Building Our Raised Garden Beds
It’s been a long time since I’ve wanted to do this.
I took a badly needed break.
Back in 2017, when we moved out of the van into an apartment, I was going through some stuff. And I won’t lie, still am. So I took some time away from social media, from posting as “homesweetvan”, and tried to look into myself to figure out what was really going on.
A lot of the noise from the internet was blocking out my own thoughts. It sometimes felt impossible to sort out what thoughts belonged to me, and which ones belonged to others. I went through some deep depression that led me into some really dark places.
I found guilt, shame, and sadness around my inability to take action in the past, to stay true to myself. It took a long time to sort through. It was often messy, chaotic, and wild, but I guess that’s life.
5 years later, I feel like I’ve gotten some serious clarity and am ready to start sharing again, because I do feel like even if it’s helpful to one person, it’s worth it.
Home is where the heart is
Buying a house and creating a home of our own has been surprisingly healing. It’s shown me something about myself: that I love carving out healing, warm, and harmonious space.
One of the biggest healing properties of our new home has been our garden.
In the spring of 2022, not quite a year into owning this house, we started working on a project to get as close to an Earthship design as possible. Our goal is to grow as much of our own produce as possible here in the high desert, and do so in a relatively urban environment on our .29 acre property.
Making room for Mother Nature
One of the underlying themes of our project is our desire to live more intimately with our natural surroundings.
We hope to make some big changes to our yard, to create an even more enjoyable space for us and for our wild neighbors (deer, hawks, owls, rabbits, and more). We’re planning to get to the status of “Certified Wildlife Sanctuary”! We’ll share more on that later…
Making room for Mother Nature
Here in the high desert of Central Oregon, there are some basic challenges and principles that we have to consider (which I’ll go through in another post).
Some things we have to consider: relative humidity, winter temperatures, sandy soil, and low annual rainfall. We also live in an urban environment, hooked up to utilities.
For us, these are all exciting design challenges that we’re looking forward to taking on and sharing here with anyone who’s interested.
More to come
This is all really new, and we’re doing it in our free time, so there will definitely be more to come.