Co-Creative Gardening 5: The Garden Chart

When Barbara and I got together next, she had her lists all ready to go. We sat one morning and kinesiology-tested every plant on her list, as well as some that she hadn’t listed. This gave us a comprehensive idea of all the veggies and flowers that were to go into the garden, and which beds they were to go in. As there are 17 (albeit small) beds and many pots, this was a big job that took us hours! And the work wasn’t at all done, because we still needed to know how many of each plant to put in, when to plant them, whether to start from seed, what colors of flowers and varieties of herbs and veggies to plant, and a million other questions.

Barbara had provided 8 ½ x 11 maps of her garden, but they didn’t have the information we had gotten earlier about where to put needed paths between beds in what we call the Rose Garden, and they didn’t include detailed outlines of what we are calling the Kiwi and Greenhouse sections of the garden. So I felt we needed a garden chart. Creating the chart was a fun project for me, which was lucky because when Barbara and I went over her list of flowers and veggies, she discovered that all the asking and testing involved was definitely NOT fun for her! It felt piddley, time-consuming and frustrating, especially when we got different answers, and had to work to get clarity.

This is good to know if you are thinking of doing co-creative gardening. A lot of what happens in the beginning of each year involves asking the nature beings what is to happen that year. It can involve hours of testing. One of the most basic things you’ll learn is to let go of control and realize that once you have clearly set the intention, you must allow nature to tell you how to best manifest that intention.  There are so many areas in which we have taken over nature’s part of the job in everything we do, that relinquishing control becomes one of the biggest lessons we get out of a truly co-creative project. The reward of doing this is that we get to see the magic and fore-knowledge of the nature beings unfold over time.

So I got to create the chart of the garden beds and put little tags of where the veggies, herbs and flowers were to be placed. And I also got to take over the task of testing for number of plants and timing of planting, which helped things to go more smoothly, as well as getting Barbara off the hook. The chart helped us to get a sense of the energy of the actual garden once it’s planted, and has already come in handy as a reference in other ways as well.

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