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)

                 Practicing Serendipity

                              or the Accidental Gardener

     My daughter, Keri Lee is always telling me I should blog. She’s says that I am the original “crunchy mama”, from long before it was trendy. Most recently she has enjoyed my “accidental” garden stories of my compost volunteers that are now bearing fruit. She told me she was going to think up a good name for a blog like Serendipitous Gardener, so that got me thinking.

     "Practicing Serendipity" is an oxymoron and oxymorons are fun. Life is full of them, and I think God planned it that way. Some of our greatest joy comes from serious pain. Think childbirth. Some serious pain comes from our greatest joys. Think teenagers. And some of the most rewarding gardening decides to pop up from the compost!

     I have had considerable difficulty learning how to garden in Central Florida. So far my best efforts to grow edibles have failed, but I have enjoyed amazing papayas that sprouted from a friend’s compost heap, pineapples that grew on barely cared for tops placed in the dirt and this year some pretty decent tomatoes that showed up out of nowhere!

     Consequently, I have adopted a whole new gardening philosophy. I am gradually attempting to enrich my barren sandy yard with kitchen scraps and other compostable goodies. I have a rough plan of what I will plant here or there, but if something pops up and it’s not in my way at the moment, I let it grow and see what develops.

     Yes, I do know it’s a stupid way to garden, and you never know what will come of the seed of some hybrid veggie, but it leaves room for serendipity. It has also given me much food for thought and so far a little food for the table, so I am enjoying it. Besides, if nothing special grows on my serendipitous plants, they are still pretty and they eventually add to my compost pile! Nothing is valueless. That is my philosophical gardening thought for the day!