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Wild Flour

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 Recently, I came across an account by Melanie Sawyer on dehydrating wild foods and grinding them into flour. She uses these at home, and found they served her health, during a stint on a reality TV show.  Melanie writes, " making flours converts perishable, bulky or bitter forest forage into lightweight, shelf-stable staples to be used throughout the lean months." I was delighted that she featured using the seeds of yellow dock, Rumex Crispa! We've all seen those beautiful red-brown seed heads - yes! They can be harvested and used for food! (And - at thousands of wee seeds per stalk, it's a great use!)  "They are widely foraged over England, Scandinavia and Europe, and used as a nutritious, yeast and gluten-free wild brown flour that tastes similar to buckwheat." Dock stem  with chaff and seeds With their deep roots, dock acts as a bio-accumulator, bringing minerals from the soil, so I leave a few in the beds, and there are more around the edges of the gard...
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Spring gardening

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 This morning I headed out to the gardens, and gathered Comfrey and borage leaves for a batch of  FPJ - Fermented Plant Juice. This is a pleasant  (and less stinky!) way to use Comfrey  to enhance plant health in our gardens!   Comfrey and FPJ in Rose Cottage Garden Welsh gardener Huw Richards gives this description on his  YouTube tutorial on making and using FPJ for healthier plants and soil.  "Fermented Plant Juice (or FPJ in short) is a method developed from Korean Natural Farming, to help get better yields using local and 100% natural materials. "The whole goal in Korean Natural Farming is to use local resources to make mineral and biological amendments that not only improve results in the garden, but are kind to nature and helps close the waste gap in our modern culture." Nettles, dandelions, mugwort, or nasturtium are also great options for making FPJ. Perennial plants are especially potent bioaccumulators. Look for young, fresh leaves, a...
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Fall tidy

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  This fall marks  3 years since I moved across town to my daughter's, and (the following spring) into my sweet Rose Cottage. It was awesome to have so much help with sorting and downsizing for the move! That was a marathon - which we often attempt on our own - but without aid, it can be  overwhelming!  For  day-to-day tending  and periodic  resets , it's better to do in regular, steady increments. I watched a  little clip  from an organizer of a marathon sorting project, and could relate to the stacks and piles and boxes ... d uring my move, my son-in law was the 'take away guy,' dealing with trash, recycling, donations, things we were bringing over here, and storage.  Along with season's turn, I am also preparing for the SoulCollage® Facilitator training (squee!)  It feels timely to do a fall reset with this in mind, and set the stage for deepening with creative process!  I tend to let things pile up around me - and I hav...
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Companion Suit cards

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  One of the prerequisites for  SoulCollage® Facilitator training is to create and meet cards from several suits, including 2 Companion Suit cards. From the  description of this suit  on the  KaleidoSoul  website:  these cards r epresent the energetic dimensions of our lives.   This suit encompasses two different kinds of energies:  Animal energies Chakra (body) energies You can think of your Animal Totems as imaginary guides on your life journey. You might also think of them as Power Animals because each one imparts a special energy/power to your life. The animals can be animate or legendary - like the Courage card i made this spring - featuring a phoenix. As you choose images, be open to both animals you already feel connected to, and surprises!  Courage  In the 90s, I did a visioning journey to discover Chakra totem animals, in a workshop with indigenous doctor/ healer Louis Mehl. I know I have the notes *somewhere* - horse,...
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Topic Compendium

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  What a lovely week with lots of tsalagi sprinkles!  On Saturday, our Willamette TsaLaGi and the Mount Hood groups hosted folks from the Cherokee Nation for a feast and gathering in Salem, Oregon!  Principal Chief Chuck Hoskins Jr   Guests included Principal Chief Hoskins, Storyteller Robert Lewis, at large council members, and several others - plus 2 ASL interpreters! My friend ᎵᏒ (Li-sv) helped send food and volunteered at the Willamette TsaLaGi booth. When I met Chief Hoskins, I mentioned taking Cherokee online with Ed Fields, and he, in turn, mentioned that during his 'state of the nation' talk! I'm in Ed's first Cherokee ᏅᎩ (nv-gi /Four) class, and we're learning verb tenses. It's fun for all of us (Ed included!) to work with new sentences and 'Word pictures.' This week I also joined the hybrid language study group which meets at the Longhouse at Lane CC. This is where our language classes have been held - and is open for use by indigenous groups. ...
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Elusive Blue Poppy

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   This week I took the grands to their volunteer training at our Public Library. While there, i picked up several seed packets from the Seed Library!  My granddaughter's middle school gardening class packages and restocks the seed supply, and she asked,  "Grammie, have you visited the seed library?" ... Seed Library - 'take up to 5 packets' I also checked out a couple of books - on gardens and gardening. In an essay on the lovely blue Poppy,  Meconopsis betonicifolia in Jamaica Kincaid's  My Favorite Plant , gardener Wayne Winterrowd writes of being given a start of M. betonicifolia.  The 'very good gardener' who gifted the start told him,  "Divide it into single crowns, with a bit of root when you get home. Plant then firmly just at the crown, like strawberries, in rich decayed leaf mold. Bright dappled light. Maybe some morning sun. But pinch out the first flower bud.  You MUST pick out the first flower bud."   Tibetan Blue Poppy Sin...
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Plant babies

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  It's exciting to watch the garden emerge and take shape!   I seeded more of my Homesteaders Kaleidoscopic Perennial kale Grex (Experimental Farm Network) - always fun to see the variety of plants which emerge.  Tomatoes, basil, kale seedlings on right I sketched various plans for each bed, then, go out to the garden and fine tune with the Devas, for the layout! We still don't have fences to the N or S, so the deer roam through.... tulle and binder clips provide night time protection!  Tomatillos and Monarda I enjoy planting a mix of old favorites and less standard greens - orach, new Zealand spinach, doucette (summer relative of corn salad/ maché) red celery, Alexanders, Magentaspreen, shiso ... and purslane transplanted from the lot.  Varieties of beans include Dragons Tongue, Red Swan, Edamame, runner beans, and Trail of Tears. There are Dragons egg and Persian cucumbers, bitter melon and okra ... a box divided into 4 sections for burdock... Morning vi...
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