April 28, 2011
Rain!!!! And wind oh my!
I was on my way to the Cottage to do an early morning reading when the sky just felt like rain all morning. I knew there was something on the way but as it goes in Florida it can blow right over you and you won’t get a drop. I was dressed for work and feeding the feral cats when the radio went off with the emergency broadcast warning of a tornado watch headed straight through Leon into Jefferson county, right in my path on the way into Woodville. About that time my cell phone goes off with a message from my early morning appointment canceling. Relieved that I didn’t have to drive that road in my little car in a bad storm.
I went back to the house let the dogs out of their crates and my beloved Zeus into the bathroom, unplugged TVs and computers, called my client and just sat back to enjoy it. I love lightening storms, I set out my big bowl to collect Lightin’ Water for work in the near future. It is charged with negative Ions and is wonderful for protection work and bringing good luck.
I am so happy that my plants are getting rain water, it just makes me want a dance! Last night I bought heirloom green beans, snow pea, zucchini, marigold and calendula seeds from New Leaf Market, I know most people think buying seeds from the health food store just doesn’t sound right. But I have had great results with the "Seeds of Change" organic brand. And I know they are fresh and sealed. And I just love the name, "Seeds of Change"
The storm is passed, no damage, about ¾ inch of rain that I can tell. The poor little cardinals that just built their nest in the shrub off my front porch may consider moving since the pitch on the roof just dumped gallons of water with in inches of their new home site. They were busy all week happily building only one little eggs as of yet. I love the smell of happy grasses and plants after a storm, everything is so fresh.
New moon (May 2) is coming in a few days as well as Beltane, time to get those seeds in the ground fresh and wet, but for now I have to go, I have an afternoon reading and off to work. I love my job, both doing readings for people and helping them on their Spiritual Paths and at the Crystal Connection and I know not many people can say that but it totally fills an important part of who I am.
　
　

　

　

Barefeet, Bad cat and Planting

April 27, 2011

At the bottom of this page there are photos

Most of you that know me know, I hate shoes! I don’t wear shoes in the house and rarely around the farm, or in the garden and as soon as I get to work they come off. I am just a true earth loving barefoot girl. Well, a few days ago I found a dress to wear to the Beltane Ball this weekend and the ladies in the consignment shop just insisted I have a pair of dressy white shoes. OH My Goddess!!
And I can’t wear flip flops, tennis shoes or my basic black everything with this beautiful dress. And once I got home to try the dress on I realized I also needed a slip. Ohhhh Noooo, I really don’t like to shop and I was dreading it. I remembered that there was a box of my mother’s clothes in storage and knew once she had a long slip. I went digging through boxes when all of a sudden the Grandmother clock that belonged to my grandparents that hasn’t worked in maybe 20 years began to tick, I stopped my digging and checked it out and sure enough it was ticking or at least attempting to, there isn’t even a key to it anymore. So I asked my Mother that passed in 2005 to help me find the slip and I just reached to the very bottom of the box and pulled it out along with a silver clutch purse. Good, that keeps me from shopping for a slip, now the shoes, at least I have some idea what to look for. Off to Payless I found not one but two pair, what is happening to me??? I loved one pair and they fit, 3 inch heals but the color… well they are tan. Once I put them on with the dress they actually were close to my skin tone so they are keepers, the others I took back and bought a pair of flip flops, yhea! happy feet! But I am all set to go to the Ball and celebrate Beltane, a night on the town dancing with my husband and friends. Join us!
Today was another busy garden day. I woke up really pissed at my little cat, she had jumped up into the bathroom window ledge and knocked off my Amy Brown Seer statue, nothing more super glue won’t fix but it did not start me off in a good mood. Or at least until I found all the pieces. Then I had a little talk with her and felt better.
I got in the garden about 7:30 am and did some weeding and some observing and recording. Put the Bio-brew on some test areas and set my irrigation systems up, hoping for rain but just in case they all needed some water today. I am very pleased with the new growth and blooming. I have some grass hoppers that seems to going at my bell peppers but other than that all looks good.
So I decided I needed to get some of the plants in the ground that have been waiting, mostly tomatoes I started in the green house from seeds and some butternut squash. Both were looking pretty sad from sitting in the seed trays since first of March, and these are open pollinated. For those that may not know what Open Pollinated means they are NOT Hybrids or genetically modified to resist disease or such. Most open pollinated plants can be pollinated by bees or other insects. Hybrids do not need pollination or do they reproduce from seeds, they can grow plants but they will not produce flowers, fruit or seed that can be saved and replanted next year. How the Seed companies reproduce them is totally unknown to me, but if you can or are working with permaculture and sustainable living please try not to use hybrids because the day may come when you need to save your seeds and start your own heirlooms. This year we ended up with some hybrids because we were busy preparing for our new grandbaby that was born in late January and I didn’t get to the feed store or order them on line. Next year I am going to shoot for all open pollinated and start all my plants in January or February, I don’t like to plant in the ground till March 21^st, which is Ostara the Spring Equinox. I also like to plant by the moon signs if I can.
The tomato plants didn’t get the special treatment, I just lined the beds with a heavy row of horse manure compost and covered it over and set them out, the squash I just set them in the sand. Messed around with the sprinkler for about an hour and gave them a good watering. This was one of those days I really miss my outside shower. I was covered from head to toe in dirt by 12:30 pm. I put aromatic oil on to keep the sand gnats off and then all the dirt sticks to it. I just hosed down before I went into the house. So, I am putting my outside shower on my wish list for the near future, I loved it.

Here are a few photos to share since I am at work and I can download them faster.

 Our Little granddaughter Summer inspecting the blueberry plants full of green berries, this is what it is all about, the Future!

 Harvesting worm castings I posted a few days back on how to do it, they are shade lovers so in the sun they will crawl under the tarp and you have the best composted worm castings. Try a worm bed.

 This is our flat woods sandy soil, it is pretty dry. Easy to work when it's dry but hopefully with all my hard work will be full of organic materials with lots of horse manure.

 This is bed 1 in my test garden, the white ground cover is recycled horse feed bags, one of my pet projects this year. I have a whole presentation on how, why and the porpose and application.

This is bed 12 A&B, double bed with cucumbers, I will sand bag it in the future to raise it up as I fill it in.

 This is one of my Herbs in my garden, the tires are cut and turned inside out and hold the moisture and heat in the winter. I love them and have beautiful herrbs in a nice shady area under oak trees.

And here is a pear tree, just one of several and you can see it is full of pears already. We love our fruits right by the garden, can not wait till summer. In the back ground you can see our 8 foot fence.

Expanding the projects

Today Ken Gambill from the Wakulla County extension office came to the farm to look at all my projects and discuss more experiments. He and I have formed a friendship over our permaculture interest and now he is one of my students in Spiritual Development as well. We continue to discuss our plans for sustainable living and are going to plants some corn in horse manure to be used for several other projects. He has some great ideas as well as some knowledge with organic gardening and applied knowledge in engineering projects such as solar applications, generation of methane gas and such. It will be nice to have another set of eyes on the projects I have started and expand them into the future. I am hoping we can locate some open pollinated heirloom corn for our project and not use hybrid. I would love to save some seeds for the future.

Sunday Noah and I worked with horses most of the day and did some repairs and much needed projects around the farm. It can be difficult when I am only home maybe one day on the weekend to work with him. I usually work 4 days a week and do most of my gardening early in the morning during the week. Today I started another batch of bio-brew and I am seeing results in the garden on my test areas. Noah tilled the south half of the garden and I am preparing to plant beans, peas and corn in the hotter side of the garden next week. These will be planted in the usual farming practices and will not get the special attention the 12 experimental rows will have, they will also be watered with a sprinkler instead of drip irrigation. I just need to get them in and I have worked hard enough on the garden for one spring.

I will post more photos soon with the projects I have been working on. At the farm we have dial up internet and it takes forever to post one photo but I have a nice collection of photos hopefully to use in a workshop coming in the future on permaculture.

Happy Gardening,
Sissy
      

April 23, 2011
This past week I have been really busy in the garden and I am experimenting and playing with ideas and observing. After all I do come from a lan background in another life. My little plants seem to have plenty of water and the weeds and grass are very minimal but they look a little pale. I started a bio-brew Monday with what I had, which was not what the recipe called for but you do what you do with what you have, right? I also made some homemade fertilizer from horse compost, chicken manure, woodash and worm castings.
For the bio-brew compost tea: I put chicken manure that was mostly sand, worm castings, horse manure and some karo syrup (really didn’t want to do this but it was all I had, I have a huge problem with high fructose corn syrup) into a 30 gallon drum and set up my fish aquarium pump to make it aerobic.
On Tuesday morning after 24 hours, I had some serious action going on so I feel it must have done what I set out to do. I decided to test a few areas. First I used the sludge to put around some cucumber plants. Then I diluted it more than half, screened out the big stuff and hay with cheese cloth and put the liquid tea on a few rows. Yesterday Noah and I had a long discussion about checking the nitrogen with the capsule test kits before I did this but I did it anyway.
Soil is the most important factor in permaculture. If you have used conventional gardening practice for years and it was passed down to you by your family, it can be hard to change the way or find a reason to change your gardening practices. This is one reason I am doing this all as a test project. In theory it makes sense to amend our garden soil.
Our soil is mostly sand, but since the garden area is only four years old you would think it would have retained some of it’s goody, but to look at the soil it appears to be dry and lacking life. My hopes are to only use organic materials and hope for nature to give it her best, but when you look at your neighbors garden, that is plowing and tilling the soils 3 to 4 times a year, pouring fertilizer and spraying gallons of water into his lush green plants thriving and flowering. It does make you ask what are you working your ass off for? With my projects, I intent not to produce commercial grade vegetables that you see in the grocery store, but I will feel better that me family and I am are not ingesting chemicals or dumping them into my water source or saturating the ground with pesticides and herbicides.
Today we harvested honey from our hives. We took 13 frames that were full of capped off honey to our neighbor, David that has an extractor. The honey was rich and sweet, early spring wild flowers give us a light honey. We got almost 4 gallons from the 13 frames. I got stung while I was scraping off the caps, only the second time I have been stung in the three years since we have kept bees and it just a small nip, didn’t even swell.
Leslie and Summer, our daughter and granddaughter sat in the screen house as we extracted and strained the honey an took photos.

Yep that is me scraping frames Noah and David spinning the frames in the extractor.

　
　
　
　
　
　

Canada here I come and Worms

April 19, 2011
It has only been a week but seems like a month since I found out that I was accepted for the scholarship to Earth Activist Training in Canada. I guess since I have waited so long to do this it seems as it has been a long wait and I really feel I have practiced a lot of patience. Since 2008 I have been holding this want and need to take this workshop. Last summer I came into some unexpected money and decided that it was time. I registered for the class and had the money to pay for it in full. I was on my way to the post office to mail my check when I walked into the Cottage and stepped into three inches of water throughout my 80 year old family home I now use as a Spiritual Sanctuary. That set off a whole series of events that changed my life quickly and ended my hopes of going last summer. But between insurance and a good friend Brad Davis, a wonderful carpenter, we completely gutted the Cottage and I ended up with a beautiful new reading room because of it. It was truly a blessing. I was tuned into what the Goddess wanted for me and took it with pure Gratitude. But this is right and I feel the importance of what I am doing. Taking EAT is not just for me but for the many people I will help on this journey. So yesterday I withdrew most all of my emergency money and bought my plane tickets and now have a little more to do to plan this trip. I am also going to spend a week with my old friend Bonnie or as we call her RedMoon Lotus in Nova Scotia. She was also a founding Elder of Magnolia Circle and I haven’t seen her in a few years since she moved her family north. This will also be a working adventure for me, she is setting up readings for me when I am there to visit. And last night as MC was going over our schedule for the next few months I realized, I will be spending summer solstice with RedMoon Lotus on the coast of Nova Scotia. Back in the early days of Magnolia Circle she would host our Summer Solstice rituals at her house in Tallahavana and they were some of the most memorial rituals we did back then. I feel that this trip is so very important beyond what I can even imagine. I will just let the Goddess guide me in my work and see where she leads me for this is her work I do.

So, having said that there are a few things I am worried about, one is money. I am doing a fund raiser at the Crystal Connection raffling off a reading to raise money and looking for other ways to pay for this trip and the almost month I will be gone. I am also concerned about being gone for a month, leaving Noah on the farm in the middle of summer between endless mowing and the garden coming in full force. I am going to ask friends to come in and harvest vegetables and work in the garden. Between June and July I am usually the busiest, wagonloads of fruits and vegetables to be canned, cooked and put up in the freezers. It is a lot of hard work and too much for one person, even me at times. That is providing I have a good crop and I have put in a lot of work in hopes of that.

I have lots of projects going on and today is going to be a busy day on the farm. The weather is warming up but the nights are still cool so the young plants are still just sitting there waiting. Today I am making compost tea and start some biobrew. My friend Rose gave me the recipe last night and I need to get started. I am also going to harvest some worm castings and get it on the young plants to give them a boost. For those of you that haven’t dealt with worms, once you get them established the are wonderful. My bin is now more than a year old and it took work. This was my third attempt but one that has been successful. My first attempt I bought red wigglers from the bait shop and set them up in a kiddy pool, guess what?? Even though I had it covered, they drown. My second attempt I put them in a tub with red wigglers and one day opened it to find nothing but a huge fire ant bed and maggots. Then I took another workshop and asked more questions and took tons of notes and really paid attention. How hard can it be to raise worms? Last January I sat in the compost pile for days and I mean days. I decided I was going to make it work as I sifted through mounds of horse manure to collect thousands of banded red worms, the best kind of compost worms you can get and I didn’t have to buy them. Then I set up a plastic bin with holes around the side and the bottom lined in rocks and dog feed bags to separate the liquid. I sometimes forget to feed them but they seem pretty plentiful over the winter months just skinny and then a few weeks ago I dug around in there and was just excited to see fat healthy worms and they were awesome. So I can successfully raise worms! In the past I have used some of the castings but been very careful not to over do what I was trying to build, now that I got them established and they seem to be happy and multiplying.
How do you harvest them? You know those wigglers love the shade, so you spread out a tarp in the sun. pour our your compost and cover one half of it and go work in the garden, in a few hours they make their way under the shade and you have your compost. Put them back in the bin and add more compost and there you go, worm castings. Mine is not all pretty like what you buy in the store but it is rich. Last year I totally got messy with potatoes sprouting and pumpkin seeds, I just have to be careful what I put in there.
So off to the garden for some fun this morning.

　

Full Moon

April 17, 2011
The Libra Full Moon and Bull Bats
Southerners can’t really avoid being a part of the culture you were born into and picking up on some of the folklore and traditions that have been around since your great great great grandma and way beyond that. It is a part of your everyday life. In our family we have developed some of our own folklore, I’ll tell you about as our journey goes on.
Driving home from work Saturday night, I stopped and got crossroad dirt from a crossroad I have worked with it’s guardians before. See you have to ask permission first and you best have some relationship before doing so, or else you may just find yourself flattened there slap dab in the middle of the road. For those that wonder what this has to do with permaculture, just enjoy the story and learn a little about dirt worshippers, county folk and more.
So, since it is the full moon and the one that determines when Easter falls, you see Easter’s date is always after the first full moon, after the spring equinox. Don’t you just love it, a Christian holiday that actually falls according to a full moon and the change of the season. Truthfully how many holidays religious or political follow and of earth’s cycles, that is in main stream religions. So Easter can fall between late march and mid April, this year it is about as late as it gets since the full moon was just a few days before the spring equinox. That is why county folk always have their own ways to tell when the seasons are changing and when to plant. For me it is when I see the first swallow tailed kite of the spring, for others it is when the pecan trees put on their leaves. The old folk say, "you can’t fool the pecan tree". I know spring is here when I see the first Bull Bat in my headlights. What is a Bull Bat? Well I don’t really know but I always felt they maybe the whippoorwill since they only come out at night. I have never seen one in the daylight. It was my husband that told me what they were called years ago. But once you have seen one you will always remember them, for their huge shiny eyes sitting in the road, they are catching bugs I assume. They fly up at you as you approach and if you are lucky you can catch a glimpse of them as they fly way. I saw one Saturday night, first of the spring. Glad I have most my vegetables already in the ground. Everything feels early this year.
So, getting back to crossroad dirt. See I practice many forms of Earth Magic and Spiritual work. I use the Earth to guide me in my work like my ancestors. I don’t wait for Easter to plant and I plant by the moon signs. That work is spiritual and practical in nature. The dirt I collected last night will be for blessing and protecting the work I do in my garden and to aid and protect me and my knowledge on my adventures. I am living a promise I made myself several years ago to take Earth Activist Training and to learn and apply perrmaculture in my life and teach others how to use the principles for sustainable living and survival. Truthfully that is what permaculture is and Earth Activism is about doing what is right to heal the damage we have done to our Mother through natural practices.
Nature will survive no matter what, but will we as a human race? Not all of us and not unless we learn to use what she gives us and follow her lead. Time is running out and we have to look back to the old ways when the new ways fail or are no longer available She is shaking us at our very core for the damage we have done and in our lifetime we will feel and know her wrath. We are already seeing it in earthquakes, tsunamis, mega storms, hurricanes, flooding and not to mention global warming. The animals feel and know it, bird and fish die by the thousands and no one knows what is coming next. So, this blog is not about gloom and doom and I am not perching to you, if you are not following me then maybe you should be listening. If not maybe you won’t find Southern Style Permaculture to your likin. Cause I am going to tell you the truth no matter what.
So on the full moon I always set out my Faery Seer Oil, a 300 year old recipe I got from my teacher Orion and a little added guidance from the nature spirits of the land. I give it a full night of the full moon light to charge it. Sometimes I set out my crystals and stones depending on the work I am doing. This full moon I just set out the dirt and some cream liquor for the Fair Folk. I have lots of blessings to give and gratitude to those that guide me on my path, for I am truly blessed.
So, a little more about folklore traditions and how we create our own. On our farm we have a few chickens, just enough to keep our refrigerators full of eggs to share with neighbors family and friends. We get between 15-20 per day. Sometime in the late winter our daughter was here and we were out collecting eggs. She asked me about their language and I told her they were bragging that they had "laid an egg". And she observed the other chickens answered with "good for you". Our grandson Trent that is terrified of our rooster, Rodger, was working in the yard with us and we were talking about the language of chickens and he asked what Rodger said with his "Cock a doddle do" and we answered "I’ll get you". Trent will never forget what the chickens and roosters says.
So, during this full moon look up into her blessed light and think of what you leave for your family or others in the way of folklore or legacy. What are you doing for the future and future generations as you gaze into the night? Here is one way you can assure the future for the generations to come. Behind My husband Noah and our grandson Trenten planting the palm tree is the palm tree (left) my husband planted with his grandfather,

　

Where do I begin???

My first introduction to Permaculture was through my teacher and mentor Starhawk. I read her book Earth Path and in 2008 I was with her at Dianna's Grove and took her Path in Priestessing the Earth. It was a week of discovery. Natures farming and gardening is powerful just walk through the woods, watch nature and how it supports it's own plants without any help, plants either live or die. They choose where they can survive by natural selection. I was moved my the magic of this workshop and the way Starhawk presented it through the Magic.I came home from that week with a vow to take this Earth Activist Training. Here is where it begins....

This is Grandmother Mother, the most sacred Oak on our land. I am blessed to live is her space and she embraces me with love and respect. This Photo was taken Imbolc 2011 when her bones were exposed.
All for now... I am working on it, just wanted to try a photo tonight.

April 13, 2011 Set up my Blog

Hey! this has been an adventure and I am on one for sure. Stay tuned to this blog because I have lots to share with you, but right now I am running around in circles....
So as they say THIS SITE IS UNDER CONSTRUCTION!