Out in the Canyon,  my newly acquired ½ acre parcel of land, on a south facing slope, located in a gully, downhill from the Rocky Mountain snowmelt, was overgrown and suffering from years of neglect.  After observing property over the winter, I noticed that the Cottonwood and Aspen trees on the homestead were dying.

Perhaps it was due to when the land was being excavated, but the disjointed property was victim to an excessive underground water table.  The substrate was bereft of life.   What remained was rocky, hard-crusted clay. 

The mature Aspen grove, sharing a unified root structure, seemed strong and intact if it weren’t for the pestilence and disease covering it.  The trunks showed signs of black, oozing, seeping sores, and dark grey lichen clung to the silver-white bark like deer ticks do to skin.  On the ground around the Aspens there were depressions.  Sunken swales where the plundering had occurred.   These cavities were filthy, dish-sponge marshes, ‘good for growing very little’.  There were other signs of infestation.  Like thickets of thorny shrubs claiming the space with gnarly branches; like dirty, pokey, fingers of homeless people, begging, reaching out for spare change.  In other areas were green patches of posh, pillowy moss that alluded to making promises of better days yet to come, [priestly] promises of better days yet to come.

There was so much decay that I too seemed to fall ill in the gloom of it’s malady.  So it was decided then and there to take up arms.  Bolstered against icy winds and rains, I clad myself in boots, gloves, goggles and overalls.  And with brushcutter in hand, I began a deluge of my own, restoring health and vitality back to the land.

 Weeks of pickaxing -skeletons; shoveling away -bones (unearthing remnants rusty nails, bottles, cables, and cans)  I cleared the air.  Filling in holes, laying down compost, mulching layer upon layer, spraying leaf, branch, trunk and root with organic fertilizer; and again spraying the disease on the trees with vinegar.   As new soil began to grow, the land seemed to flow less like a river and more like a meadow.  The warm sun baked the oozing black wounds into thick scabs of bark.  New fruit and nut trees were planted a top hugelkulture mounds of composted mulch.  That’s black, mycelium-laced, sweet-smelling, dank, mulch.  (Of which I composted from a local tree service who dumped their of wood chips on a vacant lot.) Finally, under the canopy of giant trees, tiered in (7) layers, I planted a permaculture food forest; with a myriad of berries, flowers, herbs and grasses; bringing signs of abundance like; hummingbirds, bees and butterflies.  Evenmore, morel mushroom spores, already native to the area, were planted in the woods bordering the property.  

So you see, stewarding the ecological environment had helped me grow too.  Because the garden and I held hands, patiently learning what Balance is.  Homesteading in the 21st Century.