URBAN Haven

(Early stages of our mapping out our garden. Not depicted in this are our zucchini plants down further on the left!)

(We learned after that you don’t mound potatoes until they’ve grown so we ended up levelling out those mounds :P)

This is my second year of planting and harvesting a garden of my own. With the help of ladybugs, bees, butterflies, snails, my husband, the sun, the moon, the garden hose and our little plot of soil, my little slice of haven in the city came into fruition this year. It has been a wildly rewarding experience -- teaching me about my own ability to care, in a way that only Mother Earth can show. This garden has proven my capabilities of caring on a scale I didn’t know I had. This garden has taught me that nothing is more paralyzing than overthinking and, equivalently, nothing is as freeing as just doing.

The idea of growing my own food has always seemed far fetched and too grown up of a responsibility for me. When our lives slowed down in March, my partner and I spent what we had thought was 3 hours in the garden, turning over the little plot of abandoned soil behind our building, picking out the weeds (to no avail) and mapping and planting our vegetable garden as we went. When we decided to call it a day, we found it hilarious when we realized that the 3 hours in our head, was in reality 7 STRAIGHT hours of gardening. This anecdote of losing time in the garden would set the tone for this season of our lives. Having all the time in the world and then losing all sense of it to the projects that we’ve never made the space for us to explore until now. 

6 months later, we find ourselves in the phase of the garden where we stand back and marvel at how Mother Earth knows exactly what she’s doing. Reaping the fruits of our labour with the excitement of a child at play. Thanking the earth for providing for us so abundantly and selflessly.