Why am I doing this? Some TMI and personal shit resulting in a micro-nursery

Why Localeaf?

I have a few reasons. Not one of them is extensive horticultural experience or credentials, because really, honestly, I have none. Everything I know about plants and gardening I taught myself, mostly through trial and (a lot) of error.  

I have been growing plants and gardening for many years, indoor and outdoor, on balconies when I lived in apartments with them, at kitchen windows in apartments without balconies in foreign lands, and tucked away inside cabinets, terrariums, aquariums and even Rubbermaid bins in the height of pandemic winter isolation. 

Life Change

4 years ago I got sick. Really sick, suddenly, for unknown reasons, and spent 2 years slowly dying while a myriad of well meaning doctors and specialists invaded my body with needles, scalpels, scopes, cameras, injections and steroids, each leaving them more puzzled than the last.

I was eventually diagnosed with Neuro-Behcet’s Disease, a rare and unpredictable auto inflammatory condition that can affect any part of a person, and rarely, like in my unfortunate case, the brain. Today, I am stable, but my life has been forever altered by the permanent damage this disease has done to my body and especially my brain. If I remain in remission, I am living the best new version of myself, with permanent “mild cognitive impairment”. If I don’t, I have no way of knowing what other part of my brain my disease might fry in another flare-up.  

There are so many things I can no longer do, so I have been searching for what I am still capable of doing, in the small spurts of energy and attention I still have, within the limitations of my new, forever altered life.

Over the past few years, on and off, I have volunteered with a wonderful anti-food waste initiative called the Collective Kitchen at Entre-Nous Community Centre here in Aylmer. They receive past-due food from large grocery chains, and volunteers spend one day a week cooking that food and distributing it into hundreds of containers for families to bring home, and also to supply to the community anti-food waste fridge. 

I used to deliver the portions to the community fridge, and felt such a sense of community pride and accomplishment filling that fridge.

That was in sharp contrast to the outrage I felt at the thought of the mountains of food waste our society produces, then willingly discards, but I chose to focus on our accomplishments instead. I loved volunteering there, but the food we received became more and more scarce, and I struggled physically too much to continue. 

I kept searching for something, anything I could actually start, and complete, and feel proud of within my new constraints. Growing plants and gardening became my zen space. I’m sure an official name for it would be horticultural therapy, but my version was self-administered, based on some primal survival instinct. I was flying by the seat of my pants, really just looking for a sense of accomplishment and purpose, and watching plants grow was it, at my worst.

Plants helped me force myself out of bed in the mornings on the really bad days, so that I could be there for these guys at the end of the day, somewhat loopy and tortured looking and forgetful, but still smiling.

I learned to propagate plants in so many different ways, grow them from seed, experimented with growing mediums, soil amendments, light conditions, not-watering, over watering, and in the winter I did the same with indoor plants.

This resulted in an over abundant garden, particularly with my perennial plants, and a lot of smaller indoor plant propagations. I loved giving these away in my local plant community group (Aylmer Gardeners and Plant Swappers), and people loved receiving them, which in turn made me feel happy. 

I took art classes, and though I struggled through the physicality of them, and missed many on days when my body betrayed me, I learned I’m not half bad at drawing.

I have to do it in small spurts or I lose feeling in my hand and fingertips, but I can draw. I incorporated some of my newfound confidence in my artistic abilities into my garden spaces and landscaping designs, incorporating recycled and donated materials wherever I could. 

In mild weather, our family spends a lot of time at our cottage. I like going for short walks in our expansive, untouched forest in the mornings. Our littlest eagerly joins me, and together we uncover the understory of our forest. We go on mushroom hunts. We take pictures and identify them later. We find small flowers, and berries, and fancy fern patterns, and try to identify each one. My daughter collects wild flowers forest treasures, and I take photos and sometimes collect seeds.

We started growing these seeds and found places for them in our garden, and it lead me to a love and appreciation of the natural beauty of native plants, over the showy cultivated version of their nursery bred cousins, with names like “Pow Pow Wild berry” Echinaecea. 

I found people who share my love for native plants, and swapped baby plants, leading to more variety in my gardens. These baby plants grew, larger and larger, and I split them and found them homes in my community, and collected some of their seeds. I learned the importance of sourcing native plants as close to home as possible, as well as considering the impact of climate change and global warming on native plant survival, adaptation and migration.

I learned everything I could about winter sowing, joined the North American Native Plant Society, joined the Ottawa Wildflower Seed Library, visited many wildlife community gardens, and began seeking out varieties of native plants I fell in love with, adding those to my garden, and finding nooks for them to thrive. I bought baby plants from Trinkets and Thyme, Connaught Nursery, A Cultivated Art, the annual Aylmer Heritage Association Plant sale, the Fletcher Wildlife Garden Native Plant sale, and watched them grow along with my own seed babies. 

I began gifting my neighbours baby plants and helping them create small pollinator friendly native patches in their own yards. I started learning about food forests, perennial edible crops, permaculture concepts and a few years ago thought it would be fun to try my hand at growing fruiting trees and shrubs from seed. Some of those early experiments will be 3 years old this spring, though many didn’t survive until I learned they needed protection from the critters. They are a long game, but the baby trees I grow from seed each year give me the greatest joy.

I have continued to have mixed results with my vegetable gardens, but have learned so much in the process. Last year I experimented with many varieties of heirloom, open pollinated vegetables, grown in traditional vegetable plots, but also in random places in my yard, in sunny spots, and shady ones, in fresh lasagna layers of compost, under a spruce canopy, and particularly nested among patches of native shrubs, flowers and fruits.

I realized I can fit more than our family could ever need in our yard, once the grass was gone. Our strawberries spread and bore fruit all summer long, feeding us AND the local bunny population. Cherry tomatoes and lettuce and rhubarb and peas and grapes and cucumbers and potatoes grew into baskets and bushels that fed our family, and we gifted to neighbours, and we shared with the birds and the squirrels and bunnies and chipmunks, and still had leftovers.

I made a lot of large batches of soups with our harvested vegetables, more than enough for our family. We stocked our standalone freezer full for the winter, and I’ve been able to restock the community fridge with additional soup portions, made with vegetables and herbs we grew, from seed, in the side yard of our old home.

Back to Localeaf

We decided we wanted to move to the country last year, and the idea for Localeaf began spinning in my head as we started searching for a home. I wanted to find a way to start a small nursery. Not a traditional nursery, but something personal, on a manageable scale, rooted in the idea of restoring a connection between people and nature. I wanted something tangible I can do to help my 5 year old who wants to “help the earth”. I wanted space to rewild, give back to nature, entice animals and birds and insects to come fill their bellies and that of their children.

At the same time I was searching for ways to provide food for our family, and have room to grow more than we need, and share the abundance with our community and the wild. I wanted to help others to do the same, while having space to grow and continue learning about plants. We have found the space in our new home to do all that, and I hope by starting Localeaf that in turn we can help others find the joy in life and nature.

I now have a space to incorporate my art into,  and maybe some day the art of others. Through Localeaf, I hope to find a different lens to grow plants ,and share awareness of the understated beauty of native plants, and their visitors. I have been aiming to approach this in a way that is accessible, and tangible, and real, and not overwhelming for people curious about native gardening and permaculture concepts.

This year I also want to grow and learn more about medicinal plants and herbs as well as using plants for their natural dyeing properties. I’m growing lots of them, and very honestly not quite sure how to use them all yet, but if I am successful I will learn. I will plant them, try them, and more than likely ask for help and guidance or look for answers until I figure it out.

I want Localeaf to grow organically, slowly, over time, and I want it all to start from seeds, using as much existing and recycled or reusable and sustainable materials available to me as I can find. There is plenty.

We moved into our dream home last fall, and this is the home where Localeaf is officially born. Our kids are excited to help, and have shown impressive entrepreneurial spirit already, and have ideas for continuing to build on that momentum. Most important, to me, they are embarking on this journey as partners, with a genuine interest in learning, working hard, and spending quality time together as a family.

We are enjoying the journey, and happy to start small, try things, make mistakes, and engage with our lovely community and see where we end up in the process. I started this blog as a way to document our journey, and also to force my mind into a rigid form of exercise. As scary as it is to put my slightly damaged status on public display, I didn’t feel I could be truthful and open without mentioning that aspect of my why.

As per usual, if you have reached the end of this blog post, I commend you, as I tend to ramble. I have shared some pretty personal shit about myself in this post, and hopefully that helps explain the reasons why my blog posts are collections of such run on sentences. I prefer to leave my writing as it left my thoughts, despite  WordPress’s AI algorithm constantly suggesting to me I need to edit myself. If you read this far, I hope you understand that meeting me in person you may also find me strange. A little distanced seeming, possibly with red puffy eyes, maybe rambling slightly, or forgetting my words, or repeating myself, depending on the day.

That is me, and my Neuro Behcet’s, which has impacted my eyesight, my short term memory, my processing speed and my ability to multitask, focus and concentrate.

But that is not everything I am. This post is the most I have ever shared of my personal life with strangers, or the internet. It is terrifying, but also liberating, as it somehow sets me free. It allows me to hug my family close, and embrace the new me. It reminds me that good things can come from dark, scary places, and my dark, scary place is in the past, making room for, and giving reason for Localeaf to exist.

If our story interests you, come visit us sometime in spring or summer, or reach out through the usual channels, and learn more about what we are trying to do.

You might be surprised to learn how much your words of encouragement mean to us. We’d be happy to receive suggestions, advice and ideas, and are absolutely interested in partnering with like minded individuals and organizations, whenever “the shoe fits”. We apologize if it takes us a bit of time to respond, we are likely somewhere outside or with our hands deep in dirt, away from our phones, devices and social media, focused instead on growing baby plants from seed.