Month: May 2025

Illness: when chaos, birds, and deer run the show

I’ve been sick and slowly recovering for at least two weeks…I think…who counts things when they’re sick? We probably all know at least one person who would…but I digress. The upside…I found out the wonders of probiotics. Once I identified my digestive issues, 35 billion little probiotic buddies came to my rescue. That much I’m happy to count.

Half of my seedlings died (along with me…I swear it felt that way) due to lack of water; the other half were assaulted by little food-seeking birds scratching. Once it started raining, there were the birds. It rained for days. The grass that hasn’t been mowed grew about two feet. The bunnies have awakened. I’m so far behind the critters now.

The bird that was nesting in my husband’s rubber shoes sitting on the shoe shelf next to the front door has hatched out her young and they are gone. It was fun to watch. She started building a nest in each of four shoes on the shelf before she finally decided on the first one. Don’t question the nesting habits of a pregnant female…

Yesterday evening just as it was getting dark…the days are so much longer now, it was around 9pm…a doe showed up with a newborn fawn. The day had been stormy…windy all day, raining off and on, sometimes quite heavily…and the weather was no different as it darkened. Enter a tiny fawn, hardly able to walk, shaky little legs. It was seeking refuge under the seat of our picnic table. Crouched, not lying down, under the seat, not the table itself.

It’s mother was nearby, licking it, obviously trying to coax it to a safer place, but the fawn didn’t want to leave. It finally did, though, wobbling off. Forgetting my own shakiness and weakness after not eating much for a couple weeks, I sent that little one all my love, trying to imagine how it felt to emerge from quiet, warmth and security into a tempestuous world. I wish you, little one, and all those without shelter, a place to lay your head and gather strength.

I hope to see that little one soon, leaping with joy in this green place where deer find solace.

Happy Mother’s Day

I had my two sons relatively close together. Since I breast fed them both…first one, then the other 17 months later…the nursing years seemed to stretch on forever. I call them “the lost years.” Not because I didn’t love them over the moon and back, but because by the time the younger one was…maybe three?…I realized I started slowly having more than 15 minutes at a time to myself. These mere minutes I like to call “time on my hands.”

What does one do with this time? I don’t have to change a diaper, nurse, bathe them, fix a meal, fix their skinned knees, wash clothes, entertain them (short attention spans means extra work), clean up after them…so then what?

I rediscovered my knitting needles and yarn stash. I’d been knitting since I was a pre-teen but had forgotten that “I used to do this.” I started a small garden…then a bigger one…but it wasn’t until those two babies were in high school that I started writing again. I volunteered in my community, eventually starting up a community center with the help of so many others. I started a farmer’s market. I started freelance writing and a friend and I started a knitting business.

Now I’m 75 and writing, knitting, and gardening still. My sons have had kids of their own, so I don’t need to call them up at 2:30 am to tell them I need to pee (a sort of revenge I thought of but never actually did.) I look at an occasional photo of them growing up and nostalgia creeps in. Their kids are growing up, some are adults. I think about how I loved being pregnant.

And now the wheel is turning. I think about reincarnation. Assuming I don’t reincarnate as a fruit fly or a cucumber…I dream of giving birth all over again. Some idyllic place with a loving partner and a tribe of monkey-children, wild and free, experiencing life with every part of their being.

~~~Adapted from the song “Pass It On” by Bunny Wailer~~~

“Be not selfish in your doings

Pass it on

Help your children in their needs

Pass it on

Live for yourself, you’re gonna live in vain

Live for others, you will live again.”

Bless the Mothers.

Companion planting

This spring, I’m chaos companion planting in a new raised bed. I planted peas, sweet peas, and wildflower seeds in a bed that was ready, hügelkultur-style, with small branches, unfinished compost, and…no watering system except a small watering can and …no protection from rabbits and squirrels. Yes, the area is fenced, but the ground is somewhat uneven and there are gaps…like, under the gate. Even the squirrels don’t need to climb, they scamper easily right under the gate.

Now I am able to keep the soil surface watered, but still I occasionally see signs of digging. Today I go scavenging around and in sheds to see if I can find some way of protecting the bed. A small piece of chicken wire would do the trick, laid on top of the bed. A larger piece, I could make a semblance of a fence…

I’m gardening on no budget and with all the strength a 75-year old woman can muster…

So even if only a few plants survive I will count it as a success.

I’ve already done a “second planting”…mixing all the veggie and flower seeds left over from years of seed purchasing and scattering them over the surface. More chaos!

What if nothing much grows? Well, the volunteer potato plant will thrive…and the four pea plants seem to be surviving! …so that’s something! I will cover the bare spots with grass clippings. In the fall I will add more compost, maybe some bagged soil, purchase a NW wildflower seed mix and scatter that…

I’ll just keep making the soil better and trying again.

Meanwhile, I’ve written another book about a more deliberate, scientific method of companion planting and am offering it as a free ebook through this Sunday, May 11th. Help yourself to a free copy!

Hügelkultur in nature

I like to think of this as hügelkultur but if I’m wrong, well, it won’t be the first time. I will never claim perfection, since I lean into chaos. Then again, maybe that is perfection? After all, nature leans into entropy, the definition of which is the natural tendency of things to lose order…a loose definition, not the scientific one…

And my mind wanders back to nature’s way of regenerating, even when we humans have tried our best to kill something. This is where hügelkultur and regenerative gardening melt into each other. Let’s start with cutting down a tree. In my own yard, this art of killing living things perfected by humans since they were created/evolved has not stopped the tree stump from nurturing new life. Perhaps a bird ate some berries and then stood on this stump while defecating, depositing some undigested seeds along with its poop.

Elsewhere, a tree fell in the forest – or maybe was cut – and this happened, eventually…

This picture, also in my yard, shows the ultimate regeneration: a fir tree growing on a very old tree trunk. It’s hard to see, because the fallen tree has almost become soil over many years, but this is a fir tree, a fruit bush, ferns, and other plants growing out of what was once a fir tree.

What I marked is actually the decayed tree trunk that now is a low mound of what I call almost-soil.

My yard looks messy; weedy; “lumpy” because it was never “landscaped” after being logged back in the 90’s and before, leading up to this house being built, and then added on to about 5 years ago. Heavy machinery takes a wicked toll on the earth.

So we mow less and less each year. It’s a compromise between my husband and I. He likes a mowed lawn, I would rather toss out native seeds each fall and see what grows. The compromise is that he mows less and less each year, making sure the street view is mowed so that the HOA stays happy. He leaves plants around the singular trees in the yard. And he has fenced 3 areas that were meant to be gardens but now two are left to nature (keeping the deer out so a few things we planted can grow tall enough to not be impacted so heavily by the deer.)

I planted some herbs and flowers in the third area, which is the only area that gets at least 6 hours of sun a day, and that is where I have one raised bed and a few apple and filbert trees. The raised bed is still accessible to squirrels so I’m not expecting much to grow there. Fingers crossed. So far, one potato plant volunteer from the “compost” I added and a few peas are surviving. Since I can now water it sufficiently with ease (a sprinkler), I’m hoping something will grow.

There’s always another season, another chance. Meanwhile, I’m basking in sporadically warm sunshine and the intensity of spring green. Green blessings to you all.

This year’s gardening mashup

I’m all over the place this spring, but my madness makes sense to me.

I’m a mashup of chaos, raised bed, hügelkulture, and regenerative gardening. I started my raised bed with a base of small branches and unfinished compost, then topped it off with planting soil. I put all the seed I had (leftovers from past growing seasons) in a small bowl, mixed it up, and scattered it across the bed. Before I turned on my rainforest mist sprinkler, I walked over the bed so as to compress the seeds into the soil a bit. Then I added water.

Regenerative agriculture is my current fascination. The idea is to never leave the soil uncovered, never tilling, and never using fertilizers or chemical pesticides, herbicides, etc. I think you get the picture – organic no-till gardening.

But I highly recommend two documentaries: “Kiss the Ground” on Netflix and “Common Ground” on Prime. I watched the first many months ago, but just recently watched Common Ground. What most impressed me was the story of turning a part of the Chihuahuan Desert (which stretches from northern Mexico into Arizona and New Mexico) into a verdant grassland simply with carefully managed cattle herding.

This just blows my mind. You have to see it to believe it. I guess I’ve been prejudiced against cows, but grassfed and with enough pasture to rotate them out frequently, they are an incredible asset. And I can attest to the amazing flavor of grassfed beef.

The cows are mimicking the role of the buffalo before the colonizers all but wiped them out.

If enough of my seeds germinate despite the omnipresent squirrels, I’ll post some pictures in coming weeks.