When Ideas Come Alive

When I started thinking about my garden earlier this year, I envisioned my garden looking and functioning in certain ways.

The first thing I envisioned was doing my garden in strips, basically instead of tilling a huge piece of dirt up for plants I only wanted to till where I would put the plants. My husband got that done for me and it looked great.

The next thing I wanted to do was put down something that would smother the weeds. Every 7 years we allow our land to rest, last year was our rest year so there were a lot of weeds that grew and needed to be dealt with this year or my garden would be overrun with them.

I had some old newspaper leftover from the winter so I decided to use it as a barrier but I knew I would have to put something on top to help hold it down and I also knew this is where money would come in, something that had stopped me up until now. I decided that no matter how much I spent it would be worth it, I have been taking and taking from my dirt for years never giving anything in return.

A few days ago I decided to stop at Menard’s to see what they had, I found a really good organic mulch/compost that I knew would be perfect. I only bought 3 bags so I could try it out and I loved how it looked so much that I’ll have to go back for more but here is what part of my garden looks like now,

Here is another picture,

You can clearly see the paper underneath with my compost/mulch on top.

I keep telling my kids that you need to work smarter not harder. Making my vision a reality will cut down on labor, disturbing nature, it will help retain moisture for those dry days that come in the summer, and everything I added will help build more soil and add worms and microorganisms to help future plants grow.

I love seeing my vision become reality, I was so excited about doing it that it surprised me how quickly and easily it got done. For the first time my mind had fun instead of seeing what I was doing in the garden as work.

About Mimic Nature

Hello everyone! I’m so glad to see you! I’m Jana, I’m an eccentric wife and mother; I work 2 jobs and homeschool my kids. With all this going on in my life, I want to focus my attention on the things that make me happy, and the one thing that has made me happy ever since I was a little kid is nature. As my life progressed and changed through my teen years and my early married life, I lost my connection to it. Life took over and here I am living disconnected from nature because of work, bills, and every day events that keep me away. So the next chapter of my life will be dedicated, at least in some small part, to reconnecting to nature; I still have a mortgage, work, and a family to take care of, but now, I will be more aware of nature and my place within it. Each day, I will find some small way to not harm nature. Not long ago I was introduced to something called permaculture and I fell in love with it. Basically, it’s building a small ecosystem in your own backyard that is based off of what nature would do naturally. In turn your backyard helps you, and you help your backyard…with minimal work!! At first it may take more work, but over time, your backyard will become self-sustaining and you won’t have to work as hard…other than harvesting. I love the life lessons that I learn from nature, so what I promise to do is share a lesson that I’ve learned from nature each week, share what I’m learning about permaculture, and share my own personal progress in changing my homestead into a permaculture Garden of Eden. And since it’s hard to make any changes in life, I want to have some free giveaways once in awhile…all nature themed of course, to help all of us remember our ‘green’ family. Read a few articles, see if you like what is there, if you do, go ahead and subscribe. If you don’t like what you see, that’s ok, I’m honored that you took the time to get to know me a little and see my vision for my blog and my life.

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