Elements of Balance - My Sq ft garden

My Square Foot Garden Summer 2010

It all started with a neighbor friend over a year ago. She’s a single mom with three kids, working a job that did not serve her purpose and she needed to have an outlet that was fun, but also beneficial to the family. With the water conservation in California only allowing us to water our lawn 3x’s a week, it is hard to keep a green lawn and thriving plants. It’s bad FUNG SHUI to have dead plants in your living space.

Anyway, she decided to do something about it. Turn her lawn into food !! I thought that was a brilliant idea.. and a lot of work! Good Luck Linda ! She was going to create a garden that would yield vegetables for food, compost the wastes, conserve water buy hand watering with a can, and have a hobby that benefits the whole… her family and the planet. (all organic gardening of course). Good work Linda… You planted a seed in my head that day!

As the months passed by, the thought of having my own vegetables and herbs with fresh basil, tomatoes that actually have taste, lettuce that wont go bad, and so on… I wanted a garden. But how ??? Time, space and experience are being very valid obstacles.

Ha !! Eric brought home the ‘All New Square Foot Gardening’ book… we have charted out course for the next few months…. We have only been at it a few months.. and things are already blooming away. We still need to make a trellis for ‘vine-ing’ plants, and a fence to block out the creatures (dogs included) that seem to think this patch of dirt is for them too. So far, it’s been nothing but fun. I think playing in the dirt, after work, is my new favorite past time!

Here is our garden – 6 weeks

Our garden - 12 weeks

The Pangu Legend
How the Earth and Universe were created...

In the beginning there was nothing in the universe except a formless chaos. However this chaos coalesced into a cosmic egg for about 18,000 years. Within it, the perfectly opposed principles of Yin and Yang became balanced and Pangu emerged (or woke up) from the egg. Pangu is usually depicted as a primitive, hairy giant with horns on his head and clad in furs. Pangu set about the task of creating the world: he separated Yin from Yang with a swing of his giant axe, creating the Earth (murky Yin) and the Sky (clear Yang).

To keep them separated, Pangu stood between them and pushed up the Sky. This task took 18,000 years; with each day the sky grew ten feet higher, the Earth ten feet wider, and Pangu ten feet taller. In some versions of the story, Pangu is aided in this task by the four most prominent beasts, namely the Turtle, the Qilin, the Phoenix, and the Dragon.

After the 18,000 years had elapsed, Pangu was laid to rest. His breath became the wind; his voice the thunder; left eye the sun and right eye the moon; his body became the mountains and extremes of the world; his blood formed rivers; his muscles the fertile lands; his facial hair the stars and milky way; his fur the bushes and forests; his bones the valuable minerals; his bone marrows sacred diamonds; his sweat fell as rain; and the fleas on his fur carried by the wind became the fish and animals throughout the land.

Nüwa the Goddess then used the mud of the water bed to form the shape of humans. These humans were very smart since they were individually crafted. Nüwa then became bored of individually making every human so she started putting a rope in the water bed and lettings the drops of mud that fell from it become new humans. These small drops became new humans, not as smart as the first. The first writer to record the myth of Pangu was during the Three Kingdoms period.