The laying out

Today we had the first garden meeting at WeMoon. The property is huge, and the task of getting any one piece of it cultivated was daunting But there is a beautiful, rounded wedge-shaped area toward the front of the property that gets a lot of sun and is huge -- 42 feet long and from 18 to 30 feet wide -- that seemed like a likely starting place. It would be the first thing that people saw when they pulled into the parking lot, just behind the bottle wall. Logistics put few restrictions on us; aside from making sure we gave the few trees and their roots some breathing room, we had this whole huge area to design a garden.

So we walked around scratching our heads and bouncing ideas, and eventually decided that we wanted to have two seating areas, a small path for walking around and for kneeling while weeding, and an ecclectic mix of flowering plants, herbs, and vegetables. As shapes came to us, we laid out overturned flower pots to get a feel for 4-foot-wide beds (not too big to reach across) and the kinds of pathways that would be the most useful and leave the most space to gardening. There was a lot of sketching and measuring and discussing, and a lot of moving out of the sun and into the shade. Mid-day brought a bright, hot, sun, and the obligations of Saturday afternoons began tugging on our sleeves. We broke for the day without breaking ground, having a loose plan for the layout, and agreeing to meet again Wednesday morning to actually get dirty.