Julie's garden close, Oct 12

We have been gathering here in many forms for the past six months. Sometimes in a solitary capacity and sometimes in a communal capacity. We started with words of gratitude that were fed to our worms to carry as a message into the soil. Take a moment and see if you can recall the gratitude you offered in the spring? If you recall and want to share please take a moment now to speak the gratitude to all of us gathered on our closing day in the garden.

A love letter to our dear garden-a prayer-a blessing

From the moment our bare hands and feet touched your spring warm soil you inspired our senses.

You drank from our hands

You allowed our tender ministrations as we turned, raked and hoed your beds

You transformed tiny seeds into vibrant nourishment

All season long you offered simple, succulent bounty and revealed mysteries that lifted our spirits

So many gifts you've exchanged in our presence.

When we are here with you, you impart the message "we are one"

As we enter yet another season, we honor your need for silent regeneration.

Rest well our dear garden

Ashay, Ahoe, Amen

Garlic harvest

We harvested these 2 beds of soft neck garlic July 13. The one bed of hard neck garlic (left) will wait a week. We set aside the biggest to replant in the fall. We then seed these beds for a fall harvest of carrots, beets and kale.

Quick harvest during wildfire smoke

Storage onions

2023 garlic harvest

This year's garlic harvest about triples prior years' !!

Soft-neck total is 630 so a share is 19 bulbs.

Hard-neck total is 166 so a share is 5 bulbs. (have longer stems for ID, foreground)

200 Years of Great Writers and Artists on the Creative and Spiritual Rewards of Gardening – The Marginalian

Spiritual Rewards of Gardening

Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, Oliver Sacks, Rebecca Solnit, Bronson Alcott, Michael Pollan, Jamaica Kincaid, and more. 

BY MARIA POPOVA

Something happens when you are in a garden, when you garden — something beyond the tactile reminder that, in the history of life on Earth, without flowers, there would be no us. Kneeling between the scale of seeds and the scale of stars, touching evolutionary time and the cycle of seasons at once, you find yourself rooted more deeply into your own existence — transient and transcendent, fragile and ferociously resilient — and are suddenly humbled into your humanity. (Lest we forget, humility comes from humilis — Latin for low, of the earth.) You look at a flower and cannot help but glimpse the meaning of life.

Perhaps because the life of a garden is also a vivid reminder that anything of beauty and radiance takes time, takes care, takes devotion to seed and sprout and bloom, gardens have long been living cathedrals for the creative spirit. 

Here, drawn from a lifetime of marginalia on great writers' and artists' letters and diaries, essays and novels, is a florilegium of my favorite exultations in the rewards and nourishments of gardens:  https://www.themarginalian.org/2022/05/07/writers-artists-gardens/?mc_cid=5ff6bcba7c&mc_eid=c105bd900f

First day of gardening 👩‍🌾

Hello Higher Ground,

Here are some pictures from our first day of gardening. It was nice to see your faces today!

Thank you gardening committee for coordinating this 👩‍🌾 👨‍🌾 🧑‍🌾
Thank you Julie for preparing such a nice opening ceremony 🪶
Thank you Kira for the beautiful song you shared with us today 🎶
Thank you to today's chefs for the nurturing food 🍪🍊🍎
Thank you all for your work today ❤️

May this season bring an abundance of growth and beauty to our gardens, filling our hearts and souls with joy and community. 🌱

Carol Cathey