Where to Start?
Building your own community and creating the environment you want to be in, depends almost entirely on you.
A quote that has resonated with me a lot recently has been:
“If you inherently long for something, become it first.
If you want gardens, become the gardener.
If you want love, embody love.
If you want mental stimulation, change the conversation.
If you want peace, exude calmness.
If you want to fill your world with artists, begin to paint.
If you want to be valued, respect your own time.
If you want to live ecstatically, find the ecstasy within yourself.
This is how to draw it in, day by day, inch by inch.”
-Victoria Erickson
It was one visit to my grandmother’s house last year that set me on this path. This epiphany hit me: this community, this environment, wouldn’t just appear out of thin air. If I wanted something, I had to be the one to make it. First up, building the community…
So, I planned a birthday party.
We spent so many weekends preparing the house. Doing the yard work was a huge endeavor since it was left to overgrow by the previous tenants.
Honestly, that alone gave me so much joy. Just having my hands covered in dirt again.
To see this home that I loved so much brought back to its former glory, little by little.
The backyard was actually useable again. We got seating for different areas and installed an outdoor TV. I got some themed decorations: pink flamingos with palm fronds.
I was so excited to have my family and friends there with me to bring the ‘together-ness’ back to this house and to this town as a whole, in my eyes.
The music was playing. The sun was shining. We grilled burgers and hotdogs, had different chips and dips, and cracked open ice-cold beer and seltzers. We floated in the pool and laughed. It was a true American summer day.
I loved every second of it and I am so grateful for the memories with everyone there. It brought so much life back to me. Just being with everyone made me hopeful that what I intended to do here, bringing that mountains-community back home, was not just a dream but a real possibility. It just took some initiative on my end – to be the one to actually get people together and create that community.
But I still had a lot of work to do for the other half of this – building the environment.
With a freshly cut and cleared out lawn, my boyfriend’s birthday present to me was four raised planter beds to start a garden!!
I did so much research. I could tell you so much about dirt soil.
I ordered seeds that would thrive in my specific garden zone. Thank you to Elise at The Urban Harvest for being so kind and sending everything so fast.
I planted these perfect seeds in my perfect new soil and quite literally jumped for joy when I first saw them sprout. They grew and grew – for weeks. I did more research and picked up fish emulsion for my first fertilizer!
The next day, there was nothing there.
I looked out my window in the morning, and my heart dropped. I ran out the back door and the planters were practically empty.
Little bite marks were all that was left at the base of the stem.
For context, with our house being on a canal, the iguanas run amok. I thought the raised planters, with the plastic leg covers for good measure, would be enough to keep the iguanas away from the plants.
But, the iguanas had just had their babies, and they were everywhere. I think the babies must’ve been small enough to fit under the plastic leg covers and were able to climb directly up the wood.
They didn’t waste any time chowing down, either. I can only assume the smell of the fish emulsion fertilizer attracted them since the plants really hadn’t been bothered before.
I was deflated.
It was now too late in the season to start new seeds, and if I bought already grown seedlings from the store, they’d be eaten again anyway.
Take Two.
I want to walk outside with my basket and pluck fresh fruit from a tree that I grew.
I want to harvest my own vegetables so I know my family is eating clean food that wasn’t sprayed with chemicals.
I want to bring flowers inside from my own garden.
I want to see the bees happily buzzing around completely covered in pollen.
So, I wasn’t about to give up after this.
I was going to figure out how to make this work.
Hence the drafting up of Plan B.
Over the winter months, I drafted a design to build an enclosure on top of my planters.
I took the measurements of the planter box and then decided how high I wanted to go. My biggest concern here was that after doing all this work, and the plants started to take off… they’d run out of vertical room.
How could I build this enclosure that would allow for extra space down the line?
I spent a lot of time planning and researching. I couldn’t find anything close to what I needed online.
The price of materials had gone up dramatically and I wasn’t sure if this would actually work to protect the plants. So I decided to start with just one enclosure to test it out.
I wanted to make sure that the pollinators could still reach my plants. From what I could tell, 1/4” hardwire cloth was small enough to keep the iguana babies out but still big enough for our bees to fit through, so I started there.
Ideally these enclosures would be made out of wood to match the planters themselves, but since I wasn’t sure if this would even work, I decided to create the prototype enclosure out of PVC pipe.
There was one Saturday morning where I was standing outside in front of my empty planters, my coffee mug in hand. My soil had become dirt without anything growing in it, and it looked like a sad little barren wasteland.
“Okay, enough planning. Just do something and we’ll see if it works. You can always adjust later but you can’t keep doing nothing.”
So I set my coffee down, and started right then and there.