Stepping in to my love of nature

A few years ago, when I had been vegie growing for a few years and was beginning my Permaculture Journey, I had a dream. The dream was about connection to place - that it’s not quite enough just to love your little piece of Earth, you need to become it by consuming it. Because we are what we eat, and we become one with our place if we eat what grows there, and nurture it in return. No wonder it was so hard to leave my old garden. My lunch was from that garden every day and, for the whole family, food we had grown ourselves made up about 20% of what we ate, including all our jams.

Development of the garden at the new place has been an up and down affair with some great patches of greens, a few bumper years of tomatoes and two great seasons of strawberries. One year I had a beautiful winter greens patch under fleece. But last year (2025) was a tough one in a lot of ways and all my different garden patches were overcome with grass, and deer walked in to eat my quince and lemon trees.

So 2026 is a reset. And while we build this beautiful place up properly, I’ve had to ‘consume’ the property in different ways.

A lot of my consumption has been of garden herbal teas. I can consume the essence of the property - our home - and explore the comforting and healing powers of herbs. Lemon balm, rosemary, mints, thyme, oregano, sage, chamomile, rose petal, correa and lemon verbena. I haven’t tried nettle yet.

I also made some winter balm and plantain balm, so we are engaging with our plants in that way too.

Don’t forget the fire wood! Our property of abundance warms us through the winter.

So we have found there are many ways to engage with our home, not just through eating vegetables.

But I wanted to go further - to really add practise to my love of nature. To recognise the individual spirits and personalities of the herbs and myriad other plants I am so lucky to be surrounded by, to notice and commemorate the changing seasons, sun and moon. I am loving stepping into this new narrative, listening to my intuition and connecting more deeply with nature. Truly stepping in to my love for nature allows me to be enmeshed with the seasonal changes. The practises I’ve adopted are deeply personal, but they have certainly shown me that eating from the property is only one aspect of becoming one with the place in which you live.

The gardens are coming along, we’ve had some fencing built and I’m really excited about what we have planned for the property. Adding a practical seasonal observance really adds a deeper connection for me, as I step even further in to my love for nature.