Moon Day Thoughts

The feel of wood, the oppressiveness of giant brambles, and growing your own compact and beautiful medicinal herb garden.

Our demonstration medicinal herb garden.

I was planning to finish the second installment on my pilgrimage piece today. Instead I’m going to tell you what we’ve been up to here on the farm and save that one for later this week.

I have a strong intention of getting on a regular publishing schedule but I’m also trying to write from a conscious and focused place. So far this spring, finding the time, space, and focus hasn’t been the easiest thing. Partly because there’s just a lot to do in the physical world, partly because of the constraints built in to our current off-grid situation.

Right now Tatiana has the kitchen table in our tiny cabin because she’s trying to put together a handout for a class we’re hosting in our farm garden on Wednesday. We’re pretty excited about the class; we’ve got about 20 people wanting to come and learn about “How to Make Your Own Medicinal Herb Garden.”

Tatiana is the mastermind of this one. The idea is to let people really meet a dozen or so essential medicinal herbs and get tips and pointers on how to arrange them for maximum beauty and minimal fuss by sharing what Tatiana’s done with a little demonstration garden we started working on last summer. The garden features a couple of elders, a couple comfreys, two kinds of echinacea (echinacea purpurea and native Tennessee echinacea), oregano, yarrow, thyme, passionflower, sage, prairie sage…and of course, our namesake, violas.

All in a 10-foot by 20-foot space ringed by a miniature stone wall made of rocks picked up on walks around the property here. The garden has drip irrigation and it doesn’t need a lot of weeding because the herbs she chose for it give good ground cover and pretty much out-compete most of the weeds. Which is saying something here in the temperate rainforest zone we inhabit in Middle Tennessee.

Also, many of the plants flower so it’s quite lovely; someone in the garden is going to be blossoming at any time during the spring and summer.

We finally had a day of blue skies again after a week of heavy geoengineering, so everything looks beautiful right now. (One thing about the geoengineering - we got a lot of rain! Some of the plants - motherwort, marshmallow, valerian - and a lot of the grass and weeds grew about a foot in one week’s time.)

Today being the first dry day in a week, I spent two and a half hours mowing in the garden this morning. I’ve got another hour and a half’s worth of mowing to finish the paths between the beds and the western side of the garden and a little weed-whacking around the irrigation and greenhouse and we should feel safe letting people in to wander around.

So I’m writing this from our little studio in the woods we started building last October.

It’s pretty comfy! We’re almost done with the exterior; we finished putting all the windows in and put the door in last week. Just need to put exterior trim under the soffets and at the corners and along the seam where the siding meets eight feet up from the floor. And then we can start finishing the interior. (Hence the bags of rockwool in the picture above — our goal is to use as much wood as possible and the most natural form of insulation we can afford. We both love the feel of wood and we figured, hey — if we’re building our own little office in the woods, we might as well try to do it in the most natural style possible. I know the little shed I built in 2022 from wood milled here on the farm feels so good inside — even with no insulation, it still seems to breathe and deal with temperature changes better than buildings made with a bunch of plastic and OSB.)

After mowing this morning, I took a little break and then got back to work on the project I’ve been working on over the last few days: clearing brush and turning a hickory tree that came down in the big storm a couple years ago into firewood.

This area, which runs along the side of the cabin and extends about 30 yards towards the woods, used to be a nice little meadow space. But in the three years since the farmer’s daughter and her husband moved out, it was quickly reclaimed by the undergrowth and had turned into a thicket of blackberry brambles, poison ivy, pine, sassafras, oak, and tulip poplar saplings. All clustered around a fallen hickory tree that Big B (my boss and the patriarch of the farm) had kindly chopped into somewhat manageable chunks for us when we were clearing ground to build the studio.

Clearing this space had been on our to-do list since we moved in and this Spring we finally got around to starting on it. I used our new Stihl battery-powered chainsaw (kicks ass!) to cut up the hickory branches and also — in a skunk deterrence measure — moved the remaining firewood from last winter away from the house and into the area pictured below.

Two things I’ve learned since moving here that might be helpful or at least interesting:

(1) Hickory burns really well in a wood stove. I prefer it to oak, even. Burns very clean and hot and evenly; and

(2) It’s amazing the emotional and mental lift I got from clearing this overgrown area right next to the cabin. I didn’t realize how oppressive the chaotic jumble of plants — especially the blackberry canes and briars — were until I’d cut them down and removed them. I used to harbor these romantic notions of leaving nature untouched at all possible opportunities, but there’s a lot to be said for negative space and for working with the land and the plants to create a feeling of openness, balance and beauty.

I hope you found this uplifting and enjoyable. We’ve got to go take the dog for his evening walk and check in on the plants in the garden. Be well, and thank you for reading.