Spirit Gardening

Your post remembered me about my own childhood , i used to spent my summer holidays at my grandparents farm. My grandfather was a very working man and he always was eager to teach me new things in gardening. I remember one day, when he proposed me to take care of my own small plot. It was full of wild bushes and i got a bit scared, but in the end it was quite fun to get rid of them, since he had a small chipper and used it to get rid of those bushes. It took me two days to get all wood chips out of my hair.

You know, I have tried so many different types of meditation, but I cannot get any better than getting out in the garden and sticking my hands in the dirt. It's something about the sunshine, the breeze in your hair and the smell of earth. However, I am in a completely different situation to you. I live on five acres in rural Victoria, Australia. My problem is having too much space (and gazillions of weeds that take over my vegies). I have just decided to reduce my vegetable garden size by about three quarters - to three beds of approx one metre by three metres. I feel much happier and less overwhelmed now. So gardening can be meditation, but if you can't keep on top of it, it can also do your head in!

Great post Cosima,

Playing with chickens in the sun sounds like quite a lovely way to spend your younger years... Just hope you didn't dine on the compost/bugs with them!! ;)

I have to agree with you re gardening as a meditative activity... I love gardening, well I love the idea of gardening. I think I have a somewhat romantic picture in my head when I think about all of my gardening attempts... My last garden was a medicinal herb garden, and like the others before it, it too fell victim Dr. Greenthumbs short term memory loss.

Most of my gardens end up looking like my facial hair... unkempt, disheveled, overgrown and in good need of a trim.

Thank you for such a fantastic post - And keep em' coming.

Viva la gardens of the world!!

Gardening is definitely a type of meditation! If you take it that way of course.
We just planted a beautiful garden yesterday on our roof and it looks very promising. We planted zucchinis, 3 different types of tomatoes, strawberries, black papers, onions, and few types of green leaves.
In California it is the last moment to do that and I hope we will have good organic veggies in the next few months.
We also brought a new compost bin and trying to figure out how to work with it and grow few thousands of nice little worms to digest all the scraps we have.
That is a very exciting thing for us and I am sure we can find here some good advice of how to make all this working, not just for us, but for all the interested neighbors in our awesome building.
Will post few pics here later of the new garden.