Garden, Grit and Gratitude Repeat!

Gratitude requires the grit of life for full appreciation, and gardening. Don't forget gardening. So go on then, garden, grit and gratitude on repeat.

I feel like hardship gives a measurement for gratitude. That without experiencing what sucks in life, we cannot take pause and realize what was, what is, and appreciate what remains and what will be.

Joni Mitchell’s words from the song Big Yellow Taxi resonate with me right now.

“Don’t it always seem to go

That you don’t know what you got ‘til it’s gone?

They paved paradise and put up a parking lot."

In this case a very cozy house was demolished with all the trees and beauty for a flat roofed framed house that will likely have stucco. Easily will be destroyable by the elements living on the rainy deep cove inlet but who’s judging? Just someone who has lived in this rainforest for almost three decades.

I gripe because I recently got word that two previous homes I have lived in the Tri City area have been demolished to make way for other things. To see for myself, I drove by. Unlikely parking lots but something similarly ridiculously audacious.

Given the nature of the lower mainland and the fact that regular people are being forced further and further from the epicentres simply because it is not often a financially feasible decision and the way developers scoop up anything and everything, it truly didn’t come as a great surprise but what it did do is it made me realize that practicing mindful present gratitude is important in all that we do. To appreciate along the way. To create positive memories as best we can.

Even we got pushed further out, surprise surprise which is a story for a later day.

I’m grateful for our south facing location so that I can grow and plant to my heart’s content provided that it doesn’t overtake things. Would I realize this gratitude if I didn’t have to rent in house after house with roommate after roommate to arrive at our own little oasis? Who knows? Probably not.

One day, one of my neighbours told me that there is a community garden in the neighbourhood in our new neighbourhood. I instantly signed up to get on the waitlist because as much as we are south facing, my passion for growing things extended to growing loofah which almost took out the hedge beside our house due to the fact that I didn’t realize that the vines can grow up to 25 or 50 feet tall and it latched on and nearly killed it. But oh well, you live, learn, and kill things along the way, right? Hedges can be replaced though. The silver lining there.

When I received notice that I got into the community garden, I danced. If I’m being totally honest, growing food and plants keeps my mind sharp, my mood balanced and my appreciation for what goes into the process of feeding ourselves, something that I think is an imperative in our modern world when we order everything at a click of a button.  

Take for instance a clove of garlic, a ten month endeavour.

I went to the community garden to pick out our plot, it is an absolute sanctuary there. Nothing but sky and grasses, bustling bees and gloriously wonderful dirt and silence for the most part. Minus the occasional plane from the adjacent airfield and on a Saturday when the hedge trimmers come out but here’s where I wanted things to go, I wanted to snap my fingers and it just be done. Where was the easy button when I need it? Silly me, that’s not how it works especially in the agricultural sense. Things take time, effort, diligence, observation, determination and can’t forget that stubbornness.

Our plot started out as a 15 by 15-foot gravel lot. The supply the wood and the soil and everything else, minus a few tools to toil with is your responsibility.

So, I rolled up my sleeves and set to work planning. When I pulled out the calculator, I kept chanting the mantra that it’s an investment.

 My family was so generous to help with their time, tools, and resources. For this I am incredibly grateful. And no sooner did we plan things out, order them and have them delivered, the rains started. Just like any normal plot twist it wreaked havoc on all of us.

My point is, is that I got word that my raised pots in a 4 by 4-foot space is now extending to a 15 foot by 15-foot space and at the time I couldn’t have been more tickled. And I still am. Even more so. Because the hardship that transpired next is and what was what took me away from writing, updates and sharing.

No sooner did the wood arrive, the rains released on us. So, we quickly hammered things down and left it until a later date when it wasn’t wet so that we could properly deal with it. The problem? Coordinating schedules especially with the sun.

Well, we basically had to do an hour of work here an hour of work there dodging the liquid sunshine, in between all the storm clouds all throughout March and April and then finally, FINALLY it all came together. Slowly but surely after breaking it down into bite sized palatable pieces, the wood was all in!

Then came the step of having to put the soil in. Here’s the thing, we bought wood that is higher than everyone else and so, the original amount of soil that I projected basically needed to be doubled. But I just didn’t fill it all the way to the top.

The curve ball here was that while it had been raining, several people had built their plots while we were recouping from getting sick and so, I had to wheelbarrow 45 loads of dirt further than I had planned in and it still isn’t filled to the top of the bed. Oh well, more room for compost, manure and all that fun stuff.

When I hit the 45th wheelbarrow load, I decided enough was enough and stopped adding loads of dirt.

Oh, that’s right now the seedlings I attempted to grow! I killed absolutely all of my seedlings that I tried to grow in our bedroom except one. Ironically, it’s a pepper plant, a seedling that I have the hardest time cultivating. No matter what I did, this plant wanted to grow.

So, it felt like I cheated and shortcut the process by going to the store to get seedlings for the things that I couldn’t direct sow.

Then I waited for a good weekend to plant. Well guess what, between getting sick multiple times and the weather being miserable, I didn’t get what I wanted into the ground until the last week of May. But realistically it probably wouldn’t have survived if I had started it earlier with the way the spring transitioned to summer.

June was a Junuary this year. Which is probably a good thing as previous Junes have been extremely hot feeding the wildfire season. Not this June. Cold, wet, hot, then cold again. Fickle as can be.

Circling back on Joni Mitchell’s spot-on lyrics,  

They took all the trees and put them in a tree museum. They charged the people a dollar and a half to see them

A community garden is kind of like a tree museum - more like a plant museum. Not necessarily trees per se, but we are charged to have plots in the tree museum and have access to it: the cynical truth.

So there you have it, a story of garden grit and gratitude.

I am thankful we have a local tree museum and I will appreciate it for as long as it remains. And I am thankful for that, mostly because it’s not a gaudy stucco house with a flat roof, no plants or a parking lot for that matter.