The problem with creating good soil from sheet mulch and planting successful juicy tomatoes and flowers in it, is that gophers love plant roots. They really devastated the plants that were happily growing in the mulch-covered hill from my last post. I pretty much just gave up and let things in that patch go. After taking out a lot of annuals and some perennials, the gopher or gophers seemed to leave the scene, but I figured they would re-appear as soon as new plants showed up, so I just left the area alone for a while and observed it.
We are planning a wedding at our place in April, and the bride’s favorite flower is daffodils, so we bought about a hundred bulbs to plant them all over the property. To my delight, they turn out to be deterrents to gophers.
One other pest that has eaten squash and strawberries this year are pill bugs. After much research, I just let them be hoping that the balance would be restored. Then we started observing special spiders. They don’t seem to make webs and are around soil. They are kind of ominous looking. They are Woodlouse spiders that eat pill bugs!
http://spiders.entomology.wisc.edu/Dysderidae/Dysdera_crocata/Dysdera_crocata.jpg
So many lessons for me here.
1.Step back and observe the whole communal system.
2.Let the wisdom of creation teach you.
3.Include everyone in your design.
4.Treat every problem as a solution.
5.Don’t resort to something you have to buy and introduce from the outside unless it is a last resort and appears to be the only solution after careful long-term observation and listening.
6.Life provides all of what we need in a reciprocal system. Killing off some part of the system only produces mayhem that must be “fixed” again by natural systems that may take a very long time.
7.Love and nurture what you already have and add what calls to you.
8.Let yourself be surrounded with the “love glue,” that holds everything in the Universe together.
No, those are not the Permaculture Principles, they are just mine from experimenting with a relationship with all of Creation. Hope you enjoy your own personal adventure with Creation.
Full Bloom Now 
