Author: jennynazak

Happy last day of 2022 to all of you! (OK, SECOND-to-last day, but I thought I’d get started early on the good wishes!)

Despite a few extreme challenges, this has been a wonderful year for me, maybe the best year of my life so far — and that’s saying a lot. I will be saying goodbye to the old year with love and appreciation, and ushering in the New Year with love and excitement.

Thank you all for being part of my life and being on this path with me. I love you all, no matter how near or far you may be. If you ever find yourself struggling, feeling alone, need a fresh perspective, or just want to connect, please get in touch with me anytime! I’m just a phone call or a text away. Let’s make 2023 a wonderful year for all.

Starting a list … What else would you add?

• Leaders of all countries stop jetsetting around the world doing telethons for the military-industrial complex

• Landscapers who don’t actually care about trees and plants quit the landscaping profession and find their calling as barbers or something

• Environmentalists stop rhapsodizing about electric cars already, and start advocating for 15-minute cities and public transportation

• No more international climate conferences take place in person; do it by Zoom

• Come to think of it, let’s do that for all international government meetings, at least the ones that involve crossing oceans

• Supermarkets, restaurants, and other retailers, and industry, stop shoving single-use plastic down our throats

• We totally dismantle white supremacy culture and decolonize the world.

— Come to think of it, that last one would pretty much take care of all the preceding ones, wouldn’t it — and a lot more besides! #Decolonize #DismantleWSC

And with that realization I am suddenly not feeling so cranky at all anymore! Let’s get on it in 2023! Happy New Year and much love to you all.

Great stuff as usual from my colleague & friend Mike Hoag, a fellow author and permaculture design professional. In a nutshell, instead of being so focused on what we want our gardens to grow, we should be asking what our gardens want to grow.

As Mike points out, the conventional approach to gardening tends to be performance-oriented. And often our gardens don’t meet our performance expectations: “Maybe the tomatoes are nagging you for water again, and the lettuce bed isn’t meeting your expectation to stay weed-free …”

The performance-focused mentality, says Mike, “is often a recipe for dissatisfaction, extra work, continued struggle, and poor performance. Because in a lot of cases, probably most cases, the garden doesn’t WANT to grow tomatoes. Maybe the soil, the sun, the groundhogs living under your porch have other ideas than just churning out tomatoes so you can pay your Netflix subscription. …

In contrast to the performance-based mentality, a permaculture-based approach is about developing a relationship with the land. This relationship, says Mike, can happen only “when we start listening to the feedback and trying to understand what THE SYSTEM wants. Maybe the sandy acidic soil is just completely wrong for an acre of tomatoes. Maybe the community doesn’t need another stand of heirloom tomatoes at the market. Maybe the family needs a more beautiful, lush environment to live and play in. Maybe we’d get more enjoyment out of a diverse ecosystem with room for the groundhogs and deer …”

Mike wraps up his post with a priceless suggestion: “So, has your garden been trying to tell you something and you just can’t take a hint? Maybe in 2023, take time to ask your garden what IT wants.”

Boy, has that lesson taken a long time to sink in with me! I feel like I’m finally getting it over the past year. For as long as I’ve actively gardened (which has been for maybe 18 years so far, in all different climates and spaces), I have rarely been successful in growing what I want to grow, particularly fruit trees and veggies. And I have perennially felt like a horrible failure in permie gardening circles.

More times than I care to admit, I have seen people’s Facebook photos of their perfect supermodel gardens busting out with fruits, vegetables; their homemade tinctures and oils and salads and boutique squash raviolis and other permaculture Martha Stewart things they whip up … and I want to be happy for them, but privately I am thinking, “I HATE YOU! What is WRONG with me???” I have even theorized that my relative inability to grow food is punishment for bad things I did in a past life. Maybe in some past incarnation I was really great at gardening, but hoarded all the food for myself. Maybe I was an evil duchess who tyrannized the people and brought about mass starvation. Sometimes I tell myself I’m just a fundamentally bad person who emits a toxic energy field, which plants can always pick up on even though some of my fellow humans might not see it.

(But at that point in my musings, rather than allow myself to go any further down the rabbit-hole, I remind myself that I’ve known many truly good people who were fellow plant-killers like myself.)

With wildflowers and native plants, I have had a bit better time than with food cultivars. But still, there’s definitely a sizable gap between what I plant in my yard, and what survives.

Say there are 1,000 plants in my yard (it might actually be closer to 10,000!). The plants you see are the 10 percent who managed to survive.

Over the past year, I’ve actually gotten a lot more laissez-faire in my relationship with plants. And, through various experiences (some moments of intuitive/divine guidance, plus some basic realtime observations of “Ya know, that plant just doesn’t want to grow in my yard“), I finally realized it’s perfectly OK that I’m not good at gardening!

And I have had such a sweet, lovely, liberating realization: All these years, while I’ve been trying with only very limited success to grow my gardens, my gardens have actually been trying to grow me! The trees and plants seem to be trying to tell me they want me to relax, and slow down, and have a lot more respect and appreciation for their unique beingness, and simply feel a lot more joy together with them. And breathe deeply, and learn — and the learning isn’t “learning how to grow food better” or “being better with plants.” It’s more like learning how to let go, learning how to trust, learning how to love. Definitely it’s about cultivating faith.

Also: my yard is a hands-on rainwater stewardship training ground.

And maybe most of all: My garden definitely wants to grow art and community. So far my most successful “crops” are my Little Free Library, and the benches I installed next to the sidewalk for anyone to sit on. Also the “Dog Bar,” a water-bowl I put at the corner and keep filled for the neighborhood furbabies. And my driveway, which I have turned into a sculpture garden of concrete chunks, rugged cacti, and found metalwork and figurines.

Who knows why some people have a green thumb while others of us don’t seem to. One thing I’m learning though, finally, is that gardens grow a lot more than plants.

Go here to read Mike’s post in its entirety. You definitely want to read the whole thing! (And, you might also want to take one of Mike’s classes, buy his books, engage his design services, or all of the above!)

As a bonus, this link doubles as your introduction to the Transformative Adventures group if you’re not already part of the beautiful community we are growing there.

Happy New Year everyone! May your dreams take root, grow, and blossom in 2023.

Happy Back-of-the-Year to you. That’s how I think of this time of year. The cool dark relatively quiet pocket of days from the day after Christmas through New Year’s eve afternoon. Things usually aren’t very demanding work-wise; I work but it doesn’t feel urgent. I engage in pleasant year-end tasks around the house and I just really enjoy the general lack of obligations. Even though I get very busy in a manner of speaking, it doesn’t feel frantic-busy; it feels more like “resting and incubating” busy. In lunar terms, it feels luxuriously dark-moonish still, even though we are well into the waxing crescent phase. Whether or not you enjoy a dark fallow time as much as I do, I hope you are doing well. Please call me if you need anything. And if my intuition tells me to call you, I will. Otherwise, I will see you in the new year! Much love to you all.

P.S. Now if only the mow & blow bro’s would catch a bit of the quiet dark back-of-the-year spirit! No, they continue relentlessly with their chopping and shaving and “cleaning” of the great outdoors. Maybe one day we, collectively, will come to realize that letting living things rest (including letting ourselves rest!) is a part of their growth, and is far more urgent than whipping them into our idea of “neat.”

P.P.S. The end-of-year period is always a favorite time of mine. But something that makes it extra-special this year is that the last few weeks leading up til Christmas Eve were extra busy in a very good way!! Very very fruitful in terms of growth & learning. In addition to completing the classroom portion of my training for a new occupational category, Certified End-of-Life Doula (International Doulagivers Institute), I also did some continuing ed. for my decluttering & organizing services which I have been offering since 2004. My official printed certificate arrived today. The Certified Ultimate Professional Organizer course from Ultimate Academy is by far the best professional-organizer training I have ever taken!! Both of these services — organizing and end-of-life support — as well as my writing, speaking, teaching, landscaping, and art/craft offerings, fall under my overall occupational umbrella which I refer to as “sustainability educator, self-employed.” A green umbrella, so to speak!

Consumer spending accounts for nearly 70 percent of economic activity in the USA. Seventy percent!

That’s it. That’s the post.

We make a difference, and we hold huge power via our wallets! So go out and spend (or NON-spend) as if every single dollar you spend or withhold makes all the difference in the world. Because it does!

To a reader feeling eco-guilt about painting the inside of their house:

You are part of your environment. If clean and neat-looking spaces help you feel good and enjoy life, then that IS permaculture. Zone Zero-Zero (our minds) and Zone Zero (inside the house) ARE permaculture too.

Some places sell partially used cans of paint for cheap. I think our dump/landfill in my county in Florida does, or used to. Also, locally owned paint shops are often able to mix paint in just the quantity you need so you’re not left with a bunch of excess.

Also of course, eco-friendly paints are becoming more widely available. When shopping, a couple of terms to look for are milk-based, and VOC-free (or maybe it’s low-VOC).

Regarding the recycling of cans: I doubt they get recycled. But maybe they do! And I’m honored that you think I would know the info for every locality. (My brain doesn’t retain that info even for my own locality!)

But, it varies from place to place, so you’d need to call your local landfill, local recycling company, local govt to find that info out.

Here in Florida, I took on a bunch of paint that was left in the garage by the previous owners. I have been able to use up most of it, and I then reuse the cans for various purposes til they rust out, which here in my humid place by the ocean doesn’t take long.

This same reader also asked another excellent question: “So if something doesn’t feel neat and clean to me, then I should fix it? Or should I fix myself instead? That is the dilemma or conundrum for me.”

My answer: That varies for all of us.

1) If it were me, I would check to see if there is consensus with your home’s other human inhabitant(s), re whether the space looks/feels/seems neat & clean or not.

2) I would also check in with myself, use some of my “inner landscape” tools & processes, look for patterns in my life, to feel if it’s a thing within myself. Which, if yes, then I would then address using the tools/resources I have found effective for inner work.

One of the basic concepts we learn in a permaculture design course is microclimate. It’s just what it sounds like: variations in conditions from place to place, even if the places are in very close proximity.

One way to experience huge variations in microclimate is to walk around a building. It can feel sunny and tropical on one side of the building, and downright arctic and blustery on the opposite side. Sun, wind, humidity, light-reflecting objects (such as bodies of water and light-colored surfaces), thermal masses (such as asphalt and concrete, and bodies of water) are all factors.

Temperatures can vary significantly across a wider local area too. According to official weather-station readings, our city had a hard freeze last night, 28 degrees, lasting about 7-8 hours. The weather station is about 3 miles inland. Here by the ocean we are always a few degrees warmer than the official reading. The night before last, when the official reading was in the low 30s or high 20s for several hours, we didn’t get any sign of a freeze except a skim of ice on the birdbath.

Last night was another matter. We definitely got a freeze. The birdbath, which is on the west side of the house, is frozen solid. Also there is visible damage to leaves of some plants. On the north side of the house, there’s about a 1/4-inch shell of ice on the water in the rain catchment tubs. And yet, on the sunny south side of the house, there is not a trace of ice in the water.

The concept of microclimate is hugely useful and widely applicable not only in the tangible physical world, but also in our “invisible structures” — the intangible aspects of the human-built environment: social groups, workplaces, congregations, nonprofit organizations, neighborhoods, and so on.