A few years ago, I could prune almost everything in the food forest with a pair of hand pruners.... then I needed loppers. Then a handsaw. This week, I borrowed a chainsaw. Which is a major milestone, and not for the food forest, but for me!

As I was all up in elderberry leaves, chainsawing through branches that had become too thick and abundant for my pruning saw, I had this funny realization: The food forest got big. Like… actually big. Because there was a time, just a few years ago, when I looked out at this yard and had to work pretty hard to believe that it would ever become the food forest I imagined.

I planted tiny bare-root trees (sticks!) and tried to picture their canopies touching. I tucked little plants into huge empty spaces and imagined them eventually spilling into one another. In my mind, I could see the forest I wanted to create. That part wasn't hard. What was hard was looking at the sticks, the bare ground, and all that dry, barren space in front of me and believing that someday the two pictures, the one in my imagination and the one in front of me, would even remotely resemble one another.

So I practiced believing. Believing the trees would grow. Believing the soil would improve. Believing that what I could see so clearly in my imagination was actually becoming real, even when there wasn't much evidence of it yet.

I even had a little metal bird someone was getting rid of with the word BELIEVE painted on it. It resonated with me, so I brought it home and stuck it at the edge of the garden. Over the years, a lavender plant grew around it until eventually it swallowed the little sign completely. Which, quite frankly, feels almost too perfect: the thing reminding me to believe was lost inside the very thing I was trying to believe in.

Slowly, almost imperceptibly, life changed and at some point I stopped having to believe and began to know.

I know the trees will keep growing because instead of spending my time planting them, I spend much of it trying to keep them from engulfing the pathways. I know the ecosystem is becoming more alive because birds sing in celebration every morning in places that didn't even exist a few years ago. I know the forest is becoming abundant because my pruners became loppers, my loppers became a saw, and now I find myself reaching for a chainsaw to save myself hours of hand-sawing.

And as I prepare to leave Goldifarms and start the next food forest, I've been thinking about how different knowing feels from believing.

Belief can still contain an inner negotiation. I believe this can happen. I believe I'm capable of this. I believe my life could become something different. But underneath it, the quiet question: But what if it doesn’t?

Belief is the bridge we need when there isn't much evidence yet.
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But knowing… knowing feels quieter. You don't have to keep convincing yourself. You've lived something long enough, watched it unfold enough times, that eventually, the negotiation inside just ends.

Maybe this is one of the things nature has been teaching me all along. When I planted those tiny trees, I couldn't know what would happen. I couldn't know which ones would thrive, how quickly they would grow, or whether the forest in my imagination would ever resemble the one in front of me. I couldn’t make trees grow. All I could do was tend to what was in front of me: water, feed the soil, plant another plant, notice what was working, change what wasn't. And keep going, even when the evidence was still pretty underwhelming.

And by crossing that bridge of belief day after day, eventually the evidence appeared everywhere: shade, birds, layers of plants spilling into one another, the pathways disappearing beneath branches, and eventually, a borrowed chainsaw.

That's why borrowing it felt like such a milestone. Not because I finally grew a big food forest. Because as I'm about to start all over again, this time, I know something I couldn't have known the first time.

I don’t need to see the finished thing in order to begin. I don’t need evidence before taking the next step. I know how to tend something into being without controlling exactly what it becomes.

Sometimes all we can see is a possibility. So we make a move toward it. We pay attention to what happens. Adjust. Keep going. And slowly, what once existed only in imagination starts becoming something we can actually stand inside.

I started Goldifarms because I wanted to grow food. But after all these years, I've realized that learning how to grow a food forest changed the way I understand how to live my life. That's the part I'm most interested in now. So I’ve been rebuilding Goldifarms around that idea. There are still plenty of plants and food forests there :-). But now I’m also sharing what this place has taught me about being human, about change, uncertainty, possibility, and creating a life that feels more alive, abundant, connected, and free.

The new site is finally beginning to feel like the Goldifarms I've been trying to articulate for years. I'd love for you to come see it —> Goldifarms.com​

Maybe there's something in your own life that you can't quite know yet. Something you can see in your heart, but don't have much evidence for. Maybe you don't need certainty yet. Maybe belief is enough to help you plant the first seed. And then, someday, you might look around and realize you need a chainsaw.

🧡 Erin