Healing Gardens

My Personal Garden

        My garden’s focus is going to be on sustainability. It is going to be exploring how I can life as off the grid as possible.  My garden is going to be a 10’ by 8’ plot or a 10’ by 10’ plot at the Sunrise community garden. The garden hasn’t been built yet, but will be this spring, so I haven’t seen the garden in its final manifestation, but I’ve sat with the space. I believe community gardens are really  a great way for local communities to begin to learn environmentally and socially responsible ways of living. I really don’t want my garden to be a bubble away from everything else, I’d like it to be an integral part of a whole community. Northing exists outside anything else, that’s the most important lesson I have learned the past two quarters.
        The majority of my garden is going to be vegetables that I eat the most   –potatoes, cucumbers, lettuce, spinach, some tomatoes, parsnip, onions, garlic, squashes, and zucchini.  Then I would like to put in some flowering plants, especially nasturtiums. The other major section will be an herbal garden that will be medicinal and culinary herbs. Some herbs would be, chamomile, rosemary, thyme, lemon balm, peppermint/wintergreen, valerian, mugwort (California), and sage.
         I have been doing some research into perma-culture and would like to experiment with it a little bit, as well as doing some pairing with vegetables.  I am hoping that I can cut down on my dependence on petroleum through my food.  Now I will just be getting grains and honey from the co-op, I won’t be petroleum free, but it will be better.
        I am most excited about my medicinal herbs because I hate going to the doctor and I hate supporting the pharmaceutical industry. I have learned so much from Healing Gardens, like how easy it is to treat myself.
        I am going to be planting my starts soon probably in a couple weeks, and then once the garden is in they will go in. This is my first garden ever and I am really excited, but also really nervous. I am hopeful that all the plants will like me.

         Beyond this garden I am also working with the children on designing a children’s garden that will be mostly fruits and berries, we are still hashing out what we want, but its been very fun.  A couple days ago I also found a wooded lot on the property that the children use as a trail between the school and Evergreen villages. In April the wooded lot is going to be cleaned up and turned into an interpretive/ educational trail.