Dismantling an Inner City Homestead - Part 2

The garden. The beautiful food that came out of this sweet little spot sort of baffles my mind sometimes. I look back at pictures and don't quite think it was all real. But I know it was.

I have been thinking about making a book for the next people who live here. But 90% of the people of the world wouldn't care, and that would hurt me. Maybe a map, telling them what is where? Maybe.

This link is a picture of what it looked like in May, 2008.

We took all the leaves and mulched with them, so the yard looks tidy, if not empty. There is even still chard growing in the back of the garden... if the new people know what chard is. lol...

The herb beds. Part of them are coming with me. I haven't taken the things I want yet. I figure between the day we get the keys (the 19th) and the day we give these ones up (the 1st of Dec) I will have a 'garden moving day' and take all of the plants I love and can keep with me up to my new space.

This is the home of our former chicken coop. This is a link the summer before we got the chickens. I mulched this space, put the yard waste from the garden on it, and then mulched it again. Next season it will have pumpkins on it. lol... I know this because I saw pumpkin seeds in the garden compost and in that chicken loving soil, you could COMPLETELY neglect them and the pumpkins would come. Surprise for the new house owners I guess. ;) I hope they like pumpkins. I will put my worms on this as well, so they can dig down into the soil and help with the breakdown. If I was going to be here another year I would put a tarp over this piece and allow it to compost. Then turn it over next spring and plant there... perhaps corn. Corn really likes nitrogen that chicken poo would give it. A nice little corner of corn.

Sigh. Not my space.

I think of the beauty this yard has given me and it makes me want to scream "we can't leave"... but honest to god, the house is too small for us. We have outgrown it. We have outgrown this town. Our friends are elsewhere, Don's job is elsewhere, out lives have been elsewhere for a while. It is time. But part of it hurts. Nearly 4 years I have put myself into this place. I have painted, dug up, redid, modified, improved, planted and harvested. I know that is life... and I don't mind leaving some of it. But other things... like the sandbox? And the garden? And my black current bushes that I planted when we first got here in the abandoned side of the lot that had garbage in it, that has since then become a huge bountiful garden... each of those things kind of stab me in the heart a little bit.

Somewhere, some how, I always do this. I always make my house into a home. But it takes about two years. And that is true of anywhere.

Two years feels long before you start it.