Lavender Marathon

Today with both a thankful blessing and a sigh of relief, I harvested the last of our lovely lavender flowers at Wildcat Gardens. I am always a bit sad to see the lavender season end. However, the past four weeks have felt like a lavender marathon and it will be nice to slow down a bit. Ben and I grow around 500 bushes of Lavender angustifolia, both the Munstead and Hidcote varieties.  The bushes are scattered around the property, some planted in graceful terraces and others amongst other hardy mountain perennials in rowdy beds bursting with color and aromas. We grow over 40 different herbs here on the farm but lavender is my favorite herb child. It thrives without irrigation in Colorado’s arid environment; withstands our tough winters; short, hot summers and poor soil without any fuss. The abundant and hungry wildlife does not eat it, although I have witnessed groups of does lounging in the lavender like privileged princesses. But above all, lavender is so beautiful, fragrant, productive and useful. It fills my spirit every time I see it growing with such purple grace and unconcern in this rugged, mountain environment.

Ben, being the data man that he is, has already crunched the numbers for this season’s lavender harvest. We harvested over 260 pounds of lavender flowers and processed them into over 150 dried lavender bundles, dozens of floral smudge sticks, and our own essential oil and hydrosol. Last year we purchased a larger copper Alembic distiller, four times the size of our previous one. It is a nice upgrade, allowing more efficient use of our time and energy, plus it came with an ‘essencier,’ a complicated copper contraption that separates the oil from the hydrosol. Great! One less job for me to do. We set the distiller up on the patio next to the creek and pond, as we need the cool water for condensing the steam. It is a lovely set up, and we both enjoy the process. The yard and house have smelled divine for the past two weeks while we were distilling. Next week I will start bottling the essential oil and hydrosol. With the ‘big three’ harvests now complete (St. John’s wort, monarda and lavender flowers), the rest of our growing season will be a little more relaxed. I will be able to turn my focus to other chores that have been neglected in the lavender marathon, including blogging. To be continued…

Lessons From the Wildcat Gardens Pond

The idea for our pond came up when we found out that our local water company was planning on building a dam at the bottom of the canyon that acts as the main artery in and out of our rural forest subdivision. I was against the idea of the dam at first; it was very expensive (almost $10 million), but changed my mind when I found out that the “headwater” (outlet pipe) for the pumped water flowing to the reservoir comes out just above our property in Two Mile Creek, the natural ravine of the Two Mile Gulch watershed. It also happened to run through a culvert right underneath our driveway. It ends up there are a dozen property owners who happen to have this waterway somewhere through their property; ours happens to be 30’ from our house.

Needless to say we wanted this watercourse to be very robust, in order to handle over 200,000 gallons a day, for many days, of water flowing through it. When I built my house in 1999, there was already a culvert on the property, and I extended it another 30’, with no thought that it would be used for this new purpose. That reminded me of something Steve Jobs talked about in his commencement address about “connecting the dots”:

“Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”

So my life brought me this opportunity to connect the dots to something I did 16 years ago, when my current life conditions were simply not imaginable. In October 2005, a year before the water district was scheduled to “turn on the water” for the first time (October 5, 2006), my partner Aria and I designed and built (with friends) a dam and dry stacked stone patio. In 2010, we repurposed that stone, and built a nicer patio area that we distill lavender on each year.

From day one, we see that there would be a significant buildup of silt, etc. from the water slowing down when it hit our dam. Each year we need to remove 10-20 cubic yards of gravel, sand, silt and clay, or else our beautiful pond area would fill up and cease to exist. For most of that time, I’ve dreaded this project; it usually takes hiring a team of folks to hand-dig it all out (because it’s too destructive to use machinery), usually taking 50-60 people-hours. On the one hand feeling like a "job creator," and on the other feeling the toll it takes on our bodies, as well as the labor costs involved.

Our typical process has been to wait until the pond is filled in with material, and when the water district stops pumping water (which it does for a few months a year), remove the plug in the dam which lowers the water level about three feet, wait awhile for the exposed material to start drying out; then dig it all out by hand and move it elsewhere on the property.

Last year Aria came up with a brilliant alternative that she’d stumbled on the year before. Instead of waiting until the water stopped running, why notlet the flowing water transport the material downstream, help it move through the drain, work with the flow by channeling it to different areas of the pond, and see what happens.

The outcome has been very successful. It takes the two of us a few days, a couple hours a day, with the water doing all the "heavy moving".

Lessons have abounded from this process:

• Going with the flow reduces the work, and brings joy and generative energy.
• I get into “water time” because I’m basically looking at flowing water the whole time, and my sense of “clock” time fades into the background.
• I’ve learned to appreciate the moments… like moving all the material from around the drain through it into the culvert… it’s satisfying to see the same kind of suction through the drain as I do with the recirculation system we use when we distill lavender. And I can come back in an hour and see it all built up by the drain again, ready for my next meditation with it.
• I’ve learned about how sand, silt and clay settle in a pond… strata with the dense clay below… hard and heavy enough so you don’t want to try to lift a full shovel-full very often. And ontop of the clay, layers of silt andsand which move much easier through the flowing water. The clay material tends to stick together like glue, and eventually forms abarrier limiting the water from seeping downward. Our pond is probably half-full with it. We use that density to help divert the water where we want it to go… and help move it downstream and through the culvert as well.
•  I love it that my masculine side leaned toward finding a machine to help me move all that material… and Aria came up with a feminine version which does the job very well indeed by using the energy of nature rather than fighting against it.
• Cultivating awareness of my body as I movearound the pond, dancing with the water andmaterial… when I can get an almost tai-chi movement going, skimming shovel-fulls toward the drain; as well as feeling the soreness when I’m lifting heavy loads of the dense clay.

May Day

Aria Seidl

May first is a snowy, wintery day here at Earthstar Farms. Us gardeners are always hopeful for a gentle un-frozen April and May, yet typically the spring months in the Rockies are when we get a wild diversity of warm sunshine, rain and heavy snowfalls. Even after thirteen years on this land, I still think that every big April snow must surely be the last.
 
Earth Day was a sunny warm day and I was happy to see our first hummingbird, abundant fruit tree blossoms, fat tulip buds and shiny new Aspen leaves of the season. The hummingbirds in particular are a harbinger of spring for us at Wildcat Gardens. These tiny, feisty birds fly all the way from Central America to the Rocky Mountains for the summer months. On Monday morning Ben put out the hummingbird feeders, and we harvested our first herbs, five big baskets of beautiful nettle leaf. We also spied the first tiny green seedlings of Calendula and fat purple asparagus stalks breaking through the soil. Rhubarb, catnip, garlic, spinach, sweet grass and other early greens also showed their spring vigor. The passionflower vines in the greenhouse are shooting up, their curling tendrils seeking purchase on the trellis. I felt my own energy quicken as I imagined the growing season ahead. It is a delightful, spring-fever surge.
 
However, on Friday we awoke to cold and snow, and it has not stopped for three days now. My spring-fever had me practically bouncing off the walls, until I settled into a grudging, then grateful acceptance. This snow (the fourth big one this April) is a gift of water, future growth and abundance. Although I do wonder how the hummingbirds cope with this much snow, we are grateful.

Introduction to Wildcat Gardens

Hi, this is Ben Levi, owner and co-manager of Earthstar Farms, LLC. Along with Aria Seidl, my partner of 13 years and main driver of our farm, Wildcat Gardens,  we both will be blogging here, and look forward to sharing and hearing your feedback.

View of our home from the south

Back in 1998 I approached David Tresemer about building a self-sufficient solar home on land that was then owned by All Seasons Chalice, a church David had founded to steward the sacred ceremonial building he called StarHouse. I had studied solar engineering in college, and with the threat of Y2K looming, I was compelled to “walk my talk” by designing and contracting a passive and active solar home. It was completed in July, 2000 (thankfully Y2K was a non-event), and in 2002 I met my life partner, Aria, who moved in with me in March of 2003.

Thankfully Aria is a gardener extraordinaire, and together we created Wildcat Gardens, growing it over the past 12 years to include a fenced area with cultivated garden beds and fruit trees, over 400 lavender plants, a drying shed, a pond area where we do lavender distilling, and a beautifully landscaped home filled with xeriscaped herbs that we harvest and sell.

We inherited David’s USDA Certified Organic status, which he had obtained the previous decade on all of his properties around StarHouse, and this year Aria and I have taken over responsibility for maintaining the organic status of all of the properties, for which Aria had been previously responsible under David’s property management company, Tamco.

Through Aria’s leadership, Wildcat Gardens and the three other farms which make up Earthstar Farms, Earthstar Farm, Wildstar Farm, and Starlight Caravan,  have grown into a reputable local provider of over 40 cultivated and wildcrafted certified organic medicinal herbs and products.

Our goal is to be an example of how to live a 21st century lifestyle that is more in harmony with nature. As we do this with others, we co-create healthy community here and around the world. Thank you for being part of our community.

Blessings,

Ben