We made a creek

Beneath the weeds and discarded seed trays, a wet-weather spring is discovered

Hi,

During our three years of waiting for our herb farm / sanctuary land to appear, one of the things I kept envisioning was that it would have a sweet little creek. In my mind, I actually referred to this as “the sweetest little creeks…”

There is a big creek that cuts through the land here. It, and the land on our side of it, needs a lot of love. Which we are, of course, giving it. But that’s a story for a different day.

Suffice it to say it could become a sweet ole creek one day, and that’s my plan for it, but it wasn’t the little clear bubbling creek that sustained me through three years living in a trailer across from a sawmill.

But it turns out that sweet little creek was there in the garden space we are cultivating. We just didn’t realize it until a month or so ago.

A little backstory. The farmers who own the land where we’re growing medicinal herbs now used to grow a lot of vegetables. Then they started getting more into raw dairy - goats and cows. I think they now run the largest raw dairy operation in Tennessee. Milk, yoghurt, cheeses, kefir. Really yummy and nutritious!¹

So, right around the time I started working for them a couple years ago, they stopped growing veggies on a big scale.

This is what our garden area looked like last fall. If you want an idea of how crazy fast Nature can take over in the Southeast, this is basically after fifteen months of no one using the garden.

Did I mention the farmers have goats? Luckily, goats are fantastic lawn mowers. Here’s another picture from last fall. The goats have already taken out a lot of the weeds and tall grasses and are going after the oak tree:

It only took the goats a couple weeks to clear the weeds. But we still had a lot of raking, hoeing, and dragging work to do. And bags upon trash cans upon more bags of old landscape fabric, irrigation drip tape, discarded seed trays, and other detritus to clean up. I’m still putting in a couple hours most days cleaning up and prepping ground for new planting but it’s amazing how much we’ve accomplished since the worst of the winter weather ended in February.

This is the area of the garden where we discovered the wet weather springs (there are actually two holes not far from each other). This picture was probably taken in mid-February.

We were a little concerned because this part of the garden seemed to be constantly flooded. It’s the lowest lying area in the garden and it rained a lot in February, and there was a tenacious mat of biodegradable landscape fabric buried an inch or two below the ground that was holding the water. But we were wondering, how are we going to use this area if it holds this much water whenever we get an inch or two of rain?

And then Phoenix noticed there was a spot where water seemed to be coming up from out of the ground. Kobi was alerted to this possibility and immediately began digging. And, sure enough, we have a wet weather spring!²

As I mentioned in a previous post, I spent some time digging a little drainage ditch to connect the water coming up from under the ground to the pond on the other side of the garden fence. Phoenix has been finding rocks and lining the spring and.the banks of our new little creek. It’s a work in progress but it’s so sweet and it feels like an affirmation of the work we’re doing. to steward this fertile patch of land we’re so grateful to be able to use for growing lots of beautiful, healing herbs.

Here’s a video of the bigger spring:

And a video following the sweet little creek down to the fence line:

1. It seems that raw milk is making a comeback in recent years. My daughter was raised on raw goat milk (plus olive oil and maybe a couple other ingredients I forget now) because her mom wasn’t able to make enough milk to nurse her, and because my daughter suffered violent allergic reactions to every single baby formula we tried, including all of the so-called organic ones. We bought raw goat milk from farmers across the Southeast when she was a baby, but you weren’t able to find it in stores and even buying it from small farms it was labeled as being only for consumption by pets, not people.

You are “allowed” as a “human” to enjoy raw dairy in Tennessee. You just can’t legally buy it or sell it. But you can buy a herd share; since you are now part owner of the goats or cows from whence the raw dairy products are sourced, you are consuming your own raw dairy products at your own risk.

2. Tennessee has a lot of “wet-weather” natural features, including a cornucopia of wet-weather creeks. Meaning, if there’s enough rain you have a creek. If it’s dry, you have a creek bed. So our new creek is definitely going to be seasonal.