Saturday mornings are for plant sales

There really is nothing like a good spring plant sale on a moisty, misty Saturday morning. Well, to tell you the truth, that thought never actually occurred to me until this weekend, but it still seems right. On the hot, sunny days of last week, spring was coming down upon us in full force, but on yesterday's cool grey morning, it was back to more of a slow creep...


We drove out through white-blossomed apple orchards towards the coast. Our first stop: an amazing organic bakery with a wood-fired oven for baking their breads and gardens and a miniature pony out back:

The end point of our drive was the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center (OAEC) and the plant sale for cool-weather, spring crops. Air hung damp and cool on the forests and gardens around us and two guitarists serenaded shoppers with some folksy music, as we perused brassicas with intriguing names like "Shiney Diney" (yes, I had to buy that one), lots of lettuce, herbs, edible flowers and perennials. We also came away with some hot flamingo chard (bright pink stems apparently), pacific beauty calendula, white-flowering borage and cilantro. 


I hadn't been back to OAEC since I took a two-week residential permaculture course there eight years ago, and we enjoyed the chance to explore the gardens once again. C took a particular fancy to a circular teaching area full of chairs suitable for climbing. Other than that, we tried to keep her careening baby steps from landing on any tender new growth in the gardens.

It was interesting to me, as we walked around the grounds, to think back on my eight years ago self and everything that had transpired between my last visit to the gardens and now. Would eight years ago me have expected today's me to be the one that returned? That course had been a special experience for me, at a particular point in my life. Then, I was a senior in college, new to California, fully captivated by a place and people and ideas about living that were new and exciting to me. Then, my post-graduate life waited like a mysterious gift, ready to be unwrapped. Now, I'm well into post-graduate life and I know something about the different places and people and job experiences it contains - not to mention marriage and motherhood. Some of it has indeed been magical and mysterious. Other parts have been fairly mundane. And now, here I am living actually quite close to OAEC. 


It's interesting to me to note which roads in life wrap back on themselves, and which ones don't. As I walked up through the gardens following the little miss C, I felt grateful that this road was one that brought me back.