The Half-Acre Habitat

I know how to get six-pack abs. I have had them – for about 2 weeks. But since I like to eat, that is hard for me to sustain over time. But in terms of what is sustainable over time, things like being flexible, having good cardiovascular health, and good blood pressure and glucose readings are far more sustainable markers of health.

When you see people who have defined abs, cut muscle striations, and low body fat, what you see are people who went to extreme lengths to look that way. That’s fine if that’s your goal. I don’t want to harsh anyone’s thing. But it’s not mine. I have better things to do with my time than to calculate protein grams and intermittently fast and figure out if this is the day I spend 3 hours in the gym or the day I spend 2 hours in the gym.

For most people, such a life is attainable – but not sustainable. I want both. And not just in my health goals, but in my whole life.

That’s also my approach to my yard. I do not have a manicured lawn. I do not have a raked lawn. I don’t even have a lawn – I have a yard. It’s mostly green. Its primary use is as a habitat for the creatures who live here – including us.

So I have vegetables and greens we like to eat. I have flowers for the bees and butterflies. I have plants that grow food for the chickens, which then provide us with eggs. There are plants here that exist for no other reason than bugs like to eat them, and the birds like to eat the bugs, and I like birds.

I haven’t really talked about my yard here much. When we lived in NC, I had a raucous, out-of-control cottage garden on a fifth of an acre that was in bloom 10 months out of the year.

We moved here and bought a house on a half-acre lot, which makes gardening harder, not easier. Then there were two years of foster parenting, two years of the pandemic, a bunch of people I love died, and a long year of pretty deep depression (all of which overlapped at various points), and so, we are 3.5 years in our new home and it’s nowhere near where I had planned for it to be at this point.

In the old house, we lived there for a bit over five years, and at the end of our time there, the one thing I wish I had done was document it more. What flowers are these? When did I plant the peach trees? What was I thinking when I planted those? How long did that mulch last? Are these plum blossoms early this year, compared to last year?

Since this blog is, at its core, about how to live a good life, and I need plants for me to have a good life, I plan to do a walk around the property each Saturday and take photos of what’s in bloom, as well as things that catch my eye. I might tell you about a thing I’m working on, or I might just let the pictures speak for themselves.

Anyway – welcome to my little half-acre habitat.