Tag: garden mayhem

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.

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.

In the beginning, I am…

Twisting gardening rules daily

We’re Not Gonna Rake It! No! We’re Not Gonna Rake It!

I mean really…with the number of squirrels we have, you’d think their garden would be top of the line! Instead, I blame most of some of the mayhem and chaos around here to their improper gardening skills. Welcome to my chaotic gardening world where squirrels do most of the planting while I carry on about how it should be in a perfect world. Humor being the greatest coping mechanism known to mankind.