Things change quickly in the garden. A recent festival and a few long talks also changed our plans for our future. Now, growing winter wheat is more than a pointless experiment. Winters were never part of the plan. Now, we might stick around. Permanently.

A neighbor just wanted to dump the bedding from his rabbits back on a pile near the field where they all dump it when they don’t know where else to put it. And instead I open up my fence, and I let him dump it here.

So now we have this entire pile of rabbit poop. Well, it’s mostly straw. It’s essentially straw with a tiny bit of rabbit poop. We are going to use that as mulch on the potato ditches and I’m going to figure out where to put it all.

Late August brought storms, rain, and humid air–but little light. I still continued the garden work. I’d dumped small amount of chicken manure in the potato ditches, but the rest of the pile was still there. Rabbit poop can go directly onto beds, as rabbits eat their own poop a second time. It’s essentially pre-composted.

Most other types of manure are better composted first, so they don’t overwhelm the plants. In any case, I wouldn’t use any kind of manure on plants I plan to snack from like strawberries.

It is hard to believe this bed is covered in green only weeks after this footage was filmed. Things change so quickly in the garden. A festival and a few long talks with my husband have also changed our plans for our future. I always thought we’d move somewhere without real winter. Now, that feels like fleeing.

Now, there is a good chance we’ll stay around here. Permanently.

I’ve mulched half of the bed and ran out of freely available mulch for now, but that’s totally fine. We’re gonna open up the other bed that I covered and grow wheat on there. And then one of these days I have to go into the neighbor’s barn and get more mulch, which I might do today if I feel like it. But we’ll see. For now, let’s continue with that bed and then see where we stand.

This whole bed had been one spur-of-the-moment idea after the other. I’d covered the bed without a plan for it. I’d harvested the bushel of volunteer wheat without a plan for it. And then I decided to grow winter wheat, yet again without a plan for it. Now, there is a plan for it: learning.

I always thought we’d move somewhere without a real winter. Winter was never part of the plan.

I don’t deal well with winter. Darkness gets to me quickly. We live far North in Germany, so it gets very dark here. This winter will bring a new perspective. If we are considering sticking around, I need to learn to appreciate the cold months, and learn how to use them.

Now, learning about winter wheat feels more relevant. When I planted it, this was still an experiment. Now, it’s more.

Hold on while I get sidetracked by this poor bean. It had to make do with just a thin stick which it had outgrown long ago. I put the trellis up way too late. The bean will never climb it. But it’s fine. We’d still get beans from it.

Right, where were we? Wheat bed, right.

Thanks to the cardboard, weeding had been quick. The bed was ready for seed. The cart marks the end of the bed. I make sure the cart fits wherever it needs to go. There are mushroom beds behind it that I don’t want to drive over to get through.

I raked the top of the soil to get the last grass roots out. But no digging. This isn’t all seeds. I never discarded the outer shell. Instead, it’ll just compost in the bed. But I still planted more seeds than I probably needed. I’d never grown wheat. And as this was volunteer wheat, I decided I’d rather overseed than have a spotty-growth problem.

Without tools or machines, I roughly spread things out and hoped for the best. Another experiment of “how little work can I do to make this work,” I guess.

I’d used almost all of the boards left on the forest plot by now. Three pretty degraded ones were left. I’ll get more building materials from the neighbor soon. Hopefully, I’ll be able to get rid of the plastic, too.

Not leaving the area doesn’t change that this garden is temporary. We’ll still leave here in another year or two. We’ll still have to start over on our own land. This garden ist still mostly about learning. Anything we invest in has to be mobile, so we can take it with us. But now that we’ll likely stay in the same climate zone, getting chickens is back on the table.

There are many challenges ahead of us. We’ll still need to save up–now for a down payment instead of to buy land. The idea of a morgage scares me. We just paid off our last bit of debt. Land in Southern Europe is a lot cheaper than here. But there are many reasons to stick around now.

The three main reasons to stay are: climate, politics, and social security. We live in an area where many voted far-right in the elections. We are surrounded by people we don’t trust. I have to think twice before wearing my sweater with anti-Nazi print. I don’t add stickers to my car.

But a festival in the area reminded us there is also a lot of hope here, people fighting to provide an alternative. We want to be part of that.

There are many places around here where especially young people pretend to be racist fascists just to feel safe. But there are also people trying to reach them, to give them a safe space, an alternative.

There’s also plenty of conventional agriculture around here. They’ll need to convert to regenerative methods at some point. Maybe there’s a consulting job for me here, too?

In any case, I have accepted just how sick I am. And Germany is the only place where I have a chance for social support. And finally, the milder climate will be bearable for longer as humanity continues to ignore the climate crisis. So, we’ll stick around. For us and for the people here.

I made the new bed so I took off cardboard, moved that to another spot, and removed all the weeds that needed to be removed, and then just threw all the wheat on there. The wheat is from this land. I harvested this year. I don’t know what it originally was or where it came from. I just harvested it and figured I’d try, see what happens.

If they don’t germinate, I’ll just throw some fast ground cover on it, and it’ll be fine. I have a bunch of ground cover–it’s just called called fast ground cover. It’s a mixture, and I also have my winter legumes. So we’ll have all the beds covered over winter. But I would like that one to be covered with wheat.

More on all of that another time. So long, and thanks for being here.