I’ve spent an entire year trying not to screw up this property. I think I’m finally ready to start.

Not that there’s been nothing to do!

A year ago my two dogs and I moved into this place in the mountains of Mexico.

And I’ve had a hundred plans. A huge vegetable garden. Chickens. Fruit trees. Maybe goats someday. And mostly, I’ve done… very little.

I am beyond lucky to be living here in Mexico on my dream property. For years I dreamed of having the beauty and the space that this place gives me. 

I’ve stalled on making decisions here. Taking the time was intentional.

Mostly.

So I’m a slow decision maker, on big choices anyway, and I’ve been observing the land here. The weather patterns, the climate, the way the sun moves across the property. I’m the kind of person who wants to see all the angles.

Sometimes people push me to plant things, and make things happen. After all, I have all this space. But I’ve resisted because once I put something somewhere, I’ve made a decision. And they aren’t always easy to reverse. Once you make a building, or put in fence posts, you can’t just move things around.

I’ve been talking about putting a big vegetable garden out here almost since I bought this place.

And I’ve spent a year not doing it.

And now I have to decide. Because if I’m going to have a garden next year, I need to choose where it’s going and start preparing this soil over the winter.

I’ve been feeling kind of depressed for the last few days. I get like that sometimes, and what I’ve noticed about my own psychology is that feeling trapped gets me depressed.

If I want to do something, if I have energy and excitement to do something (like make a new garden or get chickens) and I tell myself no, over and over, over time, whether it’s because I think I don’t have money or some other reason, I start to feel trapped, suppressed, like I can’t move. Like I have all this energy and it has nowhere to go. I suppress myself until I get depressed, and it’s not fun.

Once I’m able to take action all that heaviness lifts and I’m so good to get going! 

And sometimes I forget this about myself.

You see, when I was a child my parents were a little extreme. Well mostly my mother. She seemed to have a lot of fear about the culture and the evils of sex drugs and rock and roll, and who might be lurking in the schools. I think she would have felt all this fear anywhere and at any time, but maybe being in the U.S. in the 1970s helped. 

So how this fear manifested itself in our lives is that she insisted on taking her children out of school. She didn’t appear fearful, she just seemed self righteous and heavy on religious dogma.

So at eleven years old I was taken out of school to be “home schooled”. She never opened a text book and there was no schooling but that’s what they called it.  I think she was depressed. She would stay in her bedroom until 11am and then avoid her children the rest of the time.

What this amounted to for me was a lot of reading alone in my room, and sometimes walking alone in nature. There were a lot of rules about music, TV, and where we could go, who we could see. It was a lonely time for me.

All this to say that I was confined in a time of normal maturing and branching out. I was prevented from exploring learning and relationships like a normal adolescent, and kept away from all that. It felt like I was kept in my room, but I could leave my room, there was just nowhere to go.

I think that’s why, now, when I’m free to do so many things, but I put constraints on myself, I get that same old feeling of being trapped and depressed. It’s really heavy and paralysing and I hate it.

Taking some kind of action always helps me, and I need to remember that. So when I allowed myself to start on the chicken project it brought me a lot of joy! Planning the coop, learning about chickens, talking to friends… it’s been so fun.

After focusing on my plans for a giant garden out in the field, I’ve realized why I’ve been hesitant. And it’s because I didn’t have all the info I needed. 

I finally got real with the main constraint of this property, and of many properties around the world, and that is: limited water. 

It’s hard to imagine now, with rain almost every day, but during the dry season we can go months without it. The land gets parched. The trees and plants that survive here are adapted to that seasonal swing, or have roots deep enough to find water after the surface has dried out.

Last spring my neighbors and I were saving dishwater just to keep our little gardens alive. And that’s a pain.

I do have a giant cistern for the property and, luckily, water delivery during the dry season hasn’t been a problem. But it costs money, and I’ve heard that during drought years there can be delays. One year, apparently, there were weeks when water wasn’t being delivered at all, and neighbors were sharing what they had to get by.

That’s alarming from a basic survival standpoint, never mind trying to maintain the giant vegetable garden I’ve had my heart set on for years.

So I finally sat down and did the math.

To give one square meter of garden one inch of water takes about 25 liters. If I had four 8-by-4-foot raised beds, that would be about 300 liters of water every week.

Every week.

That’s more than my rain barrel even holds. And even if I bought some big tinacos and filled them during the rainy season, storing enough water to carry a large vegetable garden through months of drought starts looking kind of unrealistic.

So I’m having to rethink the garden.

The thing about growing food here is that when we have plenty of water, it’s cooler and incredibly wet. When it gets hotter, the water disappears. So things like tomatoes and peppers have to find their place somewhere in that balance.

My tomatoes actually did pretty well before the hailstorm in July, but during the rains I’m constantly fighting mold. The squash has had problems too.

So: What do farmers around here actually do?

Some commercial growers solve the problem with infrastructure. Drive through the countryside and you see enormous hoop houses everywhere. Berries and other high-value crops are grown under cover, often for export. And then, of course, there are the avocado orchards. This is the avocado capital of the world, although apparently no one told the baby avocado tree I planted, because it died. I’ll have to try again.

But a lot of traditional agriculture here works differently.

It’s called agricultura de temporal, basically farming according to the rainy season. And once I started reading about it, something clicked for me: the rainy season isn’t a problem that local farmers have figured out how to get around. It’s what the agricultural year is built around.

The classic example is the milpa. Corn, beans, squash and other crops are planted so that their main growing period coincides with the summer rains. They take advantage of the water while it’s here.

Then the landscape changes jobs.

Crops mature and are harvested. Some farmers can grow another crop using irrigation or moisture still retained in the soil. Other fields just get to rest.

Commercial agriculture is different. There are irrigated farms here too. In fact, Mexican agricultural statistics distinguish between temporal, rain-fed farming, and riego, irrigated farming.

And irrigation changes the equation because the cool, dry months can be wonderful for growing certain things. There’s less fungal pressure, and crops like carrots, broccoli, kale, spinach and lettuce are well suited to that cooler season.

So there isn’t really just one gardening season here. There are several.

During the rains, water is abundant, but fungus and rot become the problem.

When the rains stop and it’s cool, the growing conditions can be beautiful, but now I have to provide the water.

And by the end of the dry season, when it gets hotter, water becomes precious.

And I think that finally gives me the answer to what I should do out here.

Instead of building one giant garden that I expect to keep going all year, I’m going to build a garden that expands and contracts with the seasons.

During the rains, I can grow much more. That’s when I can experiment with corn, beans, squash, potatoes and other crops that can take advantage of all this free water. Tomatoes and other fungus-prone plants will need more space and airflow, and I may eventually experiment with growing some of them under cover.

Then, when the rains stop, the garden gets smaller. I can concentrate the water I have on a much smaller area and grow the things that really like those cooler, drier conditions.

And as it gets warmer toward the end of the dry season (March-early June), the garden can change again. That may be the best time for tomatoes and peppers, because they finally have the heat and sun they want without being drenched every day. The question then is how much water I’m willing and able to give them.

So I’m thinking I’ll start a lot of those warm-season plants indoors in February, have them ready to go when the weather warms up, and use my stored water to get them through until the rains return.

This is very different from the enormous, permanent vegetable garden I had pictured in my head.

But it also makes a lot more sense for this place.

So now that I’m more clear on all this, I can better place a new garden out here, knowing that it will probably be used only part of the year. That might change where I place it on the property.

It changes the design question quite a bit. Before, I was thinking of the large vegetable garden as a permanent centerpiece, so it made sense to give it prime real estate, in view. Now I don’t know about that.

If it looked lush and productive twelve months a year, having it visible from the house could be wonderful. But if part of its natural cycle is going to be resting → waiting for rain for months, then I don’t necessarily want four or six big empty raised beds dominating the view from my windows.

And that makes me reconsider raised beds for the big garden, too. I may not need a field full of wooden boxes sitting empty half the time. Maybe in ground beds would be better with pathways in between. Visually they’d almost disappear back into the landscape.

For a long time, when I looked at this open space, I saw one thing: my future vegetable garden. A big one. Raised beds everywhere. But now that I understand things more clearly I’m looking at the property differently.

But I can’t just keep thinking about it either. I need to choose a spot, because I have Bermuda grass everywhere and I want several months to kill it and start improving this clay soil.

And one of the things I’ve wanted almost as long as I’ve wanted that giant garden is chickens! 

And strangely enough, the garden problem may have helped me figure out the chicken questions too.

I don’t want to build a permanent chicken coop yet for the same reason I haven’t built the giant garden. I haven’t lived here long enough to know where everything belongs.

So I’m thinking small. Three or four hens, and a chicken tractor that I can move around the property.

And if part of my vegetable garden ends up being seasonal and in the ground, the chickens could eventually move through those beds after harvest, eating bugs, scratching through old plants and fertilizing the soil.

Instead of deciding where everything belongs right now, I can let the property teach me.

The water problem didn’t kill the garden plan. It changed the garden plan. And somehow, made room in my mind for chickens. And the chickens will teach me something about where a more permanent coop will go.

The chickens get me excited! And I decided on this small mobile coop and run. I have a lot to learn! What kind of chickens? What kind of coop for the future? How to protect against predators. Who are the predators around here? (Olive). What about food and water?  And on and on..

So once I got past the block that was holding me back everything started to happen!

Hector is back and finished the greenhouse! I love it and decided to keep it open to the air for now. He also made this new gate bell to replace the rickety old one.

The water issue has made me realize we need to keep as much water in the rainy season as possible. So Hector made this platform for a tinaco. It’s not much but I’m sure it will help.

Temo has made a reappearance in our lives here. He asked for his old job back and though I can’t give him that, I said I’ll have him out here once or twice a month when I need help. And it’s been good! It’s nice to have him back around.

I decided on a smallish patch of ground, not too far from a water source, to start preparing for a spring garden. All the stored up cardboard will finally be put to use! Temo helped a lot in moving the cardboard, compost and mulch to start breaking down the grass and hopefully make some nice soil for the future.

It feels like things are moving fast after a long period of hibernation. And it feels really good! And I know now that I can’t suppress my energy, it’s not good for me. Doesn’t mean I have to do a lot of expensive things, but taking some action and doing what’s important to me makes me happy and productive.