The Process

Describing my garden as my medium isn’t entirely accurate. My medium is something beyond “the garden.” It’s our land. It is much more than the plants growing here. I want this space to be full of life. There should be flowers, worms, bees, fruits, grasses, trees, spiders, and chickens. There should be harmony. The garden is a macro view; it’s the obvious and visual piece. I want this land to teach me lessons that I can apply to more land in the future. I want my canvas to grow. In my wildest dreams of success it might inspire someone else too, the way that learning about regenerative agriculture has inspired me.

The words “Finding My Medium” were scrawled on the top of a page for the last 4 seasons, and I did nothing with them. They just sat there. Every once in a while I would erase them and write them again. I found myself inspired to expand on the idea sometimes when I was wandering through the botanic gardens admiring a stranger’s use of color, texture, and repetition. I have been too intimidated to start; afraid of feeling uninspired when working with words instead of soil. In my notebook, I wrote “creativity is a process” hoping that reminder would help me to move through my anxiety. Finally, I started, and I never would’ve predicted what got the pencil moving: Chickens.

This March we decided we would get a flock of six hens. Josh and I had said we would get chickens before, and then we didn’t. We’ve changed our mind half a dozen times. Last spring, we decided it just wasn’t worth it. We live in the suburbs. Good quality eggs are becoming very accessible. Animals get expensive fast. By June of last year I had completely changed my mind, again. My garden needs animals living on it’s soil if it was ever going to approach what I had dreamt up.

We got our flock in the first days of April. They spent their first week living in a box in my office where I listened to them happily chirp and scratch through their first days of life while I worked. We shared our exciting news with friends and family, and everyone wanted to know more. I don’t think they realized those inquiries would result in me finally using this URL, and that they would need to read about my garden and lost creativity in order to see updated chicken pictures. And yet, here we are.

I couldn’t start the story in the middle. The chickens wouldn’t be here if not for the garden.