Mother Henna: 100 Ways to Experiment in the Garden...Illustration Friday and Sunday Scribbling

100 Ways to Experiment in the Garden
by Kara L.C. Jones
with help from Hawk Jones
for Illustration Friday & Sunday Scribbling

Set up hoop houses and grow everything you could ever want.
Chuck growing and just set it all on fire.
Just keep it mowed.
Fill it with bird feeders and then try to keep the squirrels out.
Gut the whole thing and fill in with a sweet swimming pool.
Hang out there in October and fill it with crocus, daffodil, and tulip bulbs. Come March, enjoy!
Dig fresh eggs? Get yourself a few chickens and let them have at scratching their way thru life!
Grow your own food. I highly recommend every kind of beet known to man. The greens on the beets are particularly yummy -- cook up well when sauteed with a little coconut oil or raw and chopped up in salad -- or even chopped up and tossed into chicken soup. Mmmm. And then of course the beets themselves. I recommend throwing them in the food processor raw, with the shred blade, along with some carrot and ginger. Toss it all with some raw apple vinegar. Let it sit overnight. And then you have yummies for days!
Set up a tent, drape it in saris and tapestries, turn on the music and belly dance in your very own gypsy tent!
Set up your ez-up, squeeze the lemons, add sugar and ice, and sell your lemonade!
Do the same as #10, only with limes. You'll have the competitive advantage over the stand down the road because you'll be unique! :)
Learn about the rare and wonderful bergamot oranges. See if you can grow them!
String christmas light to and fro, all over the place, make shapes out of them. Invite people to your Garden Light Party -- only happening late on summer nites.
Lay down in the middle of your garden space and commune with the worms. Do it quick before the birds come for their dinner.
If the soil has been contaminated somehow, look into chickweed as ground cover. It is great at sucking the toxins out of the soil. But of course, do not eat that chickweed then!
Consider letting it weed over with nettles. And then investigate nettles. They are valuable and yummy! You can even eat them raw -- I swear -- a naturalist once showed me how! They make great tea. They sautee up really well with a little olive oil and garlic. Or you could use them to make compost tea to build up the strength of your garden soil.
Grow henna!!! It's a lot of work to dry, crush and sift it for body art, but how cool would it be to have henna flowers growing in your garden!!!!
Do all your gardening in the nude! Come on, you know you want to try it. I bet if every person on the planet had to grow their own food and had to do that gardening in the nude, I bet we'd have world peace. Wanna try?
Plant an advice-garden. Make a whole buncha signs on sticks. Saying things like "Stop and Think" or "Love Not War" or "Be Nice". Plant them in your garden. Join the local garden tour. Don't be diswayed by snooty gardeners who try to say you don't belong on the tour.
Plant an art-garden. Make art that will endure the weather. Or not -- and lets just see what the weather does to it. Again join the local garden tour!
Plant things that make great tea like lavender, calendula, chamomile, hibiscus and more. When all is in bloom, host a tea party in the garden. Invite party goers to pick their own tea or to skip the tea and make a salad of flowers!
Put up a tent of pretty draped materials so you have an outdoor private space. Make love for hours with your partner out there. Of course beware of jealous neighbors who aren't gettin' any coz they are liable to call the police to report you for indecency. But you know, if you have good neighbors who have good hearts and understand love in their own lives, there just might end up being pretty draped tents all over the neighborhood!
Sit still under a tree for hours and hours. Let the birds get used to you. When they come pecking around, make friends!
Invite a whole group of people over to your garden and then do a mock performance of the dating game for everyone's entertainment.
Host an art party in your garden. Tell attendees that they can only make art using garden materials. Or that they have to make art representing something in the garden.
Put in a fish pond -- beware of the toads that might bury themselves at the bottom :) hee hee.
Find out what the hummingbirds in your area like and plant a whole garden just for them!
Figure out how to grow as many different kinds of strawberries as possible in your area and then enjoy the strawberry fields forever.
Invest all your money in life-size kits of dinosaur bone displays and then build them in your garden. The kids from the neighborhood will LOVE you.
Dig out all the junk in your house and plant in and around the garden. Open up the garden for touring and sell it all as yard sale finds or just tell people it is art.
Plant grapes, fill the place corner to corner with grapes, all over the place! And then, you know, of course eat the grapes or make wine or vinegar if you want. But more importantly, harvest those grape leaves, use them to roll up rice, ground lamb, and lemon, steam, and wa-la! Dolmas!
Plant evergreen trees. As many as you can. Every year, string them with holiday lights and have a winter garden party!
Collect up as many pine cones as you can find. Paint them with peanut butter. Roll them in bird seed. Hang them all over the garden and watch the birdies feast like they are in heaven.
Every day for an entire year, eat at least one meal a day out in your garden. Blog about it and tell us what you see!
Once a day, go out in your garden with huge ringing bells and yell, here yee here yee here yee as loud as you can. Then laugh like nobody's business and go back inside. Either the neighbors will never bother you again or they will find you extremely entertaining.
Go out and make snow angels in the garden every day whether there is snow or not.
Go out and dance the jig in your garden once day, no music necessary, just dance.
Even if there is no garden in your garden -- you know, it is just grass or weeds or whatever -- go out there everyday and love your beautiful garden. Who knows? You might get ideas and before you know it, there will be some bits and pieces of a garden.
Find out what the deer like to eat. Plant it and then let them eat it all, don't bother with chicken wire and stuff trying to keep them out. Invite them in.
Take the Twister game out there and play by yourself everyday. Have fun. Laugh, call out the circles you get, fall over, and have general hilarity. Let the neighbors think what they may.
Set up sprinklers. Turn them on once a day and go out in and dance about in them. Sing praises to the water goddess.
Go out once a day and meditate in the garden. Don't do anything, just sit there. Let thoughts come and go. Just BE there. If it rains, you can hold an umbrella over you.
Hang a sheet up across the garden. Take out the dvd projector and your laptop and watch films. Guerrilla film watching! Especially watch films like Libeled Lady or Double Wedding or the Thin Man Series or My Man Godfrey. I bet half your neighbors won't even have heard of these films! You'll be doing a film-dom history service via your guerrilla garden film watching!
Learn about wishing trees like they have in traditional Japanese gardens. Yoko Ono donated 10 of these trees to Washington DC recently. Plant a garden full of wishing trees and open your garden to those who want to make wishes. But you can't do this frivolously. You need to take seriously, your new mantle as the keeper of wishes!
Plant your garden full of treasure. And then open the place up to a treasure hunt!
Plant your garden full of small pieces of art like you are hiding things for the treasure hunt. Now publicize and open your garden for an Art Treasure Hunt. If people find the pieces of art, they get to keep them -- you'll even sign and date the pieces for them. It could be quite the interactive art show!
Make your garden one huge sandbox. Invite people over once a month to come and make sand art! Either the sand castle kind or the Japanese garden sand art kind. Whatever you want!
Dedicate a portion of your garden to grow food for the local Food Bank -- everyone deserves fresh food!
Invite friends over for high tea in the garden, but you MUST wear big, funny, fancy hats.
As a meditation, mindfully weed your garden, give thanks to every weed, every grain of dirt, make it spiritual!
If you are an active gardener, you probably have lots of compost. Have a compost party, share your compost with others, invite people to give presentations about compost, share your compost tea recipes, check out The Worm Guy for compositing ideas!
Go out and make art in your garden, but you MUST wear a big floppy sun hat and have an espresso break like the artists in Italy do!
Host a garden writing day. Invite people to come over and write garden themed poetry on the fly. Everyone is REQUIRED to wear big floppy sun hats.
Go out into your garden with a chair, tv tray, pen and paper, and you MUST wear a big floppy sun hat and work on your novel!!!!!
Start a garden journal where you record what happens in and around your garden every day with the plants and animals. Keep this journal for several years and look at how things change or happen the same every year! You could always check out Erin Kenny's book The Naturalist's Journal for this purpose.
Put a big sturdy box out in the garden and label it so it clearly says "SOAP BOX" and then invite people over to come and rant away.
Every month for a year, plant something you've never planted in your garden before -- and find ways to grow stuff to grow all year round -- did you know that kiwi grows well here in the Seattle area?? What kind of weird stuff can you grow where you are -- and looking at the full calendar year, too?
Have a garden feast pot-luck. But everything people bring has to have been grown in their garden!
Camp out over night in your garden. See what it is like to sleep outside!
Layout and Moon-bathe in your garden at the full moon. Do it naked :) hee hee...
Get a telescope and go out and see what you can see from your garden.
Find out what butterflies come through your area. Grow a garden just to attract them! Let your local butterfly group know and invite them to come over for a butterfly count!
Plant a May Pole in the middle of your garden (if you aren't growing a garden there of course), and invite people over to come dance around it.
Consider making part of your garden into a sacred memorial spot. Plant forget-me-not. Let people know they can come and sit to remember quietly if they want.
Consider making part of your garden into a rock garden. Invite people to come over and add a rock. Each rock is in honor and memory of someone they love who has died. Take serious, your new role as memorial guardian.
Go out once a day with a camera on a tripod. Sit quietly with your camera aimed at a tree that the birds particularly love. Take pictures when the birdies least expect it :)
Find out what attracts ladybugs and plant a garden just for them!! Watch them flock to you.
Set aside some space in your garden for the angels. Invite people over to hang up angel ornaments or to leave little angel art pieces. Take seriously your new role as a sacred space holder for angels.
Check out that solar paper you can get at Science Centers and the like. Make prints of all the different plants growing in and around your garden. Make art with it. In mid-winter when nothing is growing, host an art party with the solar paper art and be reminded of summer and growing and harvest.
Host a summer-only, weekly poetry reading. Have the audience sit in your garden/yard. Have the poet(s) stand on the porch like a stage. BUT performers can only read or perform poetry or spoken word on the theme of "Garden".
Host a summer-0nly, weekly book club. Read only books that have some garden theme to them.
Host a fashion show in your garden -- again using the porch as the stage. But the designers have to make all the clothes for the models out of food!!! A lettuce bikini. Hmmmm :)
When the tomato plants begin to overflow, host a day of salsa, ketchup, and pasta sauce making!
Grow a flower garden and then everyday take a new bouquet to the local senior center.
Make all kinds of stars out of paper and canvas and wire. Decorate them all pretty. Fill one of the trees in your yard/garden with the stars. Then open your garden up for "wish upon a star" days.
Invite the local plein-air group over to make art in your garden.
Make a zillion different kinds of lemonade. Mint-lemonade. Strawberry-lemonade. Lavender-lemonade. Lemonade-pie. Anything you can think of. Invite people over to par-take!
Invite local homeschoolers to come hang out in your garden and learn about the stuff you are growing there!
Host your local sustainability group in your garden one day and invite people to share ideas and "how-to"s.
Grow calendula (marigolds) of all kinds. In the Fall, invite the local Day of the Dead event coordinators to come and harvest as many as they need for their events.
Host your own Day of the Dead event when all the marigolds are in bloom at the end of October -- teach people how to make their own sugar skulls for the holiday.
Use ingredients from your garden to add to a huge jar of water. Let the jar sit out overnight in the full moon. In the morning, you'll have MoonTea!!
Host full moon tea parties in your garden at night!
Plant your flowers and plants in the shape of peace signs. Host peace parties in your garden!
Invite local photography students to come over and learn about outside lighting and such in your garden.
Plant stuff that will grow really high. Plant it in the shape of a square or circle and when it grows up, you'll have a private room out there!
Sit out in the garden alone, right in the middle of whatever is growing out there. Listen to the words that come to mind -- it's the plants talking to you! Write down what you hear!
Go out in the garden once a day and sing to your plants.
Host regular concerts in your garden. Plants can never have too much singing!
Have a spa day using stuff from your garden! Cucumbers for eyes. Mint bath for your feet. Tend to yourself as carefully as your tend your garden.
Take all old and junk cds you can find (and get in the mail everyday!), and wire them together in the shape of a huge fish and hang it up in your garden. It's a shimmery, beautiful fish scare crow.
Never dump your undrunk tea down the drain! Set a watering can aside, just for tea. Dump undrunk tea in it. When it is full, go out and water your garden.
Do garden haiku. Once a day write a new haiku in dedication to your garden. Put a white board on a stick, planted in your garden. Each day write your haiku on the white board, read it outloud to the plants there. When you harvest to eat and share, you'll be partaking of poetry infused food!
Plant your garden in the shape of a labyrinth. Open your garden often to those who wish to walk in meditation.
If your garden area is a mass of weeds and random growing things, then rent or borrow a friend's or local farm's goats and have them come over and munch out all the growing things to clear space for growing things on purpose.
Plant every possible kind of rose you can get your hands on. Wa-la! Your own rose garden. You don't need to be President for that.
Create a love garden. Plant everything in the shape of hearts! Write love notes to your plants and post them to stakes near the plants. Play lovely music to your plants each day.
Add a glass globe or two to your garden. I especially like the red ones. Take weird photos reflected off of their surfaces. Call it garden art!
Become really green. Plant your roof with growing, living things! If you've never heard of a "green roof" before, do some research. It is a fascinating idea!
Go out in your garden once a day and blow bubbles!! Blow bubbles for fun, bubbles for peace, bubbles for laughing, bubbles for joy, bubbles for good wishes, just get into the shiny, light, lovely bubbles!

Miracles!
k-

4 comments:

Janice said...: and Im sure there are a hundred more.. (smiling here)
YOUR bird is so very cheerful in its flowery breeze.; March 10, 2008 8:08 PM
studio lolo said...: I love how one of the flowers landed on his heart. Lovely! I must (and will) print this list. Thank you!; March 10, 2008 9:20 PM
K said...: Oh, I am so happy you left a comment on my blog, or I'd never have discovered yours! I've glanced over both and will be back to read more in depth. I LOVE your garden illustration, and I can't wait to try the experiments.
--Designsprite, aka Kris; March 11, 2008 6:46 PM
1,000 Faces of MotherHenna said...: Thanks everyone! So glad you all are enjoying the list and illustration... hope if you do experiment in your own garden that you blog about it -- and then come back and leave me the link so I can read about it, too!!! :)
Miracles,
k-; March 22, 2008 7:13 PM