Growing Up 

The country girl in me is always yearning to get back to the country where the air is fresher, the pace of life slower and neighbors look out for one another. My roots are in the Sierras south of Lake Tahoe where I spent most of my childhood growing up with my dad. He is a mobile vet by trade, who eventually decided to focus on equine medicine only. He is also an avid gardener, a cowboy poet, a damn hard worker and a lover of nature and the great outdoors.  Growing up with him, my childhood memories include road trips over the Rocky Mountains where we camped along the way, hanging out at his clinic and riding along on calls, climbing 15 foot towers of hay bails in the hay barn next to the clinic, chasing friends through the surrounding corn fields playing hide and seek, swimming in nearby lakes and rivers, horseback riding and occasionally helping him pick and water the garden in the summer evenings. Locals would bring rescue animals like owls and deer that had been hit or injured by our house in the evenings for him to treat. He castrated piglets in our driveway and would then try to convince me that "rocky mountain oysters" were delicious (he had a  wicked sense of humor). It was a great childhood! It grounded me, instilled a strong work ethic, thought me empathy and sparked my total adoration for nature and all of it's glorious beauty, which was the seed that eventually blossomed into my complete love of gardening.

The Here and Now 

In a nutshell, we are laid back people, who work hard to be able afford a little slice, of what some would call heaven, in Santa Cruz, California, a bike ride away from the beach. We enjoy nature, good company, good food, good craft beer and good vibes! I’ve been a backyard gardener since I can remember and put in my first full raised bed vegetable garden over 10 years ago.

Five years ago this May I had a major health crisis. I was a single mother working a fast pace corporate job, managing teenagers, had recently gone through the break-up of a relationship and was dealing with health and financial issues that my mom was having. To say the least, I was stressed and when I look back on that period of my life, I had been living without balance for a long time. I'd not been caring for ME. Then WHAM, I had a wake up call that changed everything. 

The things that I’d had to work so hard to remind myself of, like not letting daily stressors totally derail my day, that being a worrier served no real purpose in my life, except to add to my stress, and how important it is to make the time for the people you love and who love you became easier to practice as I realized just how precious and sometimes short life is. I began seeking ways to find balance, decided to switch to a whole food organic diet, and began evaluating the health of my relationships and focusing on nurturing them and ME. 

A year later I met a wonderful, kind and sweet man (Uli), who I married last year and have been dragging along on this wild adventure I call life ever since. We are polar opposites. I'm adventurous, have an over active mind, a restless heart, dream big and have a sense of urgency about my bucket list. He is super mellow, likes the known and is happy to just go with the daily flow. Somehow it works! He helps balance me out, sometimes take me down a much needed notch and is truly the yin to my yang. Turns out, together we make a great team!

I wish I could say we are living our dream, but the truth is we are too busy, work hard and participate in the Monday through Friday work grind with hopes that someday we will be able to grow this passion into something viable so we can spend our time tending a small farm. What is uncertain at this point in our lives is whether that will be a small urban homestead on our current lot or if we will decide to relocate and buy land elsewhere so that we can have the larger scale farm I've always dreamed of. Uli, although he'd never grown a thing in his life and is totally out of his element in the country, has been such a sport, learning to enjoy a cold after work beer while he waters and even becoming enthusiastic over the garden and my refreshed enthusiasm to branch out into sharing with others and trying to figure out this whole cyber world of resources and how to use them.

In the meantime, I'm applying my experience as a backyard gardener towards building a more simple and sustainable life. We have revamped our garden a bit this year and added our first beehive. Yes, we are rookie beekeepers! Next up, worms, chickens and expanded gardens with added fruit trees. All in good time.... 

Through my blog I'm hoping to build community with other like minded people, to contribute a piece of goodness with a sprinkling of humor to the world that is in severe need of more of both. By sharing my insights, albeit sometimes through my follies, hopefully I can inspire others to get their knees dirty and try their hand at cultivating something. 

I’m so excited that you have taken time out of your busy day to check out my page and hope you enjoy the content  and follow along on our journey. ~ Maya