{"id":936,"date":"2026-07-15T17:37:31","date_gmt":"2026-07-16T00:37:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wordpress.kpu.ca\/green-criminology\/?p=936"},"modified":"2026-07-15T17:37:32","modified_gmt":"2026-07-16T00:37:32","slug":"watching-the-garden-grow","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wordpress.kpu.ca\/green-criminology\/2026\/07\/15\/watching-the-garden-grow\/","title":{"rendered":"WATCHING THE GARDEN GROW"},"content":{"rendered":"

Not Just One Visit This Time<\/strong><\/p>\n

Unlike my first blog, this post isn\u2019t about a single afternoon at the KPU Garden. It\u2019s about the last few weeks, the routine of stopping by, watering the beds, and just watching things change. There\u2019s something different about observing a garden over time instead of visiting it once. You start to notice the small shifts like a leaf curling, a flower opening, a stem finally strong enough to hold its own weight.<\/p>\n

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From Seeds to a Living System<\/strong><\/p>\n

The seeds we planted earlier this semester are long gone as seeds, they\u2019ve become an actual ecosystem. The zucchini plants have taken over their entire bed, their leaves so wide they shade out the soil beneath them and small zucchini are already forming underneath. Swiss chard leaves have grown thick and veiny, deep red running through the green. Radishes pushed themselves halfway out of the soil, ready to be pulled. None of this happened because I did anything dramatic. It happened because the garden was watered, left alone, and given time which is close to what Montini (2021) describes as an ecological law approach, one that treats ecosystems as having their own internal logic and worth, rather than existing only to be managed or extracted from for human benefit.<\/p>\n

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The Bugs Showed Up Too<\/strong><\/p>\n

The most interesting thing I noticed over these weeks wasn\u2019t the growth, it was the insects. Chewed holes started appearing in the zucchini leaves, and small bite marks worked their way across the chard. My first instinct was to think of this as damage, something to fix. But sitting with it longer, I started to see it differently. The insects are part of the same system as the plants, the soil, and the water I was pouring in every week. Nothing in the garden grows in isolation from the rest of it.<\/p>\n

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What the Land Owes No One<\/strong><\/p>\n

Reading Kat\u0142\u012f\u00e0\u2019s\u00a0Sovereignty Is Not for Sale<\/em> alongside this experience gave me a different lens. Her writing insists that land and water are not to be controlled, extracted from, or sold off, they carry their own worth, independent of what they produce for people. Our garden is obviously a much smaller and gentler situation than the pipelines, dams, and negotiations she writes about. But the underlying idea felt familiar about the garden wasn\u2019t there to be dominated or perfected. It grew the way it grew, insects and all, and my job was mostly just to show up and support that process, not control it.<\/p>\n

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What I\u2019m Taking From This<\/strong><\/p>\n

Looking back at these few weeks, the biggest shift for me wasn\u2019t in the garden, it was in how I think about growth, damage, and care. A \u201cperfect,\u201d bug-free garden was never really the goal. Green criminology, and now cyan criminology, keep pointing me toward the same lesson about healthy systems are messy, interconnected, and not fully within our control, and that\u2019s not a problem to solve.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Not Just One Visit This Time Unlike my first blog, this post isn\u2019t about a single afternoon at the KPU Garden. It\u2019s about the last few weeks, the routine of stopping by, watering the beds, and just watching things change. There\u2019s something different about observing a garden over time instead of visiting it once. You […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1513,"featured_media":935,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-936","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-published"],"splot_meta":{"author":"Keshav","license":"","footer":"Lafferty, K. (Kat\u0142\u0131\u0328\u0300\u0105). (2026). Mother Earth is our elder: A northern Indigenous perspective on the climate crisis. Penguin Random House Canada. Montini, M. (2021). The transformation of environmental law into ecological law. In, 11\u201320. Routledge. Acknowledgment of use of AI for brainstorming and spelling\/grammar."},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.kpu.ca\/green-criminology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/936","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.kpu.ca\/green-criminology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.kpu.ca\/green-criminology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.kpu.ca\/green-criminology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1513"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.kpu.ca\/green-criminology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=936"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.kpu.ca\/green-criminology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/936\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":937,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.kpu.ca\/green-criminology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/936\/revisions\/937"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.kpu.ca\/green-criminology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/935"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.kpu.ca\/green-criminology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=936"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.kpu.ca\/green-criminology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=936"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.kpu.ca\/green-criminology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=936"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}