No its not a grave

         Yesterday was my birthday, so I decided to spoil myself and leave the housework undone and go play in my garden. I’ve been reading quite a bit lately on “permaculture” and a thing called “hugelkultur”, which are basically gardening methods that once you get them going, tend to take care of themselves. So, I set out to start making my big barren yard a minimum maintenance oasis!

         
        As I was attempting to build a new bed using some of the ideas from hugelkultur when I realized that calling my blog “Practicing Serendipity” was hilariously serendipitous! It completely describes who I am. I garden the same way I cook, which is basically the way I attack all areas of my life! I read, study, observe lots of good ideas and methods in all sorts of things, and then when I attempt to implement them, it’s a sort of haphazard, half equipped process that in the end is left to chance to determine the end result. Most of the time it works out well enough, sometimes really well and sometimes…well not so much.

        
      To be painfully honest, I am a careless person. My earliest memories include feeling guilty about my inability, or unwillingness to just follow through with details and do a job well. Somehow I got by with a decent measure of success, but I know I frustrated a lot of people! So what does this have to do with my garden, or that shallow grave looking thing outside my bathroom window? Everything, of course.

       Hugelkultur is a method of gardening that builds beds over the top of dead wood, even whole tree trunks. The result is a bed that is both being fed by decomposing material, and watered by the amazing amount of water that the wood holds underground. This seems like a great method for my high dry sand hill of a yard. Then there is lasagna gardening, which relies on layers of compostable material to effortlessly maintain your growing plants which also sounds good to me. So, in my true haphazard manor, I combined a bit of this, and a bit of that and some of my own ideas and created the bed you see here. And I guess the rest is up to God! (by the way, I don’t actually believe in chance)