Bee Good to Your Mother Earth

Grow a vegetable garden, even if its just one zucchini plant!

We just put in 3 sets of Dixondale Texas Legend onions!  

Don't use any pesticides and synthetic fertilizers in your garden, or stop using them if you currently use them. 

I use pesticides pretty judiciously and look for the least toxic option.  The mainstays I am unwilling to give up are both organic approved:  1.  Bti a bacterium I put in areas that have chronically standing water because the Aedes mosquitoes that have moved into our region are very difficult to suppress.  2.  Bonide horticultural spray which I will use to eliminate scale which ants were repeated installing for its honeydew secretion on a prized Akebia vine and an indoor staghorn fern mealybug infestation.  For the rest of the garden, I scrape them off and celebrate lady bug larva sightings.  

On the fertilizer front, we don't fertilize much of our outdoor orchard or yard.  We hope that compost, compost tea, and mulch are enough to maintain favorable growing conditions.  On the houseplants and potted plants, I have experimented with kelp extract, Osmocote (not organic), and Miracle-Grow (not organic).  It may take several years to use their tiny containers at the application rate I use, but when I deplete the non-organics, I will replace them with Plant-Tone (as suggested by Nancy Goodwin) or other organics.  

Research organic pest control

I've had some great success taking photos of problems and asking ChatGPT to diagnose them (i.e. rust on roses, mealy bug on Staghorn).  But I generally sanity check general internet advice with my local cooperative extension's IPM website before taking action.  While integrated pest management isn't purely organic, it advocates for chemical controls as a last resort: 

" Chemical control is the use of pesticides. In IPM, pesticides are used only when needed and in combination with other approaches for more effective, long-term control. Pesticides are selected and applied in a way that minimizes their possible harm to people, nontarget organisms, and the environment. With IPM you'll use the most selective pesticide that will do the job and be the safest for other organisms and for air, soil, and water quality; use pesticides in bait stations rather than sprays; or spot-spray a few weeds instead of an entire area." 

Read Montrose: Life in a Garden by Nancy Goodwin

I had my doubts about this initially.  Nancy is focused on ornamentals in zone 8a while I am focused on edibles in zone 10b.  There seemed to be quite a hullabaloo about dragging things into and out of green houses, jerry-rigging cold frames and mourning the loss of tropical plants to frost which grow like weeds around here.  Yet I found a kindred spirit in the struggles of caretaking an historic property, coexisting with a neighboring elementary school, admiring the Bloomsbury group creatives, desperate strategies for keeping cool working in the heat and hydrated during droughts, and befriending feral cats.  

She seems to have a massive work ethic.  She is out gardening until 6 PM.  She got 10 hours of daylight and spent 8 of them in the gardens.  I feel gassed after 10 minutes.  I wonder how to build my endurance up and suspect that part of it is leaning into something one finds deeply interesting and part of it is the fellowship of her husband and 4 staff "body doubling" alongside her.  

I still wonder about her process.  It seems she took notes on her activities daily but summarized them monthly for the sake of the book.  Perhaps I could adopt a similar approach.  She seems to have maintained quite an archive as the diary is littered with comparisons about plants emerging early or late relative to past years.  Although soporific reading, I am impressed by her precision with scientific names.  It reminded me a bit of the Garden of Eden in Genesis and Adam and Eve's only job was to stroll around naming things.  It also seemed to assert that the "audience" for this text was future Nancy and her staff rather than going out of her way to onboard us bystanders.      

Does anyone else struggle with reconciling artistic drawings of plants with their real life appearance?  I find I favor seed catalogs that use photographs of the plant rather than artwork and only after I can recognize a plant on sight do I feel I can appreciate an artist's rendering of it.  Still give Ippy kudos for honing her illustration skills.  Now I know to try warm water and isopropyl alcohol to preserve cut flowers if I try my hand at it as well.  It seems like a satisfying meditative activity.  

Kingsolver mentioned in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle that east coast gardening is about removing the unwanted while west coast gardeners start with a blank slate and water what they want into existence.  Goodwin sees it as "set design" and the change in perspective not by what we add but what we remove.  (pg 79).    

In terms of organic gardening, it seems she is not a purist.  She swears by Plant-Tone fertilizer, which is organic, makes and constantly reapplies a home brew tabasco deer repellent and  seems to be importing a lot of leaves to supplement her compost pile.  All very organic.  She also swears by Miracle Gro fortnightly in her pots through their blooming season, which gave me pause as I am not nearly so heavy handed with Osmocote on my potted house plants.   

Other favorite quotes: 

"A plant that grows well enough to see its own seedlings is in the right place." 48

"I feel uneasy being in style."  59

"I organize every day around weather reports." 144

"I feel a slight unease if I don't work outside for at least part of each day." 262

Carpe Cocoa! Mmmm Chocolate!

YC Beginner:

Ask your librarian for a book about the history of chocolate for children. Some suggestions: Smart About Chocolate! by Sandra Markle, No Monkeys, No Chocolate by Melissa Stewart and Alan Young, or Chocolate: Riches from the Rainforest by Robert Burleigh.

Over the past year, we have read all three. Fallon's favorite was No Monkeys, No Chocolate because it had a funny, repetitive title and could be read independently in the back seat of the car. Mom's favorite was Markle's Smart About book because it could be read in one snack sitting and summarized the main points from the Coe's book about chocolate for grown ups. Burleigh's book was the burliest with text-heavy pages that required reading in installments, but we agreed that it had the most realistic and interesting pictures. Prior to joining the sisterhood, we even visited a chocolate plantation on the Hawaiian island of Kauai. Fallon's cousins are honorary chocolate experts because one the rental car keys got locked inside the car by accident and they had a whole day devoted to taste testing different chocolate varietals while waiting for AAA to rescue them.

YC Intermediate:

Sample 3 different types of chocolate: dark, milk and white. Can you taste the difference with your eyes closed? Which was your favorite?

We had a Ghirardelli flight which we hid in plastic eggs to blind taste test. We both liked 60% Cacao. Fallon had to spit out 100% cacao. Mommy wanted to spit out white chocolate but that tied for first place with Fallon. Strangely, Fallon preferred 60% to semi-sweet despite its 2 grams less sugar. We studied the labels and discovered they have 9-7-5-0 grams of sugar per serving respectively.



Pick out a chocolate recipe to make with your farmgirl mentor.



Balboa peninsula is close to our house and famous for square Klondike-like Balboa Bars and chocolate covered bananas. Every few months, we have a "banana emergency" when several racks of bananas in ripen in the yard and our little family of 3 has to figure out how to eat/freeze/donate several hundred pounds of bananas in short order. They are like the zucchini of southern California. We found the smaller sized variety is perfect for sticking a popsicle stick in, freezing, and then dipping in tempered chocolate and refreezing. If you have extra chocolate, you can dip strawberries in to use it up (they hold up a little better in the fridge than the freezer). The zeppelin-sized bananas on our other tree work better cut in half so a kid has a prayer of being able to finish it. In a pinch, if you don't have chocolate chips to temper, you can dunk the pops in a deep container of Nutella. Mom is still tinkering about how to dilute the tempered chocolate to make a thinner coating with cocoa butter.



YC Advanced:

Make your own chocolate recipe and serve to your family. Tell them about the process of chocolate making while they're sampling.

Fallon experimented with a few recipes (chocolate mug cakes, chocolate mochi wrappers, hot chocolate) but we always come back to some variation on chocolate covered banana popsicles. Sometimes they are dusted with peanuts, sometimes with unicorn horn sprinkles, sometimes dunked in a Costco-sized vat of Nutella instead of tempered chocolate chips. While we taste-test these, we page through the three titles in the beginner section which are now a cherished part of our library.

Read the book or watch the film, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Bonus points for doing both.

Can we apply for bonus-bonus points? We read Roald Dahl's book, then watched both the 1971 and 2005 adaptations, comparing the use of Squirrels vs. Golden Geese and the portrayal of Oompa Loompas. We then hosted Fallon's fifth birthday in a park around a Charlie theme. We invited guests with a mini candy bar wrapped up with a golden ticket that some of her friends parents comment that their kids kept even 2 years later. Guests could then visit stations where they dressed up as Mike TV with funny sunglasses and "teleported" across the playground, Violet Beauregard in a giant inflatable blueberry bubble and optional blue face zinc sunscreen, or Augustus Gloop at the hot chocolate bar.










********

Beginner:

Read The True History of Chocolate by Sophie D. Coe and Michael D. Coe.

Finished and posted on Goodreads around this time last year. The research in this book fueled a trifold poster board presentation we shared at my daughter's history festival while they ground away at maize and cacao beans.

 





Sample your local chocolate artisan's wares. Learn the difference between dark, milk, white, etc.

I discovered Royce Origin chocolates on a field trip to an Asian grocery store/Ramen shop (Mitsuwa). The flavor notes (pictured below) were very helpful to build a starting vocabulary about bitterness, fruitiness, floral, etc. once I translated them from Japanese. From there, I branched out to the online merchant Caputo's to better understand if *all* Ecuadorian chocolate is floral, what percentage of cacao is interesting and palatable for nibbling, etc.



Intermediate:

Learn about cocoa beans: where they're found, and the work that goes into turning them into chocolate.

From perusing the single origin chocolate interactive maps on the Caputo's website, I had moved on to reading Rowan Jacobsen's book Wild Chocolate last August 2025. This helped bring me up to modern times with the chocolate industry. Now I can better appreciate the difficulty in standardizing fermentation protocol across numerous small growers and how allowing some wiggle room for differences can create so many different nuanced flavors.

Learn how to temper chocolate.




I would not say my chocolate tempering is fail-proof yet. The "melt" step is straight-forward with a double boiler and I usually quit when the end result is workable rather than keeping an eye trained on a thermometer. I am experimenting with holding 1/3 of my chips back to add once the original chips reach 115* F in order to drop the temp of the combined mixture down to 82*-85*F and then put it back on the heat to bring it back up to 88*F since our chips are right at that borderline between milk and dark chocolate. I would say for the Balboa Banana "Emergencies" the factors which are higher priority to me than perfect tempering are (1) thinning the chocolate with cocoa butter so that I can cover more bananas with the same amount of chips (while simultaneously increasing the fruit:added sugar ratio for my kid's dessert of choice). (2) dipping a frozen banana (or a dozen) into the mixture dramatically drops the temperature of the dwindling volume of chocolate. So I am puzzling out how to keep the finish smooth on those final bananas when the mixture is starting to seize up and get lumpy. Do you have any tips? Please share?



Make two different chocolate recipes that you've never tried before. Remember, chocolate doesn't have to be sweet; it can be savory, too. (Try a Mexican mole, a delicious sauce used in enchiladas.)








Mole Negro [12/24/2025] - made with a starter from a favorite Oaxacan restaurant. I modified the recipe a lot (canned tomatoes vs. tomato sauce, miso paste vs. chicken broth, Ghirardelli squares vs. "authentic Oaxacan chocolate," and slightly less overall liquid because I was worried about boil over). This made a flavorful salsa to cover several jars of "glass burritos" which are basically just prepped beans and a few toppings as an easy re-heatable meal. We also found this mole was helpful to add a kick to Mexican rice we cooked intentionally mild to be accessible for Fallon. Eventually, I was even using it in lieu of salad dressing!

Copycat Nutella [12/28/2025] - a while ago, Fallon and I reached an agreement that if she started the day working through piano exercises, there would be a Grand's style biscuit slathered in Nutella (or equivalent) waiting for her at breakfast. She's in her 3rd method book and we have gone through so many of those cardboard pop rolls and those nut butter jars that are just a little too gooey to recycle in good faith but then get all weird and distorted when you try to clean them with super hot water. Our local grocery doesn't stock Nutella brand (which has palm oil as its second ingredient which is a bit cringe-worthy anyway) and the alternative includes almonds which really mute the hazelnut notes. So when I found a Vitamix blender under the Christmas tree, I was anxious to try making some copycat nut butters I could decant into the classic mason jar and give myself a zero waste gold star. Well, what they don't show on the videos is how often these puppies overheat (or maybe I just have a dud?). It overheated blending frozen bananas! But I digress. Many 40 minute cooldowns later, I have a delicate jar of "Belletella" from following chocolatecoveredkatie's recipe. I added milk to thin it to a spreadable consistency so I store it in the fridge instead of considering it shelf-stable. But it is so good! You know those things you are relieved are a little fussy to make so you have a prayer of achieving your body composition goals? Yep. This is one. and I am sitting slightly prettier on my January trash audit! Here it is on some "I Might Die Tomorrow" white bread from a MJF cookbook.












Expert: To be continued!

Learn how to make ganache.

Try an authentic hot-chocolate drink. If no one in town offers one, learn to make it yourself and share the results. What makes it different than the overly-sweet concoctions you get from the envelope?






Host a Truffle Party. Make and serve at least 4 different types of homemade chocolate truffles.

Trash Audit

Anyone else spending their January focused on their waste line?  

Day 1: 16 grams trash, 664 grams recyclables.  

I am on my best behavior to start!    

The trash is wrappers from produce (bought in relative bulk).  I could hypothetically recycle plastic film alongside things like plastic shopping bags but putting it in the curbside bin would just clog up the sorters.  Longer term options would be to grow my own lettuce, carrots, and blueberries and/or shop in-store or at the farmer's market from the unpackaged loose selection and carry it out in my washable bags.  A tab broke off of the gasket of the jar we use for sugar as well as the rip and ziplock seal of a plastic bag of sugar.  It looks like bulk grocers like Azure Standard package sugar in paper bags I could compost.  The two glass jars were finishing a gifted jam and a juice needed for my daughter's birthday recipe.  We are not in the habit of buying that many juices or condiments.  

I'm proud of myself for using these random products up on a salad and a smoothie.  I'm also relieved we have a good worm bin composting operation for food and paper scraps.  I would also be struggling without a broad selection of mason jars and plastic meal prep containers which we can wash and reuse. 

The ambiguous territory I'm unsure how to handle is trash generated by family members that I am to some degree complicit in allowing into the house or am actively cleaning up on their behalf.  I haven't counted the scores of plastic film from Lego build kits and shreds of painter's tape from my  daughter's art projects today, but those would count toward our household total.  There is also the ambiguous territory of wasted food that provided us no nutritional value but because it was composted is zero waste (a bruised section of eggplant).  But progress, not perfection!   

Day 2: 138 g trash, 38 g recyclables

68% of my trash today was retired Combat roach bait stations.  I have restocked with something called Advion which claims to be effective for 3 years while I had been changing these stations out every 3 months.  It still comes in a plunger and people suggest putting it on a foil instead of a porous surface like wood, so it isn't exactly zero waste.  The remainder of my trash was more plastic film, covering materials I used to pack a gift, a shopping bag I was too overwhelmed to refuse at check out.  I received two used books in the mail today, one in eco recyclable/compostable paper and another in plastic film.  It seems like both of these are still more sustainable than chopping down trees to print new books and shipping them in cardboard boxes, but I hope sellers shift toward the eco-mailers.  

Day 3: 2 grams trash. 

Overly proud of myself today.  One empty hot cocoa wrapper that was a gift, not something I would pay to be individually packaged regularly.  

Day 4: 85 grams trash, 294 grams recycling

To reduce trash, I need to find a diy biscuit recipe to replace my kid's taste for pop-tube biscuits.  These are mixed material, so can't be recycled.  There was also a long-lived helium balloon  I bought to flag our scout troop's booth last month, but we could have used something as a marker that wasn't single use.  I cut the plastic mesh off an avocado bag in hopes of reusing it as a suet cage bird feeder, but its tag is still trash.  We have avocado trees growing so that would be the ultimate zero-waste solution.  In the meantime, this is another example of produce I could buy loose and pack out in my own reusable bags.  I explored this with online grocery orders for onions, but found the bulk rate for the pre-bagged onions was a bit lower as is often true for avocados and carrots.  I compromised by leaving bok choy, tomatoes, red onion, and cucumber out of my cart because I think I can purchase those loose at a farmer's market on Wednesday.  There is also the packaging for a bag of my daughter's Legos gift I assembled during my recreation hour.  I cut the plastic window of an envelope that I would ordinarily shred and compost, because I was working with the "finished" material in starting lettuce and carrot seeds and realized the plastic windows won't break down, so I might as well keep it in its intact form in the landfill.  My conviction in this isn't so deep that I will take the time to cut all the windows out of junk mail moving forward though.  Maybe if I set them aside to batch process.    

On the recycling front, I could technically buy the onion starts from the same wholesaler from my nursery and take advantage of bulk shipping and packaging, forging the box and the plastic film protecting the planting instructions.  If I were even more intense, I could be growing those onions from seeds rather than buying starts.  A few household items (post-its, paper clips, batteries for my car keys) came in a comically large Amazon box, despite selecting the slow shipment/batch order eco-friendly option at check out.  I emptied my algae omega supplement, couldn't find a replacement at the grocery store and feared another comically large box from AMZ, so I think I will try simplifying and not taking the supplement for a bit and see if my mood suffers.  We plan to eat some of the backlog of freezer fish this weekend, so I might be able to offset any deficit with a whole food.  

Day 5:  100 g trash, 429 recyclable

The dreaded Starbucks run.  A mason jar with lid is a permanent fixture in the car for personal to go beverage use, but it seemed weird to bust that out for a group order.  I wanted to bring something nice for Fallon's teacher in our semi-annual conference.  In my defense, I did reuse a drinks tray that had been kicking around in my trunk (but surrendered it to the teacher to dispose of with her cup-- not included in the weigh out--so it was only reused once).  But oy, they filled the order with not one but 2 plastic-lined cups which cannot be recycled and a cardboard sleeve on each beverage!  In damage control, I emptied the plastic tea bags into the compost to decrease the trash weight and recycled the cup covers.  I also got the chance to recycle an old starbucks gift card that had been kicking around in the bottom of my purse.  Clearly to-go meals have a big waste footprint.  The remainder of waste today was plastic packaging on whole foods, an emptied moisturizer purchased in bulk (I may fish it out and save it for a DIY cosmetics badge or to decant my conditioner into (seller has their own bottle recycling program)).  Emptied dishwasher detergent which I purchased in bulk.  Labels for grocery pickup which I was excited to learn my grocery store is now using explicitly reusable bags for order pickup, not the thicker plastic film they weren't prepared to take back and use again and just became trash can liners for me.  A nametag label when checking into school campus.  A book jacket that had spent a few days outside and had gotten moldy itself-- maybe it would breakdown in the compost in light of its current condition, but the glossy print has me skeptical.  Another cardboard Amazon box, this time for baking badge ingredients that were a little too exotic for my grocer to carry.   

Day 6: 136 g trash, 25 g recycling

More food wrappers.  The seitan I have ordered materials to make make more from scratch.  I also looked up a recipe for diy tater tots.  Cotton balls were part of an IPM mealy bug pest management project.  We don't rely heavily on potting soil with our vermicompost/slow compost/chipdrop mulch setup, but I was repotting a pet loss memorial gift.  There is also an Amazon mailer (for an item that was so delayed I no longer need it and should have cancelled the order).  The mailer claims to be recyclable, but in a sketchy way I suspect it will not be if wishcycled in the recycling bin.  

Day 7:  43 g trash, 222 recycling

I didn't count the egg carton in the weigh in-- it is in good enough shape that we could bring it to our friends for backyard eggs or use it for a craft.  I could technically make something like Clif bars to avoid the packaging, but I am not sure they would be shelf-stable enough to store in the glovebox as an emergency kid snack and my kid has been rejecting dates which are my go-to fast sweet snack base ingredient.  Another cardboard box, this one a much more efficiently packed haul from Mary Jane's Farm!  Again, the mylar-ish bags don't make sense for a zero waste long run strategy, but I am so looking forward to this bake over learning adventure, I consider it tuition.  The trash I don't feel too bad about.  Lots of ingredient wrappers as an outcome of making from scratch (butter, yeast, dried chilis).  Eventually we might switch to a sourdough starter and not need to buy yeast, but we might end up going through more flour in problematic packaging as we do.  Northgate or calle quatro may also sell chilis in aesthetic bundles we can hang and hope don't get too cobwebby to avoid plastic film now that hubby is back on the diy salsa bandwagon.  The coffee bag was plastic lined but from a local fair trade roaster and my far and away favorite variety, so I am thinking of this as a Christmas indulgence.  We have this variety of tree growing in our mini orchard so maybe someday we will be able to home roast, but not nearly in the quantity I consume.  Same thing with a much-craved q-tip.  The final plastic mini bag was from pea seeds I am continuing to sprout and plant out in the yard.  We have several germination stations that are sprouting lettuce (and hopefully eventually carrots) going out of old aluminum+plastic lid pizza kits.  I also went to the farmer's market with my produce bags yesterday and got a great deal on soft tomatoes $2/lb.  Apples felt more like highway robbery at $4.99/lb and lots with bruising and softspots of their own-- almost double what the grocery store wants/lb for a plastic bulk bag of organic consistently perfect apples.  There was a similar thing going on with onions $2.50/lb at the most competitive market stand vs. $1.50 to buy a net sack of organics at the store.  I also splurged on $30 of soy dressing and ponzu just because the sales lady is so avid.  I also didn't count my trial paper cups and toothpicks for the sauces in the weigh in either, but maybe this will be incentive to eat more salads.    

Relaxation

 It is well known that stress plays a big factor in a variety of important areas of human health.  Research the benefits of regular relaxation in stress management, anxiety, overall physical health, happiness and depression prevention.  

I turned to a favorite health influencer, Andrew Huberman.  Here is his 2.5 hour recap.  You can also forward to 2:11 for a synopsis or 2:14 for a description of a multi-purpose meditation approach I plan to try next.  

Meditation and mindful relaxation techniques can increase focus, improve mood, and sleep.  

One approach to meditation is to consider whether you presently have a bias toward interoception and sensing your internal state or exteroception and distractions around you.  Can you sense your heartbeat without touching a vein?  Huberman suggests pursuing a meditation technique that challenges your 'ception bias.  For instance, if external distractions (exteroception) are dominant, closing your eyes and focusing inwards may be more helpful.  If small variations in your internal state are intrusive, you may find yourself prone to anxiety and it may be helpful to meditate with your eyes open or even moving to draw your awareness to your surroundings. 

A second approach is to consider if you want to exit your meditation feeling more alert or more relaxed.  In those cases, you may want to focus on some form of cyclical breathing.  Breathing which emphasizes the inhale (more forceful and/or for longer duration) will create a more alert state.  Breathing which focuses on the exhale will create more relaxation.  

I final consideration is if you are seeking a more or less dissociative state.  Dissociation may be useful if the circumstances call for a more stoic approach -- you and your kid aren't served if you empathize with them too deeply during a meltdown.  However, acting like a robot going through the motions isn't great either.  Huberman suggests that good sleep and a meditation practice can assist with taking the middle path of being connected enough to be moved by emotions but not completely unmoored.  

Take 5 minutes out of your day today to breathe deeply, clear your mind, and relax your body.  

Kevin Kelly had quipped in Excellent Advice for Living that the minimum depth for a porch people would hang out on was 6 feet.  I measured mine.  Just barely 6 feet.  A few books later, I am marveling how Amy Tan has incorporated observation of birds into her daily routine in the Backyard Bird Chronicles.  So I invested 5 minutes of the first day of the year "relaxing" on my porch, watching rain drops puddle in my cracked up walkway and roll down the trashbags protecting the newly-rebuilt posts that already have landed back on my general contractor father in law's punchlist.  This is clearly a good badge for me to work on because it was anything but relaxing-- "ooh, the rain is still blowing onto the porch a bit,"  "I should really sweep,"  "if I had been doing my core exercises and yoga more consistently, my hips wouldn't feel so tight and my back wouldn't be so slouchy," "hubby is probably chuckling at me on the other side of the porch cam data feed," "the traffic at this 4 way stop sounds kind of like ocean waves," "we do still have squirrel in the oak tree, the cats haven't scared them all off!"  Huberman would say the real neural plasticity and growth comes from all the times we return to the exercise, not from staying in a monk-like state for the duration.  Eventually I got a few good reps of following my breathing and listening to my heartbeat.  Progress not perfection! 

Intermediate: Discover what calms you.  Take 10 to 15 minutes out of every day to take a walk, listen to music, daydream, or anything that helps you melt stress away.  Don't multitask while doing this; focus completely on your relaxation.  Do this every day for two weeks.  

1/2/2026:  15 mins in the evening sitting with the feral cats I had fed.  I thought I would try Huberman's Space-Time Bridging approach.  My two cycles of it didn't feel successful.  The harsh floodlights kept coming on, I couldn't see the horizon to focus on it, the cats were so fascinatingly distracting.  But I took several untimed breaks throughout the day to read a few journal entries in Amy Tan's birding book and found that very restorative.    

1/3/2026:  relaxed by watching Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban movie with my family.  It is so hard not to multi-task!  

1/4/2026:  recess was a half hour assembling a baggie of Legos from a massive gift my daughter had gotten for Christmas.  She had it out in a high-traffic area and every time I saw it, I felt a twinge that a piece might get knocked away from the school of nurdles and frustrate the future builder.  Also spent about 2 hours in quiet contemplation with Quaker meeting, although we are sitting waiting for spiritual direction, not necessarily focused on relaxation.  I also spent my DEAR (drop everything and read) hour visiting with the last issue of Mary Jane's Farm.  So lots of restorative activity today.  

1/5/2026: today was pretty hectic with school resuming, but I squeezed some relaxation moments in.  I took advantage of the car's seat warmers, delighted in picking up a tray of tea in a flavor I'd never tried to share with Fallon's teacher, and watching a few minutes of a DVD from the library.  

1/6/2026:  Nostalgia recess.  I found a guided meditation for free on Youtube featuring Andy from Headspace.  It didn't make sense to keep paying the recurring subscription, but I had a years long streak going on the Headspace app before I lapsed, so hearing his voice was immediately centering.  

1/7/2026:  I revisited that Andy Headspace meditation today to "check the box."  It is so convenient to be able to play it in a parked car when I arrive somewhere early.  My other three "self-care" indulgences were first, to take a leisurely stroll through the Farmer's market while my daughter was in school.  I learned most things are more expensive at this market than getting them organic and bulk in the grocery store, but I scored a deal on "ugly" tomatoes and learned about what is in season right now (potatoes!  chard! zucchini!) and was thwarted on cucumbers (too late?) and bok choy (too niche?).  Avocados were better quality and comparably priced, but funny enough, one of Fallon's school friends is having an avocado emergency with their tree.  The best things in life may sometimes be free in the future.  Do you think god is winking at us?  Second was to go get my semi-annual hair cut.  I look so much more put-together and got an update on how my stylist's kids were doing (we had worked together in a co-op preschool a few years ago).  Third was to bring a book and spend a few minutes reading in the sun while Fallon played with friends from school in grades whose schedules don't align with hers.  She was having so much fun, I lost track of her, briefly panicked (opposite of relaxation), but Levi's mom, Amanda had been hanging out with her on a rock skipping activity at the edge of the park and was observant enough about my nervous pacing to nudge her to check back at my reading waypoint pretty shortly thereafter.  It is comforting to feel like I am increasingly a part of the local community here.     

Her-Story: Mary Teegarden Clark

"Read an autobiography about a woman (living or dead) who influenced history in your country.   Share five things that you learned on The Farmgirl Connection."

For the intermediate level of Her-Story, I read Pioneer Ranch Life in Orange: A Victorian Woman in Southern California, by Mary Teegarden Clark.  It is set a few miles south of Los Angeles and covers the time period of 1875-1887, which is just a year before my own historic house was built in the same area.    

Here are 5 6! things I found intriguing to share with my fellow Farmgirl sisters:  

1. I found it more helpful to think of her and her family as "pioneers" of large-scale absentee agriculture of an orange grove rather than as more of the subsistence farming I had expected from the Laura Ingalls Wilder precedent. The train system had extended far enough that they could grow citrus in quantity and ship it to favorable markets in the Midwest. A lot of the immigration appeal of this area was for a healthier climate, with this family moving for some relief of the husband's chronic condition contracted patrolling a malarial area of the Mississippi during the Civil War. He dies in a typhoid epidemic 7 years in, but Mary continues to ranch for 5 more years before returning to her family in Indiana and managing the estate remotely.

2. Water availability has been and continues to be an issue for this part of California. Two years into their stay, Mary's family organized a cooperative called Santa Ana Valley Irrigation Company. They had an 18% stake which would have set them back about $310K in modern times ($10K then). It appears SAVI was a canal from the Santa Ana River with gates in trenches running to participating farms. Operators opened these gates for an agreed amount period of time to flood the farmer's groves. The company continued to operate until the 1970's. It is interesting to consider how we now sometimes criticize farmers upstream in the Central Valley for irrigating their crops in a similar way. It also explains why California chose sturdy perennials like orchards which could be flood-irrigated and which yielded produce which did no spoil quickly rather than tender annuals which needed ongoing access to irrigation and much faster transportation methods to market.

3. For the first 5 years or so of their stay, farmers were selling their produce directly into markets like San Francisco. However, flooded markets and falling prices inspired the Clarks to differentiate their premium product with branded tissue paper wrappers and ship to Chicago. They had a clever contingency of sending care packages to friends and family in the same market as a counterpoint on the condition of the produce if their distribution intermediaries claimed it had spoiled in transit. During their tenure, fruit harvesting and shipping collectives began to form and fruit began to be purchased on the tree. This simplified distribution for farmers and buffered them from some market pricing exposure, but also made them hosts to the families of the intermediaries responsible for harvest and shipment.

4. She focuses a surprising amount of her account on her excursions. Some of her haunts are places we still go to camp like the Irvine Regional park and Laguna Beach (although now they are not spur of the moment, but require reservations 6 months in advance). I was amused to learn she considered the mission at San Juan Capistrano a day trip; it is still considered a day trip but not because of the speed of stage coaches but because the degree of highway traffic limits vehicles to about the speed of stage coaches. I really wanted to take a train and follow her footsteps to the hotel in Yosemite that had a giant sequoia growing through the parlor but evidently the 1856 Wawona ('big tree') Hotel is closed indefinitely for roof (and more) repair and no longer has the sequoia parlor feature. One regret she mentioned that I have added to the to-do list is that she didn't keep a guest book when she was hosting guests. I loved paging through the entries of one in Salem, OR airbnb to see what other visitors had gotten up to but here, most of the overnighters are carpenter grandparents because our guest rooms are construction zones. Do y'all keep guest books?

5. I'd like to go back and take closer notes on the foods they grew and prepared for home use to figure out what would be "low lift" to cultivate for a lower ecofootprint lifestyle. She mentions at points that ham and mutton were considered luxuries but later includes bacon as a camping provision. She bakes bread, biscuits mentions serving lamb, trout, canned salmon, chicken, eggs, tomatoes, melons, strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, peaches, apricots, nectarine, pear, apple, plum, walnuts, bananas, figs, olives, loquat, persimmons, potatoes, peas, coffee, almond cake, doughnuts, pumpkin pie, dried fruit, raisins, butter, and jam. I am preparing venison as for the "food challenge table" at a Native American history festival this Wednesday and took her tip on page 83 to stew it with onions, potatoes, and a dash of chili pepper.

6. (extra credit) It was fascinating to see that even this far back, LA was a multicultural melting pot. There were indigenous Mexican and Chinese laborers, Hispanic original ranchers, Mexican banditos, and even an encounter with gypsies of European extraction. While Mary's views on work ethics and cultural practices of these different groups might not pass the PC test today, I thought it was fascinating that she still felt it constructive for her children to be polyglots, learning English, German (Pennsylvania Dutch heritage), and Spanish with an foray into French when instruction was available.

Crochet

 

If you don't know how to crochet, learn.  MaryJane has excellent instructions in her Stitching Room book.  

She does have excellent instructions, but I found I needed to watch a video rather than compare my work to stills to reassure myself I was doing it correctly.  If you are similarly wired, Bella Coco has you covered and her series is blocked out in short videos for easy digestion if you are leading a frequently interrupted lifestyle.  

If you are learning how to crochet, start with a simple straight scarf.  If  you already know how to crochet, pick a simple project...   There is a 3 hour minimum time investment.

I am a beginner, yes, but we live in a place that barely has sweater weather and my utilitarian aesthetic would not let me embark on a scarf.  I have since read Edward Gorey's Doubtful Guest and could be persuaded to make a scarf for my newly-shod-in-Converse Young Cultivator as a very obscure allusion.  

Instead, I settled for a pumpkin with plans to send it along to a friend as seasonal sistermail.  This is pretty much entirely "half double crochet through the back loop only" undertaking and gave me an excuse to buy ombre yarn which was fun to watch color change as the rows slowly spooled out.  An experienced crocheter(?) crochetier? would probably be able to knock this out in under 3 hours but I was following along with Bella Coco at half speed, and "frogging" frequently (undoing your work, because you rip it-rip it-rip it).  In fact, the abandoned first draft is stuffed into the center of this project in lieu of polyfil because the yarn got so snagged I was unable to completely undo it by ripping.  I eventually landed on the strategy of counting every row I finished (en espanol) to determine I had the requisite veinte stitches.     

Even with a stuffing stimulus, my orange tube was looking pretty flat.  I consulted with my Young Cultivator who in turn consulted with her 40 stuffies but returned with bad news.  No one was ready to donate their body to stitching and crafting.  Not even the Happy Meal toys which were well past their expected lifespan.  A giant husband backrest pillow, "Doggy" was willing to consider a more modest transfusion but I was not sure I would be able to stitch her up in a way that would hasten a speedy recovery rather than a slow deflationary decline.  So I corralled all the flower fabric scraps YC had been using to make her "hospital gown" fashion line for the stuffies (lots of ill-fitting smocks secured with staples that still exposed teddy bear derriers) and stuffed the pumpkin with that as a sort of reverse nod to Cinderella and her fairy godmother's outfits.  This was a satisfying way to punctuate the lulls of a few days and after a bit of practice, I felt competent enough to take it on the road and be seen in public working on it while YC learned gymnastics and piano.  

Put Me In, Coach!

 

Cut out TV time by joining a sports team for a season or taking lessons in baseball, soccer, horseback riding, karate, bowling, or tennis.

Fallon has built a foundation in the 4 basic strokes through 4+ years of swimming lessons and was looking for fun ways to apply those skills.  This year and last year, we explored water polo/splashball.  Our part of the country has a reputation for fielding very strong players.  Higher education institutions also have a reputation for providing more generous scholarships for decent players of this niche sport.  While her parents had no water polo experience, we figured, "When in Rome..."  

Last year, Fallon participated in splashball with an organization that emphasized learning the "egg beater" kick and dribbling the ball across lengths of a deep, chilly high school pool.  While this was a great way to limit screen time and accrue "PE minutes," Fallon quickly let her parents know that this wasn't a particularly fun way to spend 3 evenings a week.  Besides, it significantly cut into our parallel project of having more sit-down dinners together as a family.    

This season, we focused on "rediscovering the fun" and found that Blue Buoy followed an abbreviated season (4 total sessions across 1 month).  They packed a ton of learning and fun into each session.  The ratio of instructors to players was much higher (1:3) and the experience level of the instructors was sky-high.  The coach pictured above is a water polo Olympian!  The pool they met in was heated to 90 degrees and was mostly shallow.  This allowed the beginners to touch the bottom rather than egg beater and focus on scrimmaging to learn where to move to be open, block, and pass and catch one-handed.  The abundance of coaches kept the 3 player teams balanced and fun for differing ability levels.  The time seemed to fly by.  Fallon had so much fun she recruited her dad to do extra practice sessions in our home pool.  We can't wait for the spring season!