First buds on dwarf apple tree.Listening to right now: Paolo Conte
Today's Happiness Formula: The sound of Italian first thing in the morning! Waking with books in my head. Waking and feeling truly awake (thanks to obeying my wheat allergy).
Following My Bliss by: Today I'll ride my bike to my chiropractor and then to get wine to go with homemade corn tortillas tonight. Yum. A friend is coming this morning to pick up the incorporation papers for an adult creativity center we are in the process of opening. Later, I will finish writing a grant and doing edits on my partner's novel.
We live on one-tenth of an acre in the city. We are in a zone 6b (for you gardening nerds) that acts a lot like a zone 7. We are in a clean watershed. Our bio-region is diverse, to say the least.
And right here, in this tiny yard, there is so much going on:
We have been eating asparagus for about three weeks already.
There is edible kale -- it overwintered -- and there are baby kales, chard, dandelion, greens of all sorts coming up.
Our kiwi vines -- yes, kiwi, there is a hardy variety -- are trailing and filling out the front arbor. I can already see buds aplenty.
Our grape vines are robust.
Our dwarf apple that we planted two summers ago has its first flowers. Perhaps we will eat an apple this fall from our own yard.
Our almond tree is healthy -- for now. Almonds in California are being plagued by an unknown disease and I fear for ours.
Our strawberries are covered in flowers and we will eat strawberries into the fall -- and this is only their third summer here.
This is all in a yard that has a ton of flowers. Besides being good for bees and birds and butterflies, they are good for my eyes. And we still have too much grass -- which in my book means we have grass. I would like to not have any and someday we will accomplish that goal. For now, we mow with a reel mower.
For every vegetable or fruit we eat out of our own yard, we are decreasing our footprint on this small planet.
I won't go on and on about the evils of sprawl. Here's a place you can read about that. But from what I have observed about people who live out in the country, they spend a lot of their time driving into cities. Everything they do takes more resources. Think about how much more fuel it takes to get them their groceries alone. Add to this the fact that they most often do not work any where near their homes. They are constantly commuting.
City living can be the more relaxing option -- if you approach it intentionally and mindfully.
We don't have to have a car. Which you know by now. At the very least, could you get rid of one of your cars? (It is pretty safe to assume in this country that if you have two adults in your household, you have two cars.)
There's no public transportation out in the country. There's barely any in the suburbs.
We live within a 3 mile radius of absolutely everything we need. Think about that. It's all walkable! We don't have to drive for anything -- we can walk to our food, our entertainment, our work.
And if more people opted out of cars and into bikes, walking, and public transportation, imagine how much more wonderful and human-friendly city-living could become.
We could remove driveways and add gardens! We could make kid-dense areas car free. There are parts of London where you can't drive a car. Downtown Freiberg, Germany is car free.
Living off the grid might sound ideal, but grids work because they are efficient in that they serve many, many people. What we suck into the grid is where the change can -- and needs to -- happen. The grid itself is not the problem.
We are part of a community. Some of our best friends live within the houses right around us. That is worth something -- especially if you believe times might become increasingly difficult.
We are two people living in 900 square feet (small here, but large in most parts of the world) on one tenth of an acre. We could be two people living on 10, 20, 100 acres, and that is not justifiable unless you are a farmer.
And being a farmer is something most of us could not handle, no matter how much we like to romanticize it. Most of us can't grow a decent tomato. Let's just start where we are, shall we? Like with salad greens -- you don't even need a garden bed; a pot will do for salad greens!
Does gardening and producing your own food on a small piece of land sound like too much work? Because it's small, the gardening is dense, which means less weeding. And because we aren't driving around all the time trying to fulfill needs or get to jobs, we have a lot of free time.
Because this is about quality of life, above all else. We live cheaper and easier and so we don't need to work as much and can concentrate on our writing and our art and our friendships and having fun.
Imagine that.
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