begin to answer some of the big questions I have. Where will we all live? How will we adapt our food systems as ecosystems collapse further and climate chaos makes predicting anything impossible?

I’m happy to report that I find immense hope springing from conversations among horticulturalists, permaculture designers, regenerative agriculturists and so on. There are a ton of ideas, many of them from the original peoples across the world, and they tell us how people have adapted in the past so that we might prepare for the future.

So I am recommitting to exploring these questions and ideas more and to sharing what I find out. I’m putting a lot of effort into the YouTube channel and trying to create quality content that I would personally want to see. It feels weird to put much of myself out onto the internet but I’m trying to follow some creative threads to see if that can’t ignite something of the old fire again. I don’t know about you but I feel a little wrung out after the last couple of years. I hope we can find some peace and some hope in the garden. I invite your questions along the way and I hope you share what you find out too. 🌿