Imitating Eden

08/24/2026

Beginning of apple harvest. Harvest continues for pears, peaches, grapes, and tomatoes.

08/24/2026

Turmeric flower blooming!

A beautiful plant thay makes lovely medicine and dye. Got to love turmeric!

08/20/2026

Next Class!

RSVP to me! We will be playing with natural earthen materials and discussing how they are used so we become familiar with the natural building and crafting supplies we live around.

Build a fairy house to take home. All ages are welcome! As usual, dress for mess! We will be outside in the food forest (unless terrible weather, then we will be at the farmer's market building.)

08/14/2026

This week I get the opportunity to garden-sit the Gearity Elementary school garden. This is the garden I spearheaded the restoration of and then handed it off to the amazing Paul Gustafson, retired science teacher.

This place has lots of memories.

The first year I came to volunteer, the garden was waste high, solid, with w**ds. Many of them Canadian thistle. I asked my husband at the time to watch my baby while I worked with staff to string an extension cord out of a pre-K class for me to w**d wack it into submission. Slowly it looked more like a garden, but the w**d seed bank was still super heavy.

Year 2 I broke my foot, so I would sit in the garden on a mat with my toddler eating dandelions while I was pulling w**ds for hours. I handed him off to friends to play on the playground when the opportunity arose. By then we had a small CSA with the PTA to help buy supplies for the garden.

Year 3 was Covid. The PTA said the garden wasn't needed that year, but I convinced them it was and we continued growing with a bigger CSA and functional irrigation.

Year 4 I was going through divorce, Covid was still finishing, and I began night school. Still the CSA kept funding the garden and covered a few of my hours of work too as I worked to make it a space that could be taken over by someone inspired by it. Paul was already volunteering.

Year 5 it became clear that Paul was the right man for the job and I stepped back in transition so that the garden would be supported by Paul the way that worked for him and the school.

Year 6 and year 7 I moved to being babysitter, random plant-dropper offer, seed collector and supplier, and whatever other odd job is needed to keep the garden growing. And, it looks amazing!

Whew! Quite a journey! When your starting a garden and it seems your working against the odds, just keep this little journey in mind. Hardships don't mean a lack of progress. Persistence is the most important ingredient in solidifying a change.

Oh. And that tree behind me? That's my fig tree I donated about year three, and it grows a huge fig crop every year.

08/12/2026

Elderberry season!

08/12/2026

RSVP to me! We will be playing with natural earthen materials and discussing how they are used so we become familiar with the natural building and crafting supplies we live around.

Build a fairy house to take home. All ages are welcome! As usual, dress for mess! We will be outside in the food forest (unless terrible weather, then we will be at the farmer's market building.)

08/11/2026

I make these from my yard prunings, so totally sustainable! This basket is mostly garlic and muhlberry.

08/10/2026

Shiitake are the easiest to grow in this area and can produce for 8 years! These are huge!

08/06/2026

Every 2 years (because I trained my grapes to do that as a pest control tactic) we get loads of grapes. They become grape juice, w**e, w**e vinegars, fresh snacks, frozen treats, etc. This video isn't all the harvest. We take them in as they ripen based on predation: when they start getting eaten, we pull them. Some fall, and we donate that to the ecosystem. The wildlife that shares the harvest with us also shares in pest control and so deserves to be fed for their efforts. Seeing the life on the land as part of our community changes how you look at the world and manage it.