Our First Full Growing Season Among the Trees 🌿

If there is one thing our first full growing season on this land has taught me, it’s that you can make all the plans you want — and then you have to listen to what the land has to say.

And this summer, it has had plenty to say.

When we moved to our property outside Goldendale and began building Among the Trees, I had so many ideas for what I wanted to grow here. Lavender, of course, but also culinary and medicinal herbs, berries, vegetables, flowers, pollinator gardens and spaces that could eventually become little pockets of abundance tucked throughout our oak forests.

Slowly, those ideas have started making their way out of my notebooks and into the ground.

And it has been beautiful.

It has also been hard.

Learning a New Piece of Land

This is our first full summer growing here, and we're learning just how different gardening and farming can be from one piece of land to another.

Our summers are hot, dry and windy. Water is precious here, and because we're building an off-grid, regenerative farm, figuring out irrigation has been one of our biggest learning curves.

We've experimented with solar pumps, gravity-fed systems, IBC totes, drip irrigation and different watering schedules. Some things have worked beautifully. Others... not so much.

There have been days when I've walked down to a garden expecting to find happy plants and instead discovered that an emitter wasn't working, a line wasn't delivering enough water, or the heat and wind simply won that round.

And yes, we've lost plants.

That's probably been one of the hardest parts for me.

When you've propagated something yourself, cared for it for months, planted it into the ground and imagined what it might look like several years from now, losing it feels like more than losing a plant.

But I'm learning not to look at every loss as a failure.

I'm trying to look at it as information.

The Land Is Teaching Us

Which plants handled our heat?

Which varieties tolerated the wind?

Where does moisture stay in the soil longer?

Where do we need mulch?

Which irrigation systems actually make sense for an off-grid farm?

What do the deer find absolutely irresistible despite everything I read telling me otherwise?

Every season here will give us more answers.

Regenerative farming, to us, isn't about forcing this land to become something it isn't. We want to work with it — preserving the beautiful oak savanna and ponderosa landscape that was already here while finding thoughtful places for lavender, herbs, food, flowers and habitat for pollinators.

That means we're going to have to experiment.

And sometimes experimenting means things don't work.

And Yet, So Much Grew

It's easy to focus on what didn't make it.

But then I look around and realize just how much did.

Our raised bed gardens are thriving. Herbs and vegetables have filled spaces that were bare just months ago, and our dahlias are covered in buds that look like they could burst open at any moment.

We even have what we've lovingly started calling the Porta Potty Garden — a garden growing in the exact spot where our porta potty sat when we first moved here. It's funny, a little ridiculous, and also kind of perfect. A place that was temporary and purely functional is slowly becoming something beautiful.

And then there are the plants around our cabin.

When my mom came to visit, she brought an incredible collection of plants all the way from Georgia — divided and shared from her own garden and the gardens of her friends. We tucked them into the ground around our new home, bringing a little piece of where I came from to this place where we're putting down roots now.

Some didn't make it.

But some are thriving.

And I think there's something really beautiful about that.

There are plants growing here now with stories attached to them. Plants that once grew in gardens thousands of miles away are beginning to find their place beneath our oak trees in Washington.

There are gardens here that didn't exist a year ago. There are flowers preparing to bloom where there was once bare ground. There are herbs making their way into our kitchen and our products, and young plants slowly learning this land right alongside us.

This property doesn't need to become everything we've imagined in a single growing season.

Neither does this farm.

For our first year, seeing life beginning to fill these little pockets of land feels like something worth celebrating.

Growing Slowly, Growing Better

There are already things I know we'll do differently next year.

We'll continue improving our irrigation. We'll pay closer attention to where and when we plant. We'll keep building our soil, adding mulch, conserving water and choosing plants that prove they can thrive in this particular climate.

Some garden plans will change entirely.

That's okay.

I want Among the Trees to be a farm that evolves because we're paying attention — not one built around doing something a certain way simply because that was the original plan.

Someday, I hope visitors will walk through established lavender gardens, abundant herbs and flowers buzzing with pollinators and think that it all looks like it belongs here.

What they may not see are these first seasons underneath it all.

The plants that didn't make it.

The irrigation lines we moved.

The ideas we abandoned.

The lessons learned standing in the middle of a garden on a 90-degree afternoon wondering what on earth happened.

Those things will be part of this farm's roots, too.

For now, we're celebrating what grew, learning from what didn't, and heading toward the next season knowing this land a little better than we did before.

That's enough for year one.

And I can't wait to see what grows from here.

— Monica
Among the Trees Botanical Lavender Farm
Goldendale, Washington