The Garden

I have been meaning to start blogging for years..... I have always defeated myself before I even started. But I have a feeling I might be ready to make the commitment. As things are changing in my life I can't think of a better way to document them than this. I am always wishing in retrospect that I had documented my “transition” from my female body to my male self better. I did not. As a matter of fact, I never really documented any of my transition” and now almost fourteen years later I can only imagine what my life once was.

For that reason I now know that I am interested in committing myself to documenting these next steps and challenges in my life.

I am a 32 year old Transman (FTM). I recently married and am about to endeavour on perhaps the most brilliant part of my life thus far.... Starting a family. This is something that I always dreamed of, but never quite grasped how it would fit into my life. I feel so blessed to have met & married the most perfect lover and best friend i could ever have dreamed of....

A couple of years ago my partner and I decided to make the move from the city to the country. This is a decision I always knew I would make one day, but the day came sooner than i had anticipated with my sister and best friend becoming pregnant. We decided to leave the coast in June of 2009. We had dreams of landing jobs and housing easily in this community. Those dreams where not so realistic but after 2 years and many jobs (sometimes 4 or more at a time) we are finally starting to stabilize and ground ourselves.

December 2009 we moved into our current home. Being here has allowed us to plant ourselves in one place and start focusing on our future. A future that hopefully allows us to learn to live off of our land, raise a beautiful family, and have quality relationships with the people we love most.

Last year we planted our first garden together, learned to can & pickle, and started raising chickens for eggs. It was a learning curve for me coming from years of city living and small garden boxes vs. Wide open space and ground to work with. Our garden was small but perfect size for learning what we should and shouldn't do this year...

This year:

This year we planned in the winter/spring (which seemed to last especially long) to raise meat chickens as well as layers. We planned to hatch our own laying hens (with broody bantams as our mammas, even though they weren't their eggs). We planned a garden 4x the size of last years and several raised beds, a perennial garden and a garlic patch (which we planted on Hallowe’en last year) and we planned to can, pickle, jam, freeze, and dehydrate foods as they came into season so we could attempt to eat locally for most of the year.

This blog will be my “gardening journal” and hopefully I will find a way to incorporate other parts of our life too.