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My Love Affair with Gardening By Avalon
Garden Goddess, Katja Grace
There were a dozen of us who had mostly come out of intense left wing political involvement in urban centers. When I joined the family, a two acre garden had already been established. The folks who had started the commune had made it their business to learn as much as possible from local farmers about many things including growing food. I became completely enthralled with the process, and we all spent most of each day every day of the year providing for our needs by working the garden, canning and preserving the produce, making maple syrup, cutting firewood, etc. It was my first exposure to self-sufficient living and it made a profoundly positive impression on me. We grew 90% of what we ate...we bought bags of rice and bottles of cooking oil: we grew, wild crafted and preserved all the vegetables, fruits, grains and herbs we needed. We also had goats and chickens. I felt like I wanted to stay there and live like that forever, but after four years the communards moved on to other phases of life. I went to South America. There I lived in rural Indian villages mostly focusing on learning to back-strap weave, but I also participated with my indigenous neighbors in their age long traditions of growing corn, beans, squash, quinoa, amaranth, etc. I'm skipping a chapter or two that don't have to do with gardening. I came to live in Boulder, Colorado. I lived in a communal house with fellow activists (we were arrested together doing civil disobedience at Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant). I planted a garden in our backyard. I was working as a house painter. I couldn't wait to finish working each day, so I could get home and work in the garden where I was growing food for my communal family. When I noticed this pattern, I decided I should somehow find paying work doing gardening...since it was what I loved to do. I started looking for any leads or links I could find to people who were doing for-profit garden projects. That eventually led me to Larry Hershman, who a few of you met the other day. He was teaching the same series of lectures that he is now giving at Harbin. I became part of a small circle of trainee/apprentices (at first for no salary). He gave us lectures on Rudolf Steiner's bio-dynamic theories about agriculture. This was my first exposure to looking at agriculture from an esoteric perspective. I was attending the weekly lectures and started volunteering at Larry's home greenhouse and garden. He trained me in propagation (starting seeds), greenhouse growing, double digging garden beds, and growing both food and ornamental plants. Eventually he hired me to work as part of his landscaping business, Origin Horticulture. I worked for him literally until the day I went into labor with my first born child. (That's a whole ‘nother story!) I came to be with my husband and raise my child (children) in Northern California. Larry had introduced me to Ken. In fact we first met at the garden which is now OAEC...then the Farallones Institute. Ken also had been an apprentice to Larry in previous years, and we shared a passion for farming/gardening. We moved to his plot of land on Greenfield Ranch in Mendocino County. I had an infant, and was basically home-bound; so other than taking care of Sean, gardening again became my main activity. We grew a large family garden on our parcel (it was 3,000 acres divided by a lot of hippies into individual parcels...most of them were growing pot, but we grew vegetables). Next we moved to Santa Rosa, filled the backyard with abundant vegetables; and I worked for a season at a retail plant nursery. Then we made a significant move to becoming the land stewards/resident farmers at Summerfield Waldorf School. The bio-dynamic farm had been started there in conjunction with the elementary school, but it had been left and neglected for a few years. Ken and I resurrected those gardens and tree plantings: brought in sheep and chickens, had community work parties, and brought the children into the gardens for classes. We also grew enough to sell a lot of produce to the school community. We only stayed there for one year. My second child was born in the farm house. It was an amazing year with my four year old child and then my new born, living on a producing farm. The internal politics of the school community and the fact that we wanted our own place caused us to move to Sebastopol. As my children grew, I grew a model quarter acre of vegetables, fruit trees and vines, and flowering perennials. I must say, at it's heights it was a spectacularly beautiful and productive garden! (Somewhere I think I have some video footage of it.) Since I was a stay at home Mom...I tended the garden as I tended my children. I met a woman named Miley Arnold. She had a landscape business, and had an incredible garden full of flowering perennials. She taught me how to take cuttings, and invited me to help myself to her established plants; pretty soon I had more than I could plant in my garden. I was Miley's employee as a landscape gardener; and on a volunteer basis, I started landscaping the grounds at Summerfield Waldorf School with plants I had propagated. People admired the plantings and asking me to do the same at their homes. So I started my own landscaping business...Lavender's Blue. So there was about a ten year period where I was gardening in Mendocino and Sonoma Counties at home, as a volunteer, and professionally. Along with being a devoted mother, establishing and tending gardens was my main passion and daily activity. Motherhood led me into the
Waldorf teacher training, and my employment shifted from landscaping
to teaching Spanish. I continued to garden on the side. So, a year traveling...finding Watsu...intensive four years of training at the Watsu Center...and here I am! This passion and some knowledge about growing beautiful abundant gardens has been lying dormant for a half dozen years. It's re-kindled and found a pallet here at Avalon Springs! I'm excited and committed to expanding my knowledge especially expanding my familiarity with the permaculture perspective. I'm so thrilled and it feels so perfectly right to have organically found myself here spearheading the garden with such capable, visionary and loving souls. It's perfect! Katja Grace
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It
goes back to the early seventies. My first experience with self-sufficient
homestead gardening was as part of a commune in northern Vermont, "The
Dreamers". 