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Since last year was my first year being a mom, I wasn’t able to plant the massive award winning garden I desired. However, we did do some planting and now we are enjoying the fruits of our labor. We have an adorable little winter garden which is supplying us with arugula, radish, mustard, and kale. I love being able to go outside with my blender in the morning and pick the greens for my breakfast green smoothie.

My winter garden

This year we are gearing up to plant THE BEST GARDEN EVER!! We just purchased all our seeds, soil blocker, and mycogrow today! After a couple of our friends named their Space Of Love (Garden of Eden and Hackberry Farm), we decided to call our domain PARADISE GARDENS. This year our place is definitely going to live up to its name! We have already planted blueberry bushes, fig trees, raspberries, boysenberries, strawberries, mint, akebia, kiwi, emerald carpet raspberry, goji berry bushes, goumi, paw paw, aronia, elderberry and a kousa dogwood tree. If being surrounded by beauty, delicious smells, and healthy food is not enough to motivate you to start planning your garden, I have a list of ten reasons you absolutely must plant a garden this year. Seriously, you have no choice. It’s mandatory!

If you ever wondered what I would look like as a painting this is it…

10 Reasons You Absolutely MUST Plant A Garden This Year:

1. Your garden produce will have more nutrition than anything you can buy in any store. Even processed food from your own garden will have more nutrition than fresh produce from the grocery store. I betcha didn’t know that!

2. You will get produce that is fresher, riper, and tastier than anything in the store. Eating will become an orgasmic experience again!

3. If you do it right, you will save money. Produce from the store can be very expensive. Think of all the trips to Hawaii you could take if you didn’t have to pay for groceries!

4. All your food will be unsprayed and have nothing toxic on it. Even certified organic foods often have (natural but still toxic) pesticides on them. For example, my son David got a rash from eating unwashed organic tomatoes from the store, but has no reaction to unsprayed tomatoes from our friend’s farm.

5. It gives you a reason to spend more time outside, getting exercise, breathing fresh air, and enjoying the beauty of the earth and plants.

6. You’ll have a greater variety of produce. You can grow varieties that can’t be found in any store. Eating will become more interesting and fun!

7. You’ll reduce your impact on our planet. Fewer fossil fuels will be used, less wild land will need to be cleared for farms, fewer toxic chemicals will be sprayed into the environment and so on. Then Mother Earth will thank you by creating more magic and manifestation in your life! For example, cute little birds will land on your head when you reach out to them (happened to me twice ) They know who they can trust!

8. Money, Money, Money! If you sell your surplus, it can become a source of extra income. For example, this guy doesn’t even need a job. All he does is garden and sell his extra produce to neighbors and restaurants. And he only has 1/5 of an acre!

9. Gardening teaches children where food comes from. It also teaches them (and us) the law of the harvest (you reap what you sow). Plus, if you learn to forage wild foods you can learn the higher law – reaping where you didn’t sow.

10. You can help your friends and family become healthier. If you give them fresh home grown vegetables, they’ll feel obligated to eat them. (That’s right! I’ll be giving you vegetables from my garden this year. You know who you are.)

Bonus Reason (from my husband): It gives you extra incentive to keep bees. As if you needed another reason to keep bees.

The best type of gardening, in my opinion, is Forest Gardening, which is basically creating a forest type eco-system with useful and edible trees, shrubs, herbs, vines and perennial vegetables. By creating a forest garden you create a self-sustaining paradise. In a forest garden you don’t have to till the soil, plant year after year, or even water after a while. If you desire to look into this awesome style of gardening check out my fav books on the subject…

• Gaia’s Garden, Second Edition: A Guide To Home-Scale Permaculture
• Creating a Forest Garden: Working with Nature to Grow Edible Crops
• Perennial Vegetables: From Artichokes to Zuiki Taro, A Gardener’s Guide to Over 100 Delicious and Easy to Grow Edibles
• Uncommon Fruits for Every Garden
• Mini Farming: Self-Sufficiency on 1/4 Acre
• The Resilient Gardener: Food Production and Self-Reliance in Uncertain Times
• Edible Forest Gardens (2 volume set)

In any case, make sure you leave room for wild food in your garden because…

Shepherd’s purse makes an awesome snack

David picking shepherds purse

David eating shepherds purse

Curly dock

Plus filaree flowers

Equal yumminess!
(curly dock wraps with raw macadamia nut “cheese,” decorated with filaree flowers)

Enjoy your life!

I am a big proponent of taking care of my teeth naturally and holistically. As the saying goes, “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” The last time I went to a dentist was about 4 years ago when I removed my amalgam filling. After being disillusioned by at least three incompetent dentists, I realized I required to take responsibility for the health and longevity of my own teeth. One dentist, in realizing I had a slight jaw misalignment, actually suggested he break my jaw and put a metal post in it to fix it. What?! Are you serious?! He was. He had this insane procedure done on himself. Poor man! As for me, I will stick with my slight overbite thank you very much!

What are the main reasons people go to the dentist? One, to check for cavities. Two, to fix misalignments. And three, to get a semi-annual cleaning. Proper nutrition can prevent and even reverse cavities and teeth misalignment (especially in children). In his well researched book, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, Weston Price, a dentist, found nutrition had a direct impact on dental health and jaw bone structure. In an effort to find out why so many “civilized” people had dental problems, he studied several tribes of indigenous people. When these tribes consumed their natural diet they NEVER had any issues with their teeth or need for dental care! Once fed a western diet, the dental health of these same indigenous people, and especially their offspring, rapidly deteriorated. The hundreds of photos in this book are worth a thousand words!

As for the semi-annual cleaning. I have the perfect alternative solution for you! This tooth powder recipe, which I found on herbmentor.com, is the best way to clean teeth I know of. As most of you may already be aware of, conventional toothpaste is chock full of harmful ingredients. Sodium fluoride (used in rat poison), blue dye, sodium lauryl sulfate, triclosan, and hydrated silica just to name a few. Even organic healthier toothpaste versions have ingredients which can be too harsh and abrasive or can coat our enamel, therefore never allowing our teeth to be fully clean. So obviously a professional cleaning would be useful for those who use toothpaste. This tooth powder, on the other hand, leaves my teeth feeling as clean and fresh as a visit to the dentist. I like it even better than tooth soap, which is also a great alternative to toothpaste. In addition, the kaolin clay in this recipe is reported (by a dentist) to feel and look exactly the same as the expensive tooth polishing agent in her office. Hmmmmmm….

Tooth Powder:
1/4 cup baking soda
1/4 cup sea salt
1/4 cup kaolin clay
30 drops spearmint oil
1 tbsp. ground dried sage (helps whiten teeth)

Mix ingredients well and store in airtight container. To use, dab a small amount of tooth powder on wet toothbrush and brush as usual.

Oh, and remember to floss!

I am really enjoying all the wild greens growing on my land right now. Filaree, dandelion, chickweed, curly dock, and hedge parsley are in season here in Texas. Can you believe wild food has on average 10 times more nutrition than conventional food?! And it’s free! And it’s tasty! And it gets us out of the house, giving us fresh air and a meditative mind! I really have no excuse not to have at least one wild salad a day. I usually do

Freshly picked wild greens ready to make into a salad or green smoothie

If I wanted to go the extra mile I could even add some wild pecans and black walnuts to my salad. Now that would be WILD!

What do you like to put in your wild salad?

Hi Y’all! I hope your Thanksgiving weekend was FABULOUS, filled with family, fun, and good food! I love that we have a holiday which reminds us to appreciate our life and gives us an excuse to throw a party for our family and friends. There truly is so much to be grateful for. Every breath we take is a gift. And as Cicero stated, “gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all the others.” When I stop to ponder on all the blessings I have, I become deeply emotional and humble. There is no way I can be jealous, selfish, or complaining when I am in a state of gratitude.

In honor of Thanksgiving I thought I would do a food blog. It’s been a while. This video was taken a few months ago when I wrote my day in the life of a blissful mama post. It is a how to on making a yummy drink out of sumac berries. I know, I know, they are out of season, but hey, it gives you something to look forward to in the spring. In springtime you can munch on young sumac shoots and in the summer you can enjoy this delicious sumac-ade…

Thank you for being AWESOME! There is no one else in the world exactly like you!
Love,

P.S. If you had a raw/vegan Thanksgiving, please let me know what you had! We had a vegan pizza from the book Thrive and also some raw cranberry sauce and a delicious salad with pomegranates and nuts. Yum!!

Two weeks ago something very strange happened to me… I developed a sore throat. This is strange because it has been extremely rare for me to have any sign or symptom of “sickness” in the last several years since beginning my raw food journey and doing a lot of detoxing and cleanses (lemonade fast, liver/gallbladder flush, colon cleanse, etc.). So imagine how surprised I was one afternoon to feel pain in my throat area which only increased as the day unfolded. That evening, my pain was so intense, I had a difficult time going to sleep. To top it off, my sweet son was teething, which means his sinuses were affected and he was waking up every few minutes crying. I was experiencing what it feels to be a mother who needs rest and babying but instead has to take care of her own needy baby. Not fun. As I was wondering how I could make the most of my situation, I remembered the amazing power of essential oils. Essential oils are a concentrated form of herbal medicine. Just a few drops can be equivalent to several pounds of plant material.

I asked Bryan to make me a sore throat gargle. He warmed up 4 ounces of spring water and added 2 drops Eucalyptus, 5 drops lemon, and 2 drops wintergreen essential oil. I gargled all of it and immediately my throat felt better! Then, I added a couple drops of tea tree oil to organic coconut oil and rubbed it on the bottom of David’s feet and on on his back. That did the trick!! We both enjoyed a good night’s sleep! The next day, I did a neti pot with essential oils. We mix 8 Tbsp. of high quality sea salt with 10 drops of rosemary oil and 6 drops of tea tree oil. Then we add 1 to 1 1/2 tsp. of this mixture into 2 cups warm water for our neti pot. During the day I also ate light and had lots of juices and herbal infusions, which I offered to David too. That night, we both felt great! My sore throat was gone and David slept like a baby! awwwwww!

P.S. To purchase high quality essential oils click here.

This morning we went to pick up some raw goat butter in Oak Cliff, with no ideal we were about to embark on an awesome urban foraging adventure! On our way there, David required to go potty so we stopped by a gas station to take him. We walked to a hidden spot behind the building and, to our great delight, we found 3 wild plum trees!! These beautiful trees had dropped hundreds of ripe fruit. We just had to stop and enjoy some. They tasted DELICIOUS!! There is a certain depth of flavor which wild foods posses that cultivated store bought varieties don’t. David loved grabbing them off the ground and putting them in his mouth. We collected over 100 of them for eating, pickling, and making jam.

Wild plum tree

David foraging for plums. This photo was taken after we collected most of them off the ground

When we reached Urban Acres, we found a HUGE patch of purslane. The biggest patch I have seen so far! David and I had a few leaves. After we picked up our butter and a few other items, we went to a park in Richardson where we used to live. This is the same park where I recorded my persimmon foraging video. We ate several yummy ripe persimmons and collected more for later. I also had some dandelion leaves as there were several dandelion patches. David was asleep for part of the time. After he woke we pushed him on the swings.

David enjoying the park swing. Notice the evidence of persimmon eating around his mouth

Feeling the foraging vibe, we decided to make yet another stop on our way home. We visited Bryan’s work which has persimmons, hackberries, and lots of other wild food surrounding it. David picked his own hackberries and persimmon off the trees. He also pointed these trees out to us as we passed by. Amazing!! He already knows how to identify them! It is easy for small children to do this as they have photographic memories.

Bryan and David picking hackberries

Our final stop was at Whole Foods, where we did a different kind of urban foraging: one in which you pay for your food and it’s not as local or freshly picked. Oh well, this is what we do until we create our abundant forest garden/space of love, supplying us with all we require. We went home and I took a blissful nap with David.

The End

P.S. Do you urban forage?