A Blank Canvas

Yesterday was an exciting day for our garden progress. Our work throughout the yard had resulted in a mountain of trimmings filling the backyard. We had researched the rental of a small chipper only to find out small chippers were not actually rent-able. And so the pile sat...

...until yesterday. With the long drought, many neighbors have had trees die and called out companies to cut and chip them. Hearing such work occurring down the street, we took advantage of the fortuitous situation. We were able to get our backyard full of trimmings chipped into a little pile of mulch, and also get the truck-full of mulch from the neighbor's job! Now the full extent of usable space in the backyard has become a blank slate for creating our garden. Only, as we work to apply permaculture principles, the materials of the site are used as the inspiration and means for implementing the design, so the slate is really not so blank. Instead, it is a field of possibilities, and we happily began laying out the routes for our mulch paths.