Blog – Twisted Weeds

Learning to be Here

This is a phrase used by one of my teachers recently, and it got me thinking, rethinking. In my youth, I read the book Siddhartha by Herman Hesse. What I remember of it is that Siddhartha learns that his spiritual journey is a personal one, and he spends most of his life by a river that becomes his primary teacher.

As a young adult, I read Be Here Now by Ram Das. The title says it all.

And thirdly, I was never successful at meditating until I learned about walking meditation, where you focus all your attention on one thing you are doing. So washing the dishes can become a meditation, or writing in a journal, or playing with your dog.

Or gardening.

Your garden can be your teacher. Close to the earth. One plant can be your teacher…or one bird…or an insect. You can focus solely on the one thing you are doing right now, be it watering, harvesting, weeding, transplanting.

Or you can rest in a chair or sitting on the ground, listening, watching, smelling, feeling the breeze and the sun, opening your heart and soul to the place you are in. No to-do list nagging at your mind; no thoughts of a phone call or a video game; nothing other than opening to being here now.

The other thing I think of today is listening to the birds and remembering how their song tells us that we are safe. We are home.

Government cuts affecting your garden and farm

These are not the weeding or harvesting kinda cuts – cuts that would help. They are cuts that have “disappeared” more than just people; these cuts have disappeared: grants for regenerative farming, weather forecasting and alerts (NOAA and the National Weather Service), internships at school garden projects, SNAP benefits, food banks, food surpluses to local food banks, the USDA’s research into ways to mediate climate change; citizens and undocumented alike from farms, restaurants, food processing facilities, grocery stores, markets, and even schools; and entire business models that relied on sales to support USAID.

All gone. Much more than people of color has been disappeared.

How many other ways can we hurt our own people, not to mention millions of people around the world? A better question – how can we help others?

Growing your own food is a good way to start, and you can use your own experiences to help others do the same. Many of us already include our children and grandchildren in our gardens. I have written three books, two published and a third on its way to being published. Look for gardening books under my pen name, Terra Bloom, on amazon. My way to share.

Support your local farmers. A CSA share is a great place to start. You sign up for a season’s worth of produce, pay in advance, and get a share of the harvest every week. Most importantly in these crazy times, you share in your farmer’s success as well as hardships.

Your money is a bit of an insurance policy against the fickleness of government cutbacks, weather emergencies, and crop failures due to normal reasons as well. Another way to support farmers is by purchasing from you-pick farms and visiting farmers markets. And it’s absolutely brilliant to be able to put a name, a face, and a place to where your food is grown.

On a larger scale, write or visit your Congressmen and women when agricultural issues are in the news. Help keep them informed and aware that people care about what affects our food supply and the welfare of farmers and farm workers.

Summer in the Maritime Pacific Northwest

It’s 8 a.m. on July 5th, 2025. There is a myth/tradition that this is our first day of summer, lagging behind the rest of the world because…well…it often just turns out that way. Junes can be cloudy, cool, and wet oftentimes.

I don’t like to dwell on the negative. But…this morning my thermometer reads 50 degrees and it is cloudy. As of late, afternoons have been sunny and pleasant…up to the low 60s. Fine. I can hear all you heat wavers to the east rolling your eyes. Yes, I can hear that.

But bear with me just a little. If the rain and clouds and cool can sometimes return as soon as October…can I have just a little heat…please? I’m only asking for 70 degrees because I’m a heat wimp. More than that and I’ll start whining again.

Ok, I’ll probably start losing readers now that they realize how much of my whining they’ll have to listen to in the course of a year. (Do I even have any readers?). I’ll leave you alone now while I go find a sweater. And my fingerless gloves because my hands are cold.

In other news, I’m in the middle of a 6-day vacation. My other half went on vacation, not me, but I am still looking over my shoulder constantly to see if he is watching me be a bad girl…leaving dirty dishes in the sink until I feel like washing them or putting them in the dishwasher…leaving unfolded laundry on the guest bed for days…watering his flowers (and the lawn) with a sprinkler that I leave on for 4 hours at a time (this way it won’t need water again until he’s gone for 4 hours (maybe once a month). If the sprinkler hits the side of the house, the windows get washed a little too.

He insists on watering with a watering can or by walking around dragging a hose and, you know, holding the sprinkler attachment down. I check after he waters and usually the soil is wet to about 1/4″. He does it almost every day; still only 1/4″. I drag the hose, set the sprinkler, and go watch a baseball game on tv. Or my favorite binge-worthy show. Maybe while eating popcorn.

Every time I see the cat coming down the stairs out of the corner of my eye, I jump a little, thinking it’s The Man coming to judge me. Sigh…6 days isn’t long enough to stop being edgy. I’ll have to work on that. Meanwhile, I feel like a teenager home alone…basking in staying in my pajamas all day and doing whatever I want…

Meanwhile, everything outside is enjoying the cool weather and my sprinkler. The birds are bathing, the grass is greening back up, my tiny garden is thankful for the surprise deep watering. As it is mostly Mediterranean herbs, and potatoes, this year, normally they go through the summer drought just fine. One last soak will keep them smiling.

Digging deeper…

Wars…genocide…imperialistic hubris…deportations…assassinations…

So much intentional cruelty in the world these days. Many days it feels as if we humans have dug ourselves into a deep, dark hole. I look out my window and the sky is grey. The temperature is about 10 degrees cooler than average for the end of June. Compare that to the 20 degrees above normal we had the beginning of May. We’re riding a climatic rollercoaster as well as a political one.

I spend a lot of time dreaming, both night and day. Today I had a revelation. Years ago I visited Olympic National Park here in Washington state and gazed upon a Douglas Fir tree estimated to be 1000 years old. I imagined myself being there again…experiencing the essence of that tree. In comparison, I realized I have just been born.

Like a child in the womb, I have felt the darkness before I ever experienced the light. I heard sounds, softly muffled by my mother’s body. Her heartbeat familiar, steady and reassuring. Her voice and breathing a whisper; her blood coursing through my own tiny body.

Then I felt my world contracting, slowly pushing me outward, towards the light. I don’t know if I cried as I exited all I had ever known, into a seemingly boundless unknown. But I imagine that I was quickly swaddled and placed in my mother’s arms. I heard her voice again, louder than before; I still heard her heartbeat.

I was home. I am always home. Everything expands, including the universe as a whole. Life recycles.

Today I struggle to get back to that birthplace. The earth reminds me. My garden reminds me. Nothing is ever lost or left completely behind. The garden and the seasons remind me that everything dies but is reborn into another form. Seeds scattered by the wind, far from the mother plant, know what to do, know who to be.

I picture myself today, born anew. Bare feet touching the earth. I hear her voice, her heartbeat. I eat from my garden’s bounty and feel her blood in my veins. I feel her caress me in the wind.

I find courage to venture forth knowing that I can add life to life. Coming out of the darkness, I can witness and embrace the dawn. I can nourish the earth that nourishes me. I can hope, and believe.

Garden mayhem in all its beauty

Here in Twisted Weeds chaotic garden, we aim to work less and enjoy more. This doesn’t mean that we haven’t worked hard in the past, but as we age we aim to hardly work at all. The mighty husband built fences, then we planted hazelnuts and dwarf apples, disturbing the existing plants as little as possible (such as ferns), with the exception of stinging nettles. I harvested them and steeped them in buckets of water, using the tea as fertilizer.

My husband planted roses. I knocked down a ridiculously steep mound (left after the area was originally logged) and turned it into an herb bed after adding some unfinished compost. I planted rosemary (king of the hill), lavender, comfrey, oregano, sage and thyme (they eventually disappeared under the rosemary, lavender, and oregano), and an unknown flowering plant that I bought in a 4-inch pot because it seemed like it would grow anywhere.

I planted this mystery under a tree in the middle of our driveway but quickly realized it needed more sun so I transplanted it at the edge of the herb bed. Oh my…it has become a woody shrub. As soon as it flowers, I’ll try to identify it. Meanwhile I chop and drop around the edges, trying to keep it from devouring the narrow path and everything else it encounters…

There are also a few berry bushes in this chaos, as well as an elderberry and a couple of attempts at raised beds. So far only potatoes have withstood the rabbits, squirrels, chipmunks, and birds. I shall continue to try…but not too hard.

It is definitely the survival of the fittest in this messy but beautiful place.

Don’t even ask what is all there…oregano everywhere, weeds too. Volunteer potatoes. I love it all and it returns the favor.

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.

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.

My faovorite weather blogger calls this “beautiful satellite imagery”

I love ya, bro but really?

Seattle is the red star. I’m a little NW of that. Being in a somewhat clear area is encouraging but obviously the optimism is only temporary. And “cold unstable air”? At least in the present moment everything is stable, just the tiniest wisp of a breeze. But it’s 45 degrees, man. Not sticking my hands into cold wet soil today.

There are weeds to be pulled, chaos to be pushed back, oregano to be pulled/harvested/burned, and a seedbed to be watered (that I can do) because this is the second day of no rain. Just the seedbed today, just the seedbed…then go back inside to another cup of coffee and a day of writing.

It’s not even May yet…May is usually iffy, June is sometimes iffy, the NW joke is that July 5th is the first day of summer…

Not quite ready for spring gardening…

Me in the garden the other day, staring down at my “raised” bed:

It’s not clear, I know…I know…let me try to explain…

I pushed half of the soil aside with a rake, then placed small fir branches, then I stepped on them to break them up a bit and pack them in. I then shoveled some duff from under the fir trees into a wheelbarrow and dumped that in. Duff is this stuff under a couple trees, not sure what it is, maybe some sawdust from long ago logging, also what’s sluffed off of a rotten old stump, fir needles, and ?

On top of that went some half finished and finished compost along with some worms, then I pushed the soil back over the top. Then I looked at the other half and realized I was exhausted.

Yes, I’m that old and out of shape. Baby steps all over again. I decided to skip the hügelkultur on the second half of the bed, my bad.

The next day I pushed a small trellis into the middle of the bed and planted peas on one side and sweet peas on the other, without bending over. I made a shallow trench with a piece of bamboo, kinda tossed in the seeds, and pushed the soil with the back of a rake to cover.

I scattered chives seeds around the edge and onion and milkweed seeds over the rest of the bed. And called it done. Putting off watering until later…but about half an hour after I came inside, it started raining. And rained off and on for the rest of the day.

Many thanks from a weary ol’ gardener. But now I water with a watering can every day.

These old gardening terms are supposed to inspire today’s gardeners

Pleasance (or Pleasuance) – A pleasure ground attached to a castle or mansion, usually outside the fortifications.

It didn’t take much to turn my thoughts to a different kind of inspiration…ahhh youth!…from pleasance to dalliance to romance and more…and of course it’s a rose garden.

When I was young and starting out in gardening, I was so utilitarian. Beds lined up, paths between, all the same size and shape – easy to irrigate. No romance, all practicality.

I’ve never been much of a romantic, now I look back and think, so much wasted time. I’ve lived my life backwards. Now I am more fanciful, as I slow down and smell the roses.

That’s why my main advice to gardeners is to do just that. Sit in your garden and just love it in all its pieces and possibilities. Love the soil and all that lives in it. Love all that lives upon it. Leave your intentions and goals behind for a few minutes and just love what IS. The sun and all that reaches for it. The rain and all that sucks it up through roots and into mouths. The breeze and all that flies and floats and bends.

And the ineffable spirit that connects us all.

Don’t be afraid to love.