Summer At The M/M Jardin 2021
A SUMMER TALE
“Il faut cultiver notre jardin.”
We must cultivate our garden. Indeed, monsieur Voltaire. Gardening is no trivial pastime, rather a way of temporarily shielding ourselves from the influence of the chaotic and dangerous world beyond. An attempt to be in the present, focusing our energies on something that reflects the goodness and grace we long for. The garden is a place to set anxieties, worries, anguishes, or fears aside and bring forth new life. To find peace of mind.
I continue to smell our garden’s earth, even weeks after returning to what may seem like the antithesis of a garden: New York City. My meditations take me back to the farm, my bare feet in the soil and sun beaming on the back of my neck, either while collecting calendula flower tops, weeding around our lavender shrubs, or trimming our rosemary bushes. I think about the above quote from Voltaire because I’ve lived it - when I’m in our garden my mind is focused on the task at hand. Not Covid-19, not social media, not what’s for dinner, but only which calendula flower I’m going to harvest next.
Of course the extent of our stay wasn’t only focused on a little harvesting and weeding, those are but standard tasks that the jardin asks of us. This year we finally succeeded in finishing our drying room, renovated a processing room and office, finalized a long-awaited irrigation plan, ran electricity to the garden, and expanded our production of plants. All in all, a busy summer!
The completion of the drying room was a particular achievement we are proud of. The proper drying of plant material is paramount to quality. The better and quicker they are dried immediately after harvest, the more of the medicinal constituents are retained. We tiled the floor, built drying shelves, and installed electricity, heat sources, an exhaust, and a dehumidifier. Since it’s so crucial to deliver the medicinal qualities we want to deliver to the skin, we made sure we had everything we needed to secure quality plant material. The way you can tell? Dried plants should look as close as possible to how they were when they were harvested. If color, smell, and general shape look like the plant when it was in the ground, then it was done right. Directly adjacent to our drying room is now our processing room. Post-garbling, here is where we package and store the dried plants, preparing them for their journey to our studio. It is also where we are renovating in order to have our “Farm HQ”, an office where we can work or take a break from the sun. Maybe one day a farm store? We shall see. 😉
For those of you that have been following our voyage from the beginning, you’ll know that the irrigation of the garden is something that we’ve struggled with over time. In all years prior to 2021, we had major droughts where we wouldn’t see rain for over 60 consecutive days. While medicinal plants require less water than vegetables, droughts like this will soon dry out almost any plant so having an irrigation system in place is crucial. The first seasons we worked on securing 3 large cisterns that could collect rainwater for us to use in the garden. Next was the distribution of the water - how can we water all the beds at the flip of a switch? We experimented with different ideas (can we connect the moat to the garden? What about a water tower? etc.) but, as is often the case, the simplest solution ended up being the most prudent: let’s pump the rainwater. Now all we needed was electricity in the garden to power the pump.
Enter a family friend of ours, Erich, who has been a lifelong friend of our Aunt Edith, our master gardener extraordinaire (she’s the one who started the garden with us and has brought invaluable experience and teachings). Erich, a tradesman with a specialization in electricity, has helped build homes across the world, even having worked on the 7-mile tunnel under Mont Blanc. He took one look and knew what to do. We ran waterproof cable from the circuit breaker in the farm to the garden and installed a weather-resistant circuit station next to our rainwater cisterns. Problem solved!
Lastly, but certainly NOT leastly, we cultivated 6 new beds, planted 7 new trees, 8 new shrubs, 9 new medicinal plants, and 44 additional lavender bushes. Slowly but surely our vision for the garden is becoming more and more of a reality. It’s slow because there’s only so much time, and even with help we have come to realize, the hard way, the nature of the old saying, “Rome wasn’t built in a day…”.
The pace at which the garden grows and develops is in line with Voltaire’s use of the word cultivate. The idea of cultivating a garden, like when you cultivate a plant, is soothing because it reminds me that, while at times difficult to recall, this endeavor is about the journey, not the destination. In fact, it can never be finished, any gardener will tell you the same. It is constantly changing, expanding and contracting, sometimes producing more, sometimes less. At the end of every season we sit on the entrance steps and reflect back to that 10 sq ft patch of calendula that started it all, and, tired and salty from sweat, we smile.
– Adrien