Building Eden..

  

Towards the end of February 2013 Wild Flower, Little Feather and I packed our bags to leave Varanasi and make our way south. My boy was due to be born in mid March in Kerala (the most southern State of India) and because you shouldn't fly during your last trimester and the thought of spending 4 days on an Indian train with a 2 year old and a heavily pregnant wife didn't appeal to any of us, we decided to split the trip up into a few different stretches and spend some time with our sister community in Goa (around half way). 

Obviously this meant that between February and April nothing much happened in the Gardens except for our friends harvesting and enjoying the last of the produce that was still growing. When we returned home in April with our newest and cutest little guy in tow, the temperature during the days was already beginning to claw its way above 40 degree Celcuis (that's 105F) so as you can imagine, this sort of temperature (coupled with a brand new baby boy) meant that there was no way I was going to get anything done in the gardens for quite some time.

The Resurrection Garden; August, 2013

Now fast forward to August, it's still unbearably hot (still in the high 30's and 40's) but now the first monsoon rains have started to fall which means the humidity is skyrocketing and thus much of the time feels even hotter than before. The previous months had seen small clumps of weeds sprouting all over the Resurrection Garden but because the soil had dried out so thoroughly in the heat they weren't doing a great deal. But after the first rains, all the weed seeds that had been laying dormant for all those months in amongst the soil that I'd been working so hard to enrich, seized upon the opportunity to germinate..   And. Went. Ballistic.

As you can see in the above pic, the weeds took over in a matter of weeks and rendered the garden completely inaccessible. The front wall disappeared under a halo of green, parts of it had weeds as high as my shoulders and everywhere you looked you could see weeds bolting to seed ensuring that I was going to have an ongoing battle of epic proportions.

Initial Resurrection Garden Design Plans

During the hot season you spend A LOT of time indoors and so in amongst adjusting to being a family of 4, I began planning what I wanted to do with the Garden and how to go about sourcing materials to get it up and running once the temperatures came down. I was keen to radically redesign the layout based on a little side project I've been working on that's experimenting with applying principals of farming and agriculture from our Sacred Scriptures (more details about that at a later date) and so I wanted a minimum of 7 separate beds to be working with. Because of the overall size of the space I'm working with and the fact that the average person can't reach more than 75cm, I designed each bed to be 1.50m wide so that I would be able to reach the center of each plot without having to step into it, and thus the space allowed for 8 new beds as well as one long but narrow bed running against the wall which I will use as a trellis for various climbing vegetables.

My default was to think in terms of wood for constructing the raised edges of the Garden beds but a little investigating uncovered that wood here is crazy expensive, that because termites are everywhere (including inside the basketball sized termite mound in the top cupboard in my bedroom.. seriously) so the wood would need to be treated (with all sorts of charming chemicals that would joyfully leech out into my soil) and so I began looking into other options. I spent a bit of time thinking about it and decided that in keeping with the aesthetic of the space, buying a load of bricks would be the best option as they are cheap, easy to use and won't get chewed through by Demuk (termites). I had all the dimensions of the garden and the plans for what sizes I wanted to make the beds and so one day, after crunching the numbers, I went out and bought 350 bricks (with free delivery via Bicycle Trolly Rickshaw) at the outrageous price of AU$0.11 per brick!

 

End Of First Day of Clearing

Last year I really learned a valuable lesson by not trying to do all the work myself. I love being in the Garden and originally wanted to do all the work myself, but I've had to come face to face with the reality that it's a big space, it requires an insane amount of work just to maintain it and keep it clear of weeds and debris, I have a tonne of other responsibilities and don't get to spend anywhere as much time in the Garden as what I would like too. So hiring day labourers to do parts of the initial work means that they get an above average wage for a days work and I get done in one day what would literally take me weeks to do by myself. I brought in 3 guys who worked 7 hours a day, for 2 full days, just clearing out weeds!! I can't imagine how long it would have taken me alone to do it, hiring these cats was definitely the right way to go!
 

Nearing The End Of Day 2 Of Weed Removal

Once the space had been cleared, I went to work laying bricks. I started by measuring out all the paths and the individual plots and sculpted their outlines by connecting string between corner markers. This was a great moment as for the first time I caught a real glimpse of what had been in my minds eye for so many months and finally seeing it come together was filling me with excitement. I then got to work laying bricks along the string lines. Long term I hope to get some mortar between the brings so that it will be a permanent setup, but this time round I decided instead to bury each brick a third of it's height in the ground so it would be held in place and will hopefully get to it next year. It would have been a substantially bigger job if I'd cemented them all this time round and I figured if unforeseeable things came up or I change my mind on how I want things laid out I would still have the freedom to change the setup which I wouldn't have if I cement them now. 

One of the things I spent a lot of time thinking about as I was laying the bricks was how the space would function as a whole. Sure I want it to produce a harvest of rich organic crops, and sure I want it to look beautiful, but I also want it to feel beautiful! I began noticing that when I was kneeling on the back path that runs parallel to the back wall, the angle between my neighbours and I was so steep that they couldn't see me from their windows and roofs; the feeling of not having the entire neighbourhood's eyes on you is bliss! This got me thinking about creating somewhere where you could just sit and enjoy this sensation of being in the garden without being the center of everyone's attention. I also wasn't enjoying all the right angles that I was making on each Vegie plot. I made the front wall of my garden form a curving design because it fit better with the overall vibe of the area and I really didn't want to have a boring ole flat fronted garden, yet here I was making something completely practical, yet completely lacking in love. I want to draw people into the space, for their eyes to enjoy it, and so I began mucking around with different design ideas and finally settled on a rejig of what I'd initially planned.

Revamped Garden Designs

I love the idea that by making the paths that divide the plots only come two thirds of the way to the front you have to enter right into the garden space to move about between the individual beds. This draws you in and helps you discover the secret places against the wall where I'll build some benches so you can sit and enjoy it all. Also, having less points of entrance and exit means that once you're in, you're naturally more inclined to walk about and explore each little area.

Laying Out The Initial Plots Design

Once I'd laid most of the brick work and had half of the plots completed, I got to work tilling the soil and bring in some wheelbarrows full of compost that Shoonksworth and I had been cooking up over the previous months. I also bought 80kgs of straw for mulch, had it delivered, and solidified in my neighbour's minds that I'm insane because I put what their cow's eat for dinner on my vegetable garden!

Little Feather Helping Till The Freshly Laid Compost

Those months proved to be difficult for my little family. My little man is gorgeous and smiley, but he's not been fond of sleeping and so I'm sure it's not hard to imagine what unrelenting heat coupled with sleep deprivation was doing to us. Because the days are so hot it was really only possible to do work in the cool before sundown (between 3:30-5:30pm) and so if I got out there twice a week, it was a good week! But I kept on going as much as I was able and by early October I had 5 out of the 7 beds completely set up and ready for sowing.

Resurrection Garden; October, 2013

There is still plenty of work to be done; rubbish to be extracted, stones to be cleared, weeds to be pulled, soil to be tilled, but the bulk of the shape is largely finished and the seedlings are already putting on leaves and climbing their way towards the sun. So my question to you then, is when are you going to join me for a late afternoon Chai in the Resurrection garden?