30 degrees and sunny.  A perfect day to double dig 4 beautiful beds.  Brian, Jake and I got a late start, but began digging around 9am.  Jake got exceptionally dirty and despite my efforts ate his first fistfuls of grass.  Trench after trench, our bodies are aching today, but it feels great to have accomplished so much.  A bit behind schedule, I’ll be dropping seeds in my flats tomorrow.  It may have taken all day but the results will be worth it.  Here are some step by step photos of our double dig journey.  I didn’t take a final photo because it was dark when we left. – Ah, digging by headlight!

Here at  New Eden, we are very excited about our New Eden Garden Forum. Many of our New Eden Gardeners are new to organic gardening and tell me that they are filled with  both excitement and trepidation. Now we have a venue to ask those vexing garden questions to your peers and New Eden experts. While, this forum is offered freely to anyone interested in sustainable gardening practices, registration is required. Click on the garden forum tab to register. If you want to change your password to something you will remember, log on to the forum, and click on your name on the upper right hand corner. Click on your name (it’s in green) that will take you to more options. Go to your profile and press edit. You can change your password there.

Welcome to the New Eden Collaborative of First Parish, Newbury Blog, bringing together organic community gardeners, eco artists,church congregants, CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) growers and shareholders,  and local food and environmental organizations in an experiment to  model  sustainable community through inspiring a conscious and caring relationship to the earth and to each other.

Veggie seed share with seeds donated by Corliss Brothers Nursery in Ipswich.

Welcome to our first installment of the NEW EDEN DIARY. Our premier entry is by J. F. Nocera.

They tell me it was a Friday night in mid-March.  I have no idea if that is true or not, so I’ll just have to take their word for it.  All I know is that it had been raining for days and the world around me was dark, heavy and saturated.  I needed air.  I needed a change of venue.  But as I quickly learned: Be careful what you wish for.

As one of God’s young, inexperienced, malcontent invertebrates I looked around and noticed a mass exodus was taking place that evening.  I decided to see where everyone was headed so I followed suit.  I was eager to escape this uncomfortable, suffocating environment so I joined the group and inched my way along with my like-minded fellow creatures.  When I reached a hard, ridged, warm surface my efforts were rewarded.  I could breathe.  I stretched my lithe body across the warm surface reaching as far as I could from end to end.  I stretched and stretched and stretched until I was as thin as I could get without snapping.  I felt so good I started to relax and enjoy the fruits of my labor.

Suddenly, without warning I began to feel a strange sensation in the middle of my body.  I recoiled, but to no avail.  I was leaving the ground.  I was losing contact with mother earth. What was happening?  I was folded in half at my midsection with both ends hanging upside down.  My front half was looking at my back half, or was it my back half looking at my front half?   Regardless, I had never been in such close proximity to my other half before. I was airborne. I was hanging out to dry like a strand of fresh spaghetti. Wait, that was it.  I was hanging over a strand of spaghetti.  Someone used dried spaghetti to pick me up.  What was happening to me?  Hanging there helplessly, five feet off the ground, I awaited my fate.

Luckily, I didn’t have to wait long.  The next thing I knew, I was airborne again.  Then, without warning, I fell.  Plop.  I landed on a bed of dirt.  Dry, hard, no—parched!—dirt.  This dirt hadn’t been watered for years.  Where did they find this arid piece of terra firma?  It was so dry its edges were sharp.  How could dirt be so sharp?  I decide not to move.  Where was I?  The parched dirt began to suck the moisture out of me.  Ouch!  One of my cousins just landed on top of me.  Plop.  There’s another one.  Plop.  And another.  Well, at least I’m not alone.  I’m going to have lots of company on this adventure.

Slowly, I begin to feel vibrations all around me.  Some are high pitched, some are low, some fast, some slow, some constant, some intermittent.  What are these sensations?  Am I moving?  I must be.  I’m moving through space.  What a feeling!  How exhilarating!  Whee!  What a ride!Suddenly everything stops.  Everything is silent.  I am perfectly still.  No vibrations.  No movement.  I wait.  Now what?

Ah, I feel a breeze. I feel moist air on my body again. I think they call it fog or mist. Ah, what a relief. I relax.  But wait, I’m moving again.  I’m descending.  I can feel myself getting closer to the earth.  I’m going home!  I can smell it.  After a short free fall I make a terrifying but gentle landing.  I am back in touch with mother earth.  What a joy!  But this earth smells different; it tastes different; it even  feels different.  This isn’t my home; I’ve been relocated.  I have a new home.  How grand.  As a young earthworm I didn’t have much status in my old home, but here I will be a founding mother.  I will lead my cousins and those who have been relocated with me.  We’ll work hard and turn this virgin earth into rich, healthy, aerated soil for this loving, deserving gardener.  We’ll eat well, procreate and live happily ever after in the most symbiotic relationship of all time.

Here are several bugs that I have found in my garden.  Who are they and what do they like to eat?  That first bug is such a lovely shade of green I don’t know if it is the spiky reindeer antlers  on the golden one but I found it menacing. In fact when I came upon a whole nest hatching in my garden plot I took the risk of laying waste to the nest with my heel then and there. I hope they were not the last of their kind (I do doubt it).

If they are not bugs I want snacking in  my garden, is there an organic way to attend to them?  At New Eden we do not use NEEM  as it can have ill effects on some beneficial insects like bees.

I look forward to your comments and please send photos of your garden bugs and diseases and we will use the collective wisdom of the greater New Eden Collaborative community to find out about our garden guests.

Coming soon will be the New Eden Garden Forum where there will be an opportunity for people to ask garden questions of our New Eden Garden mentors.