Full Gardens, Desert Wind, and Saying Goodbye

A serene pathway meanders through the lush garden, surrounded by vibrant greenery and colorful blooms, inviting exploration and offering a peaceful retreat amidst nature.

The past couple of weeks have been full in the way late spring often is — long days, sore muscles, dirt under fingernails, and the feeling that everything is suddenly growing faster than you can keep up with it.

We finally finished our spring planting.

Every bed is now packed nearly to the brim with edible plants and their companions. Since we work with such a small space here in Western Washington, we decided to fully commit to square foot gardening this year. Every inch matters when your growing space is limited, and I’ve found that limitations often encourage creativity.

Instead of planting in long rows with wide spacing, we carefully arranged crops to support one another. Some plants offer shade to more delicate neighbors. Others help repel pests, improve soil conditions, or attract pollinators and beneficial insects. It creates a garden that feels less like isolated crops and more like a small ecosystem woven together intentionally.

The result is dense, layered, and a little chaotic in the best way.

There’s something deeply satisfying about walking through a garden where every space is alive with purpose. Lettuce tucked beneath taller plants. Herbs spilling into pathways. Flowers woven between vegetables. Food growing everywhere you look.

This style of gardening also changes how you move through the space. You slow down. You notice more. You become aware of relationships between plants instead of simply thinking about production.

It feels collaborative rather than controlling.

And after months of planning, seed starting, compost turning, and preparing beds, the garden has finally reached that point where it feels full of momentum — no longer just potential, but actively becoming.

Growing More Than Food

Vibrant sage blossoms in full bloom, showcasing their delicate purple petals against a sunny backdrop.

Our garden is in full swing now, and every available space is doing its best to grow something useful. This season we are cultivating a diverse mix of annuals and perennials, including tomatoes, tomatillos, lettuces, kale, tree collards, eggplant, broccoli, garlic, onions, potatoes, Jerusalem artichokes, peas, beans, summer and winter squash, carrots, and rhubarb. The fruit garden is equally busy, with strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, huckleberries, salmonberries, and elderberries all finding their place in the landscape.

Scattered throughout the garden are culinary and medicinal herbs such as parsley, cilantro, thyme, marjoram, oregano, sage, rosemary, lemon balm, mints, chives, and green onions. Many of these plants serve more than one purpose, providing food for our kitchen while also supporting pollinators and beneficial insects.

One of our goals has been to create a garden that functions more like an ecosystem than a collection of individual crops. Alongside the vegetables, fruits, and herbs, we maintain a diverse flower garden designed to provide nectar, pollen, habitat, and beauty throughout the growing season. The bees, butterflies, hummingbirds, and countless other beneficial insects are just as important to the success of the garden as the plants themselves.

As the season progresses, we look forward to watching these spaces fill in, harvesting what we can, preserving the abundance, and continuing to learn from the ever-changing relationships between the plants, pollinators, wildlife, and ourselves.

Our Place in the Desert

The rugged terrain of our desert property offers a different kind of peace—quiet, expansive, and untamed.

While everything here at home is deep green and bursting with growth, another part of our life exists in almost the complete opposite landscape.

Outside of a small town in Central Washington, we have around two and a half acres of minimally developed high desert property that has become a place of rest and reset for us over the years.

Calling it a campsite almost feels too simple. It’s more like a family outpost — rough around the edges, shaped slowly over generations.

Back in the 1970s, my partner’s grandfather purchased a couple of acres there so they would always have a vacation spot to gather. Over the years, as neighboring parcels became available, different family members purchased more land surrounding the original property.

Now, collectively, there are somewhere between 35 and 40 acres of open desert landscape shared among families.

It’s expansive in a way Western Washington rarely is.

The horizon stretches endlessly. The air smells like sagebrush and dust. Wind moves constantly across the land, reshaping small things day after day. Dust devils are common enough that they barely interrupt conversation anymore.

There’s very little development out there, which is exactly why we love it.

We have generator power and no running water on our property. Water gets hauled over from the family campground well across the street. Our setup has always been fairly simple: two trailers, a shed, and a humanure outhouse.

And for a long time, that was enough.

But families grow and their needs shift.

We recently went over for a short getaway and ended up acquiring three more trailers while we were there. Two of them need repairs and updates before they’ll be fully functional, but the third has crossed beyond the point of being useful as a sleeping trailer.

Instead, it’s being repurposed into a maintenance trailer for the property — something to tow behind a vehicle to more easily haul large water jugs, supplies, generators, and equipment. Something for everyone in the family to access, so that life is a little easier in these harsh conditions.

I’ve always loved projects like this — the kind where old things slowly evolve into new forms of usefulness.

With the addition of the trailers, the property is beginning to feel more livable and more sustainable for longer stays. We’ll finally have separate sleeping spaces, indoor and outdoor kitchen areas, and dedicated storage away from living quarters.

The current plan is to arrange the trailers in a horseshoe shape to help block some of the intense wind that moves through the property.

Because when I say windy, I mean windy.

The kind of wind that rattles walls all night long. The kind that coats everything in fine dust no matter how careful you are. The kind that reminds you very quickly that nature always has the final say.

And somehow, that’s part of what makes the desert feel restorative.

There’s very little distraction there. Very little noise beyond the wind itself. No expectations to be productive. No endless list of chores waiting around the corner.

Just space.

Space to think. Space to rest. Space to reconnect with simpler rhythms again.

The Hard Parts of Homesteading

A charming quartet of ducks gathers outside: Jake From State Farm, Jackie Sparrow, Daphne, and Rufio, showcasing their unique plumage in the yard.

Not every part of this life is peaceful though.

A few days ago, we experienced one of the hardest parts of keeping animals.

Despite every precaution, predators occasionally find a way through. It’s simply part of living closely with nature — especially in an area where wildlife still moves freely through neighborhoods and farms.

This time, it was a raccoon.

The attack happened fast.

Our duck, Daphne, was snatched and dragged beneath the house before I realized what was happening. I heard the commotion and ran outside immediately.

Somehow, I managed to get her back alive.

At first, we were hopeful.

She had a severe wound across her back, but she was alert and responsive. We cleaned her injuries, got her settled into isolation, and did everything we could to support her recovery. In moments like that, you cling tightly to hope, even while knowing how fragile birds can be after trauma.

But within 24 hours it became clear that things were getting worse.

She became septic, and signs of spinal injury began to show themselves more clearly. By that point, there was no real path toward recovery — only prolonged suffering if we chose to hold on.

So we had to make one of the hardest decisions homesteading asks of you.

We had to cull her.

There’s a strange disconnect in how people often talk about humane death. The word itself sounds clinical and detached, but in reality it’s deeply emotional. Choosing to end suffering is an act of care, even when it hurts immensely.

Especially when it hurts immensely.

No amount of experience makes those moments easy.

Daphne was deeply loved here. She was curious, expressive, and always one of the first ducks to greet us when we stepped outside. Her absence is tangible in the flock dynamics already.

The others still call for her. Jackie Sparrow appears to have felt the effects more deeply than the others.

That might be one of the hardest parts — hearing them search for someone who isn’t coming back.

Loss moves through animal groups in ways that feel both familiar and impossible to fully understand. The flock feels different now. Quieter in certain moments. Slightly unsettled.

And so do we.

Homesteading often gets romanticized online — the gardens, the fresh eggs, the peaceful mornings. And those moments absolutely exist. But there is another side too: responsibility, grief, difficult decisions, and the understanding that when you choose to care for living things, heartbreak eventually becomes part of the agreement.

Still, I wouldn’t trade it.

Because alongside the grief comes connection. Purpose. Presence.

Daphne lived a life where she got to forage in the garden, splash in water, sun herself beside her flock, and greet every day fully as a duck. And for that, I’m grateful.

May she rest peacefully.

The Shape of This Season

A vibrant yellow rose in full bloom stands out against lush green leaves in a sunlit garden setting.

These past couple of weeks have held both abundance and loss. Gardens filling in. New projects beginning. Quiet moments in the desert wind. And the painful reminder that life is always fragile, no matter how carefully we tend it.

But maybe that fragility is part of what makes these rhythms matter so much.

The planting. The building. The caring. The grieving.

It’s all part of the same cycle.