The New Transition to Paradise

The image above was taken just after moving into our house. I always knew the grass was going to go, and in time it did. Rather quickly in fact.  With the increased bio-diversity I noticed that birds didn't just move through our garden, they moved into our garden.

This is the garden around 2013/14. A magical playground for our two small boys who didn't miss the grass one bit. It was sometimes frustrating having unripe fruit picked, but it was a unique learning experience each and every time they ventured into the backyard.

This image above was from an early post titled Grass is for Parks. It is one of my favourite pictures of our garden taken in summer 2012 when our first son was only weeks young. It was a humid summer and the garden was just an oasis. Water chestnuts, bananas, squash, beans tomatoes, corn, berries, sweet potatoes.... fresh eggs....

This is the kind of little paradise I am hoping to transfer to the block in the image below. It is much larger in comparison, but still a modest size to manage the elements I wish to include, so as to provide for a growing family and continue my efforts at natural seed saving practices.

The underlying process that we initially used to set up the first garden will be adopted to set up  the next garden. The scale will be different, but there are more of us in the house now (increased food scraps) and we also have the addition of extra assistance in the form of chooks, rabbits, guinea pigs and quail. We only had guinea pigs early on when we set up the first garden. The chickens came much later. We will have the advantage of having them right from the start to get things going. My goal is to build soil rapidly and to document the process in more detail. As you may be able to see the basic structure is coastal sand.

Guinea Pigs Update

Shortly after this photo was taken of our beloved Weet-Weets I decided to turn them Free-Range again. Most everything was growing in pots or containers and was away from those little nashing teeth. So I set up several little Safe Houses for them and let them go in the chook pen. This did not last very long. Soon they were out and about in the garden. Exploring and following us around as we tended to the garden. Missy Miss is particularly friendly and we had to nurse her at one point due to a rather nasty wound on her rump.

She came to say hello as I was tending to the garden the other afternoon and I picked her up. To my amazement the wound could not be found. Not even the hard callous on the skin where the wound was. Again my wife and I could only speculate that, as before, with previous guinea pigs, they find it advantageous to roam the garden as they get much more exercise and can eat when and what they like in the quantities they need. It makes for happier Weet-Weets we think.

A Permit of Absence

I'd like to say that I've had a somewhat notable absence from this 'blog' - but in reality, I'm probably the only one to have noticed this. After all, up to this point it has been largely a personal journal of garden experiences and record keeping. This I can see changing. So in preparation for this I have decided to simplify the process and to limit the labels to 12. As it happens, David Holmgren's permaculture principles fits nicely into this whole of life living so I am confident that a dozen categories will suffice.

I am feeling a necessity to go a little deeper and capture my thoughts and reasoning's behind much of what I am applying to my lifestyle. This swirls in and out of the garden-scape, though the garden is pivotal to our way of life so I will be focusing even further on this in the near future. Another reason to pick-up the pace of recording what we do. But there are other areas of life I wish to detail which although they may not pertain directly to 'garden' - are a part of the Big Picture Design of Life. They are the strategies and tools used to create our Little Paradise.

I also have an underlying impetus in that I am realizing that this blogging is also a very convenient way to capture in reasonable detail and accuracy a way of life that our young boys are a part of. I see a day when they can look back over these posts as a journal and read as adults some the events and projects that they contributed to in their childhood. Some of the decisions that were made, and why, that may have changed the course we ended up taking as a family. Much like a Book Of Kin, only digital.

The lack of priority in doing posts for the blog has now started its ascending swing of the pendulum again. The permit of absence has closed. There is a new paradise awaiting, but this time I welcome others to be inspired by the journey also.

The back garden in early autumn/fall.