I am not too sure about in everyone else’s neck of the woods, but here in Missouri Spring has been very strange. We have gone from temps in the teens to temps at almost 80 degrees within a matter a few days. Ostara is always a draw here but normally we only worry about whether it will be a nice warm day or windy, chilly and rainy. This year we had a snow storm on Easter. I was headed to my Aunts house for a family dinner and there were cars in the ditches and wrecks everywhere. Since we get a mix of all the seasons, people in Missouri didn’t seem to master driving in ANY of them so give us a little snow, ice or rain and it’s Armageddon on the roads.
This past Sunday we awoke to a little layer of snow on everything and yet as I write this on a Tuesday evening it is sunny and 65 degrees. As confused as we humans are, I know things in nature are even more confused. Normally we will see our first hummingbirds in April. I put out and filled up my feeders last week so that I didn’t miss them. Now I worry about them freezing and breaking. I am seeing plants peeking through the Earth by a few inches, but they seem to have halted their growth. They saw that 70 degree day a few weeks ago and decided to spring from the Earth to get the big APRIL FOOLS thrown at them and now they regret their decision. I am fortunate the freezing temps haven’t harmed what is already up. It all seems like a big tease of the warm weather to come. It’s a state of flux that is driving me crazy and yet I think that it may be a sort of blessing. I sit here in this damned walking boot counting my weeks down until I can pull it off and be free of it. It will be much easier to walk the fields and woods searching out my wild flowers for this year’s harvest without it weighing me down and throwing me off balance. The cold has Mother Nature halted and yet I am still healing. Maybe it’s giving my recovery a head start on the season. I am absolutely itching to plant something. I went out and purchased a good potting soil and some organic annual seeds at Natures Pantry a few weeks ago. The first nice day I had dug out all my pots from the garage and filled them with dirt. Then I sadly stacked them by inside of the garage door realizing it was still too early to plant anything in them. My son and I planted our first small garden of the year right before I re-fractured my foot a few weeks ago. It was just cold crops but we enjoyed every second of it. We put in some spinach, mixed greens, radishes and carrots back behind the chicken coop. Every thing seems to grow really well there and they would be out of the way. That is where we keep our strawberry patch and normally we plant the corn every year. Last weekend I hobbled around on this walking boot and with my daughters help we got our big garden fenced off…..well mostly. Of course, I was about 5 food short of fence so I need to go get more before I till it up. I have a 3 year old, going on 6 month old, boxer that makes it her mission to destroy all plant life that is not thoroughly protected by fencing. The dogs never bothered that piece of the yard until I fenced it off. Now they act like it was created for their play yard. They will be heart broken when I finish the fence here soon. I am fully intending on wrapping this boot with a trash bag and duck tape and tilling my garden as soon as it is nice enough. Well, that and when I have the fence finished. The dogs would love to get muddy in a freshly tilled garden. I am thinking I will wait until the end of May to get in my vegetable garden. The weather is just too unpredictable until then. I am going to be adding more herbs and wildflowers to our own yard this year. I am hoping to add more and more every year so that eventually I can supply ALL of Cynnamon Charmed’s herbs off my OWN land but that is a big goal. Right now we do grow several of them but others come off of the land that I can harvest from in our area such as local parks, wooded areas and the Lake of Ozarks, etc. Just like last year, stay tuned to the Charmed Daily Blog this summer while we bring you pictures of our wild crafting journeys, show you exactly where this year’s herbs and flowers are coming from and the process we take through the season to bring them directly to you. We will also continue sharing different ideas on how you may choose to use these pieces of nature in your own daily living.
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Keri Nichol
Founder, Artist, Herbalist, and Writer Archives
August 2018
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