This is my new online journal. As a first post, I wrote an about page, which I’ve also copy-pasted below. Without a routine I’ll never post anything, so the plan is to write a new post every Monday. Next week, I’ll write about how I’m approaching putting together a garden that balances wild plants and domesticated plants for beauty and resilience.

About

On the surface, this blog is about cultivating the land to make it abundant forever with natural farming and permaculture. Underneath, it is about living the life we were created for — as Jesus said, to love God with all our hearts, and souls, and minds, and to love our neighbors as ourselves.

As for nuts and bolts, I’ll be documenting our journey to get more food from our half-acre yard, and less from the store. Over time we’ll develop a food forest ecosystem on a chunk of our land in addition to the gardens. Long term, we want to find enough land to truly support a family and community. I’ll keep a journal here of how we progress on this path. I’ll try to be as concrete as possible, so that if we learn something you can learn from it also.

Over the years I’ve learned a tremendous amount from ordinary people publishing out-of-the way blogs. I’ll search for something, come across a post somebody took the time to put online, and leave with more than I had before I read it. A few times, these people have introduced ideas that changed the course of my life. Tricks, stories, journals about the development of a garden over years, or thoughts about the big questions.

There is nothing new under the sun, and I won’t have anything deeply original to share. But every now and then I’ll do an experiment in my garden, or figure out a good trick, or have a thought about life that I think is important or useful. And given where the world is at now, it might be a new application of a very old idea, or a new mashup of idea to context. If I write up some of these things, maybe they will be useful to someone who otherwise wouldn’t have run into them.