Blue Ruby Farm

In many Western and indigenous cultures, groups in communities, commons, and tribes all participated in the tending, procurement, and preservation of food and resources. They exist at the intersection of the constructed idea of “wildness” and the civilized idea of cultivation. The land is not owned, it is stewarded to benefit its ecology and future generations. At Blue Ruby Farm, we draw from indigenous knowledge and the book of nature to bring our ecology into greater biodiversity and abundance.

We look to our experiences on the land, in observation and meditation, to guide us in making these reparations. This is what we like to call “cultivating wildness”. What is wildness? It’s everything: the common street tree, the worm-eating your apple, the dog chasing the squirrel, and everything in your built environment that was once “wild”. It’s you and me. The wildness of our ecosystems is an expression of us in our true state, surrounded by the constant cycling of many things in the process of being born, living, and dying simultaneously. These are the forces we work with every day, never far from our awareness. They are the energies we look to for creating and cultivating the beauty that is all around us. The beauty that is us.

Communities create culture.

We often speak of culture in generalizations— large groups of people that make up a country or region. However  if we look closer, we see that cultures find their roots in small community groups like towns, villages or tribes. Regionally, one culture can have different food ways and traditions than another in the next valley over or on the other side of a mountain.

Community is the symbiosis that creates culture.  

What does this have to do with farming?  Agriculture is agrarian culture, and though we have come very far in our definition of what that means, the idea that we’ve actually made progress is questionable.

We work very, very hard, and spend lots of time and money.  We use lots of synthetic chemicals and poisons to grow food that’s not so good for us, or for the soil or the planet. One could argue that we’ve been wasting our time for 10000 years. Native peoples fed themselves abundantly by managing landscapes without nearly the effort and labor that is associated with modern farming.  They had no cancer or any diseases of civilization. The diseases that eventually killed them en masse arrived in North America with Europeans.

All this is to say, why are we doing what we’re doing?

It is a joy to restore a landscape and to see plants, animals and insects thrive. To be a part of that deeply grounding experience. What is even more rewarding and more imperative is the community that is drawn to that experience. That they’ve come to realize and understand on some level that they are disconnected from the forces of life that make them human; the life forces that exist everywhere in the natural world, all around us, in every moment. Whether we notice it or not, it has always been there and for the majority of human history  it has been regarded as sacred.

And that is how we see it.

Because in that sacredness lies not only a connection to the Earth but our connection to each other.

This is why we do what we do. We build community by sharing. We create culture in that community by being together and helping each other out. We put aside our differences and our personal failings and judgments for the greater good of the whole. We co-create this culture with natural world.

To quote a well know line from Seth Godin:

People like us, do things like this.

And that is why we do what we do.

It is why Blue Ruby Farm to us, is a project unique to itself, yet not exclusive to a select few. We hope you’ll join us as we start this portion of this amazing journey we are blessed and privileged to be on.

Explore the award-winning architecture firm, Vertebrae LA, who brought the owners of Blue Ruby Farm’s vision to life: https://www.vertebrae.la/