0:00
And there's so many ways to garden. So I just wanted to speak a little bit to this idea of, like, being born a green thumb. Or, you know, I learned this from my, you know, my mom, my grandma. That was not my situation. There was no one in my life that inspired gardening in me. It was something I was just called to do in that very first garden. And so anyone can be a gardener. And through everything, gardening and nature is what kept me grounded. And I want to say to other people with chronic illness, if you have done all of that and you still have not gotten well or achieved remission, you are not a failure and You have done nothing wrong.
0:51
Hello and welcome to the lettuce loves you, the Podcast where we explore belonging and nourishment through the perceptions of body, Earth and community, I'm your host, Jeanell Innerarity. for over 25 years, I've been helping people come home to themselves through somatic or body based practice, dream work, nature, connection and relationship with self, other, humans and spirit. I want to get beyond belonging as a buzzword and beyond nourishment as a fitness strategy, and get to the heart of what it really means to belong and what it really means to be nourished. Each of my guests has a unique take on these ideas, and I hope you'll take home a greater sense of what belonging and nourishment mean to you. I hope you benefit from listening to the lettuce loves you, and if you do, it would mean a great deal to me, if you would like rate and share the show so that more people can discover it and get the same benefit. Now let's dive into today's episode.
2:49
Welcome. So my guest today is Jolie Ann Flora, the gardening goddess. She's a queer, disabled, avid gardener, green witch, multimedia artist and dog mom. She's the author of The Gardening Goddess' Guide to Edible Gardening in Portland, and she's medically retired from her career as a writer, horticultural therapist, gardening educator, garden designer and floral designer. Flora loves spreading the healing power of nature and the joy to be found in living in a magical seasonal life. And I'm so pleased to have Jolie here today. I met Jolie when I was training as a horticultural therapist, and she was teaching at Portland Community College while I was doing food systems education work there, and she really took me under her wing. She really supported me in my own growth and process and was such a remarkable educator, I got to take some of her classes for the general public on gardening and her wealth of knowledge is incredible. And she's also such an incredible advocate for people of any ability, any capacity, to just get connected to nature, to get connected to their garden. I have watched Jolie, in her health journey, continue to garden through some really, really major challenges, and I'm really grateful to be able to have this conversation. So Jolie, welcome. Thank you for being here. Thank
4:34
you so much. Jeanell, so I would like
4:37
to know right now how you are connecting with gardening and nature at this point in your journey, and how you've gotten to the place that you are right now,
4:53
that's a great question, so I'll share a little bit about how I'm connecting with gardening. In nature right now and then, you might need to remind me that the second part of the question was, how did I get here? So right now I'm laying in my bed at home as someone who experiences complex chronic illness and chronic pain. I spend a lot of time in my bed and the view from my bed I create is lovely with year round interest that I can engage in even if I am not outside. So I am very blessed in my current housing situation to have a big sliding glass door right in front of my bed that looks out onto a private courtyard and on the little private courtyard. Right now I'm looking at conifers, little, small conifer trees, Evergreen grasses, evergreen shrubs, Evergreen ferns, some fall blooming pansies, a beautiful winter cyclamen and my tender fuchsia hanging basket. And plants are still blooming. They still have blooming flowers on them, and the hummingbird, she visits them at least once every day, and I get to watch her. So this is one way that I connect with nature. Is laying in my bed looking at this beautiful view. Another way that I connect with nature these days is most days I'm able to get out in the morning for a walk with my dog, and thank goodness for my dog for getting me up out of bed and outside, even when that feels challenging. And so when we go on our little walks, I try to walk off of the concrete and walk around on Earth and dirt. And I'm I'm very lucky that here and this complex, there's a bank of really large mature conifer trees, and we walk under those every day, and I touch their bark, and I touch their branches, and I watch them blow their branches, blow in the wind. And that's one of the other ways I connect with nature. And these days, my gardening, I was going to say limited, but it's not limited. It's an adaptation. So I'm going to rephrase that my gardening today is adapted to my physical space that I live in, and my physical abilities today. And so it's container gardening, so I don't have a massive in ground garden for the first time in many, many years, but I garden in containers. So what I'm looking at right now is about two dozen containers off this little courtyard off my bedroom, then I have a larger courtyard in the back that also has containers. So I mentioned the ornamental plants I grow, but I also, this summer, grew some vegetables and herbs and containers as well. So that's how I'm connecting with gardening and and nature these days.
8:17
Thank you. Did you want to say something else you looked like
8:19
you...Yeah, I was thinking, so, how did I get here? Well, that's a long answer in a in a really big story, but I, you know, I, I had my home for three years, I lived in my own home that as a first time, first generation homeowner, and I had, uh, just shy of a quarter of an acre, and I was building my, my dream garden there, which Jeanell had been over to and had seen, and he watered for me when I was out of town.
8:55
Incredible garden, incredible and
8:59
it was, you know, just an amazing process to get to build that garden from scratch. And then we had to sell our home a year ago due to divorce. And so now I live, I have a pretty meager income as a disabled person living on disability income. And so I'm very, very fortunate to have a wonderful housemate who owns this place, and to have this, these little courtyards, to be able to garden in. And it really, you know, not being able to have a really huge garden that's in ground is is sad. There's been a huge grief process and losing that, but getting here to this place, it's almost as if having this smaller container garden. I'll tell you, what it's done for me is I spent so much time this spring and summer laying in my zero gravity chair on the courtyard, looking at the blue sky and the trees, wow, and not trying to tend a quarter of an acre. So it really it's a blessing in disguise, being in this place and getting to just have this transitional space and time in my life. So that's a little bit about how, you know, I got here to this place.
10:37
Thank you, and I really want to emphasize that, because I did see your incredible garden, both at the beginning when you kind of first moved in and were just starting, and then when you moved out, and what you had done in three years was just extraordinary. And I think that people get attached to this idea of grand gestures in gardening, or that it has to be something really big. And we know in the horticultural therapy research, like you said, just looking out the window at a tree or a plant has profound healing implications, like measurable results and this ability to be surrounded by your container garden and to look at the sky and rest and be out there with your sweet puppy who is with us today on the call. And that you use the word adaptive is such a perfect word that that is such a beautiful way to garden, and that somebody could just get a little pot of herbs in their window sill and be a gardener and have real healing benefits from that. So I'm really appreciating the way that you're sharing that.
11:51
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there's so much you're right. As gardeners we, you know, we think big.
12:01
Seed catalogs,
12:03
right? They already came in the mail. Somehow. They found me at my new address without me updating my address. They're here. They do. They follow you, yeah, um, yeah. And that big, big garden was my dream, after being an urban garden for so many years and having small gardens, which were wonderful gardens as well. And you know, I went from being a horticultural therapist like working and rehabilitation, physical rehabilitation, with people teaching them how to garden in a container following a stroke or hip replacement surgery, are things. And I went from being that horticultural therapist to transferring all those skills to myself and what what I need now, at this point in my life, physically what I'm able to do because I'm not, you know, when we have that big garden, it was like every day, every week, every month of the year, we were, I mean, how many, you know, Chip drops, arborist free chip drops did we get? How many giant dump trucks of compost did we get and plantings and things, and there's no way I could do a garden like that at this point in my life, with my physical abilities now. So yes, what I can do in containers and not make myself feel physically worse while still getting the benefit. It's really been such a lesson in self compassion and radical acceptance of where I'm at and enjoying, like, enjoying what I have today one day at a time.
13:50
Yeah, that's the gift of gardening. I wonder if, I don't know if you want to go there, but I wonder if you want to share a little bit about your health journey, and part of the reason I'm asking that is that I know for myself having somewhat obscure chronic illnesses that are not well understood by the medical community. I'm always very interested in sharing in case there's anyone listening who has that and has an aha moment and goes, Oh, wow, now I have something more to work with. Now I know what questions to ask or where to go, so you may not want to share anything, but I want to open that in case you do,
14:33
yeah, I think you know, it's a really big part of my life right now to help support other people with complex chronic illness and chronic pain in in community, like how we support each other. And so I'm happy to share a little bit about my journey. Um, you know, I have a long history of of not being well growing up from a very young. Age. But basically what happened was I was in my horticultural therapy internship, working in the hospital system, and then also working in skilled nursing and long term care and assisted living. It was doing all of that work when I was diagnosed with my autoimmune disease, and that was in 2016 and I became very sick and had to come I completed my internship and then launched myself into I am going to fix this with every fiber of my body and my can do attitude. I am going to fix this. I am going to research every possible thing I'm going to do, every single treatment I'm going to be on, every single diet. I'm going to do every and I spent seven years of my life doing that, um, and I want to say to other people with chronic illness, if you have done all of that and you still have not gotten well or achieved remission, you are not a failure, and you have done Nothing wrong. And I wish someone would have told me that, because I felt like such a failure, that I had done everything that I was supposed to do, and my autoimmune disease did not go away, and in fact, I kept getting more and more diagnoes the deeper I went down the rabbit hole with the treatments and the specialists and things and so, yeah, and through everything, gardening and nature is what kept me grounded. So during that period of time when I finished my horticultural therapy internship, and I was very, very sick, and I was in the early stages of treatment for my autoimmune disease. I couldn't garden very much then, and I spent a lot of time just sitting in a chair in the garden, under the trees, and looking at everything and so appreciating that I had built that garden already, and I could just enjoy looking at it. It was quite a mature garden at that point, and it was beautiful and lovely. And as I journeyed on. So, like you know, kind of what happened was that in in so, in 2022, one of my best friends, was diagnosed with ALS, and she went down fast and hard, and she died within seven months of her diagnosis of ALS. And when that happened, at the time of her death, I said, Life is short like and life is also long. Life Long and life is short, I want to do what is most important to me, and spend my tim--like I remember very consciously, I was driving through the coastal mountains out to the beach after Kristen had died, and I was looking at all the trees and like I just want to be in nature all the time. This is the most healing thing for me. And when we got home from that trip, I went down with yet another viral infection that I get chronically, and I was bed bound for about six months. And ultimately, I was diagnosed with myalgic encephalomyelitis, which is of not understood, neurological disease that causes Great fatigue and cognitive malfunction, cognitive dysfunction and dysautonomia, dysregulation of my nervous system, and a whole host of other things. And myalgic encephalomyelitis, also known as me or MECFS, is there's no specialist that owns our illness, so there's no specialist to be seen. Most neurologists don't even know about this illness, and if they do, they don't treat it. And this is yet another illness that I have that a specialist doesn't own or treat, and there's no treatment for it. With my autoimmune disease, I do have a specialist, and there are treatments, but there's no cure. And so really the thing that has helped me most on my journey with having me is connecting with other people in the community, with me and just we educate and support each other, and there's a lot of advocacy that happens within our community. And so I just want to say to folks, if you have one of these illnesses, so this is very misunderstood or not understood at all, and there's no treatment for and there's no specialist for you're not alone. You know, there are millions of people in the world living with chronic illness. There are millions of us out there, and I have really found that I can have joy, comfort and peace in my life, no matter what is happening with my body and my illnesses and my symptoms. I spent so long in my life trying to treat my illnesses so that I'd be better and I would go back to the life I used to have. I put my life on hold, and now I'm at the point where, like, I'm never going to go back to what my life was. My life is this now, and there's nothing wrong with a lot wrong with this. I just find ways to live today, and I'm really stinking happy today, happier than I've been in a really long time, because I just came to a place of acceptance about all of these things. It doesn't mean I've given up treatment. You know, I still try treatments. I take really good care of myself, but I don't I outcomes and expectations to taking really good care of myself today. So you're not alone folks out there with these weird illnesses.
21:37
Yeah, and that's huge, the grieving of the old life and the acceptance of how things are just right now. This is how they are. They might change. They might not change. They could change in one direction or the other, but they are how they are, and what, what are you going to put in your garden anyway? Right?
21:59
Yeah, exactly.
22:00
So through all of that. Oh, I do want to say you did share with me a resource about M.E., the condition that you have, and I will put that in the show notes for people who have any kind of light bulb moment about that. I will share that that link, and people can look for that in the show notes.
22:20
Oh, thank you so much. Yeah, that especially the information that's on the Centers for Disease Control. Information on there about me was written by people within the me community that advocated hard core with the CDC to get that information updated, and that's how I was able to be diagnosed was because of that information. So thank you for sharing that out.
22:46
Yeah, absolutely I hope it helps some people, and through all of that, you wrote a book I
22:52
did,
22:54
and I have it here in front of me. It is absolutely gorgeous. It is called The Gardening Goddess' Guide to Edible Gardening in Portland, but it's applicable to lots of places, not just Portland, and it's under your former name, Jolie Ann Donahue, but it's now Jolie Ann Flora. So if people are looking for the book, they should look for Donahue, and I'll post links to the book where people can get it, but tell me a little bit about the inspiration for this beautiful book. it's a hands on workbook, and it's also a reference manual, and just kind of all the things that you would want a gardening book to be. So where did this come from, and what was your process in creating it?
23:41
Yeah, that was a true labor of love, and boy, do I feel grateful that it was published before I got really sick. So I am so glad that that book that is my child was birthed out into the world. So I have been gardening for I've been gardening for 30 years. To think about that for a minute, about 30 years I've been gardening. I've been teaching gardening classes since 2008 so I've been teaching gardening for a long time, both hands on gardening classes in gardening and gardens and in classrooms. And through all of that, I decided to write the book. And I decided to write the book specific to Portland, because while the book is very applicable to the entire Willamette Valley in Oregon. I haven't gardened in the entire Willamette Valley of Oregon, so I really wanted to speak to my own experience and expertise, and my students that prior to the pandemic were from Portland metro area. Now that changed with the pandemic and my classes moving on to video platform, I started getting students from all over Oregon, all up and down the Willamette Valley, and even some students from outside of the state of Oregon. So that's what, you know, the the book was really based on the classes, the feedback from the classes, what was most helpful for my students. And I started writing the book in 2015
25:27
and I finished it in
25:30
2020 and it was published in 2021 so it really did go through a lot of revisions. And, you know, I wanted it to be, people asked me why I didn't make an electronic version of the book or an audio version of the book. And I really wanted it to be a book that you could take in the garden with you, physically in your hands to look at things, check off things, that you could take it with you to the nursery, when for the shopping list that are in there. And I wanted it to be really to cover the whole gardening year and all of the edible crops, both vegetables and herbs, in there, and how to start your garden and get it going, and how to maintain it. So really, the book covers a lot of different topics that I think are just really helpful for all levels of gardeners. Because as I was teaching through the years, my students in the beginning were primarily middle aged and older, and then my student population shifted to people moving to Portland from other parts of the country, so and gardening in other parts of the country. But really, you're going to be most successful as a gardener when you understand the climate, the weather, the seasons for where you're gardening, and then my student population shifted to the millennial gardeners and the younger folks, so just adapting the book to all of those audiences, it was really fun to write that book. It was a great experience.
27:22
I would say that even though it's regionally specific and climatically specific to the Portland and Willamette Valley area, if someone's learning about gardening and learning about the process of gardening, I really see your book as applicable anywhere from that perspective, and people can adjust the seasonal information or some of the specific climactic information for where they are. But actually learning about how to think about gardening and how to plan a garden and what to look for, I think this book is incredibly valuable wherever somebody is, and then they need to use locally seasonal things if they're in a different region. So I do want to support the universality of what you've put together here, as well as the location specific aspect.
28:13
And one of the things that I'm curious about is
28:18
whether you've noticed that the seasonality has changed with climate change and as the weather has changed, what you observed over decades of gardening is that different now?
28:29
Yes, and it's so interesting in context to the book, because what I was teaching in 2008 for what our average first and last frost dates were shifted by an entire month at the time that I was writing the book. Wow. So historically here in the in Portland metro area, our average last frost in the spring would be April 15. That's what I was teaching in the beginning days. And then when I was writing the book, it had shifted to our average last frost being March 15 was shifted by an entire month. Wow. And then when I actually published the book in 2021 we have had no consistency and our frost dates at all, so it has gone completely wonkadoodle. Now I say, and I'm going to like if we think about average first frost in the fall, like we just now got our first frost at the beginning of December versus October 15. It was that late this year, and in the book, I'm talking about October 15, but often I say to people like October 15 to December. Number 31st because we really never know anymore. And then another thing that happened, I published the book in 2021, and 2021, June was when we had that epic heat dome where it was 118 degrees at my home in the West Side suburbs of Portland, like, Oh, my goodness, that was something we had never experienced in Portland before. So I think it's really interesting that, like, the moment my book hit the shelves, all of the climatic things was talking about were, I mean, completely outdated as of that moment. So, you know, we have these ballpark ranges for average first frost and average last frost, but we never really know anymore. So gardening, we've had to be so much more adaptable about what we're prepared to do as vegetable gardeners in the spring to protect our tender summer veggies. Yeah, it's it's changed so much, and it continues to change. It's very, very unpredictable at this point.
31:17
Yeah, I'm just noticing the link between starting out talking about human adaptation to be able to garden, and now we're talking about adapting for the plants, and that they are linked, maybe in ways that I haven't thought about before, because adaptation is the is the key. And you know, I was here in that 118 degree heat wave, and I was tired, and I talked to other people who felt this too. I was tired for about two weeks after that, because it was such an extreme. And it's not like it built up to 118 it's just like all of a sudden it was 118 degrees and then, and then it wasn't and there was no preparation in in the body for that. And I'm imagining the plants also felt that way, the ones that lived, and I kept the seeds from the ones that lived. I have this incredible herb called sculpit it that I really this traditional Italian herb. I love it. It went through that 118 degree heat wave and thrived, and I still have it, and it's still thriving. And you can bet I kept the seeds from that plant, and I'm replanting it. And so it really is the how do you adapt yourself to the garden and the garden to what's happening in response to human change as well?
32:40
Yeah, and I was thinking as well when I was talking about unpredictability and adaptations, I'm like, sounds a lot like my body a lot. And you know that same year that we had that heat dome, I think the so that was 2021 the next spring, 2022, we were out covering up our tomatoes and cucumbers at the beginning of June, at the same time as the as the heat dome the year before, because temperatures were dipping into the upper 40s overnight at that point. And I agree with you about, you know, the herb and collecting the seeds of that special herb that survived that hot weather at that summer, the strip next to our driveway that had hardly any it had been grass, and we had covered it with cardboard, and it's where we had the wood chip drops at. So we had taken all the wood chips off, so there was a thin layer of wood chips left from when we had taken everything off to the rest of the garden, and we had scattered seeds for native wildflowers in there, and then planted in between those winter squash and pumpkins and the rain watered it in while it was still raining in May, and then I never gave a drop of supplemental water again to that bed, and even in the heat dome, I produced more pumpkins and winter squash than I ever had in This bed that I absolutely tended to not at all that had a very thin layer of soil, no nutrients added. And so I'm like, I will always grow those types of veggies. I mean, you don't get as high of a yield from winter squash and pumpkins as you do summer squash, but they needed nothing from me, and they got very little powdery mildew, which was interesting. So, yeah, and I, you know, in talking about these, like, what we're willing to do for our plants as gardeners, this is something that my gardening cohort and I talk about a. Lot like, are we willing to take plants in and out of a greenhouse every day until they're hardened off to be in the garden and it's the ideal temperatures, and then are we willing to cover, you know, a low tunnel, or frost blankets or something? Do we actually get a bigger yield by putting things out sooner when it's colder and they're under all this protection, and I feel like the consensus has been in recent years, and especially as the folks in my gardening cohort have been gardening for more years, so they have more gardening maturity and experience at this point, like we want less work in the garden and plants that need a lot less coddling. So am I really getting earlier tomato harvest by putting out my tomato plants under cover at the end of April, versus putting out my plants on June 1, when I don't have to coddle them typically for that one year. Yeah, that one year, which was ridiculous, and we were so unprepared for that one year in our garden, it was pots and pans. We were taking and putting and big mixing bowls plants during the night, and then having to take them off. So, you know, I want plants that are going to show that they're adapting and evolving, and they're not, plants are not being given very much time to evolve and adapt. This has been very sudden. So usually we're looking at over hundreds of 1000s of years plants have adapted to changing conditions, and these conditions are changing now every single year. So I really look at in both the edible and the ornamental garden, what are those plants?
36:52
Yeah, and following that adaptability theme, I'm thinking about my sort of love affair with Himalayan Blackberry, which is highly adaptable when it's 117 degrees and I haven't watered anything, and it's producing fruit pollinator space. It's also taking over everything and eating our shed and eating other plants and poking holes in my clothes. But it's interesting to observe that, and so I ask every guest who comes on this podcast what their favorite herb is, and you shared dandelion, which I think of as the ultimate adaptive plant and herb. So tell me what you love about dandelion.
37:31
Yeah, and I mean, have to ask me what my favorite herb is. It's impossible, if any of my students will tell you during any given class, I say about 20 different plants are my favorite during the class. So, so hard to pick a favorite, and I think the reason I picked dandelion is because what you were saying about the Himalayan blackberries. It needs no cultivation. It is so great at transplanting itself places in the garden. And I utilize so many plants in my own medicine for my for my well being, both spiritually and physically and emotionally. And one of them is dandelion I drink dandelion tea every single day. And what I love about it in the garden is it's an early bloomer, so it helps the pollinators, and every part of the plant is edible. So I love those little flowers in the spring, I pluck them, the little petals off, and put them on egg dishes and in salads early on in the spring, and the leaves are really great in the spring to eat. Once the plant's more mature, they're fuzzy and a little bit thorny on there and not great, but they're wonderful as a salad, green or sauteed like like you would spinach or kale or something. You can steep them into a tea. The root is used a lot in tea, but the root is also edible, and so it can be chopped up and used in soups or roasted as a veggie, like you would a carrot or a parsnip. So you can literally use every part of it is edible and medicinal, and I just love what it brings to the garden. So here in the Pacific Northwest, in Portland metro area, specifically, we experience a lot of compacted clay soil. That's the nature of most of the soil here in our area. And so what that long tap root does on that dandelion plant is it aerates the soil. It help breaks up the soil, and this is what gardeners are looking for in their garden, and the dandelion is doing that for them, and then it's such a powerhouse of nutrients, not only for us as an edible plant, but it's drawing those nutrients up from the. Soil, and then is that root and the leaves, and the plant just decomposes. It brings that all back into the soil. So it's such a wonderful plant. And I love its tenacity, because it will be growing up in the cracks of concrete. You cannot eliminate this plant. I mean, it makes all of these old white guy gardeners who want their perfect lawn, it just keeps sprouting up no matter what. And I just love that about about the dandelion. And I've had, you know, I've been like in which I'm sure you and listeners can relate to like being in this our garden is the safe zone, and all around us the herbicides are being sprayed on the dandelions and on everything else. But in my garden, I'm like, go for it. It's so it's such, and dandelion is viewed as a weed, right? And I love the conversation around what is a weed. So weed is basically a plant growing somewhere that someone doesn't want it growing because what is one person's weed is another person's food and medicine, right? So I don't think there's anything you know bad about dandelions the way other people you know view them, and obviously not because it's your favorite as well.
41:27
Yeah, I love it so much. And the weed conversation is so interesting because, oh, I actually got censored for using the word weed on a promotional page too much. I was a forbidden word.
41:40
But it's, it's
41:44
such an incredible plant. I made dandelion wine for the first time this year with the flowers. I've wanted to do that for 20 years, and I'm so pleased with it, and it's still aging, but it's absolutely beautiful. But I use it for all the things you just described, and so much more. It's just, we could talk about it for hours. There are so many things that this incredible plant offers, and I still notice that even though I allow it to grow wherever it wants, I have actually purchased French culinary dandelion seeds. I have put dandelion seeds in my yard, which is blasphemy to the pristine lawn gardener. And yet, when it shows up in a place that I have the idea that it's supposed to look a certain way, like in the little front patch in my in my yard, or something like that, I have, I feel, Oh, I have to get it out. Oh, it's a weed. And it's so interesting to watch how deep that conditioning goes, where I know all of the things that it's doing for the soil and the pollinators, and all of the medicine that it provides, and everything that I love about it and everything that I want about it, and yet I still have this. I think of it almost like as a glitch in my brain, or this, like deep social conditioning that goes, Oh, but there's a weed there, and I didn't put it there, and I have to get the dandelion out because it looks like I don't take care of my garden. And that fascinates me, and also is humbling, and gives me compassion for how hard it really is to change the social conditioning that goes so deep and is actually fairly recent. I mean, dandelion has been so respected in herbal medicine for such a long time that this idea that it's invading our perfect lawns is actually very new in the course of human history and our relationship with this plant.
43:35
Yeah, it sure is right. Because it came here with immigrants. It came here as a medicinal plant with European immigrants to North America, it was very purposeful that it was brought here and it was planted here, and then it just did a really good job populating itself everywhere.
43:56
But it's not invasive. That's one of the things I think is incredible. So the term for listeners, the term invasive in garden speak is a plant that is displacing native plants or indigenous plants, that it has an ecologically destructive--we think--idea: we can go down a whole 'nother rabbit hole of what is really invasive and what's happening in climate change, and how the invasive plants might actually be helping us in certain ways, and there's a whole, whole 'nother episode in that--but that's the term invasive, and dandelion doesn't do that. It doesn't displace anything else. It's just just a friendly helper that shows up, even when we put concrete everywhere and spray it with pesticides [herbicides], it's just like, No, I'm here to help. Yep,
44:41
resilient. AF, like me,
44:47
absolutely.
44:49
So we've covered a lot of ground. Is there anything that's still on your mind that you would like
44:56
listeners to consider? Yeah.
44:59
Hmm, I wanted to talk a little bit about my journey to gardening, like we talked about, like, how I got to where I am now, but there was this big jump of, like, my garden for 30 years. So I wanted to talk about that a little bit and that I did not grow up in a gardening family. It was not. I was born in 1970 and I grew up in the northern California Bay Area, and I grew up in the suburbs, and people were not gardening anywhere. And my family, my mom grew up on a farm in Nebraska with nine kids. She didn't have nine kids, nine siblings, one of nine siblings, and they were very poor and didn't have indoor plumbing until the 1960s and I don't know a lot about my father's family, but he grew up in Appalachia, North Carolina and Tennessee. That's where the paternal side of the family is from. So when they got married, they were solidly we're going to be middle class and moving on up out of this, you know, generational poverty and so gardening was not a thing. What a thing was was a perfectly manicured, manicured green lawn, right? With lots of fertilizer, pesticide, herbicide, and maybe a tree or some foundational shrubs. That's, that's what I grew up with, not gardening because gardening was like, You're growing food to eat because you're poor, because you're working class, because you're a farmer. So when I started gardening, I started gardening in 1995 and San Francisco, I was 25 years old. No one that I knew was gardening, right? We were all going out to bars and nightclubs and partying and having full time jobs and not no one was gardening. And I'm I moved into this place, and there was an existing little postage stamp garden that was very overgrown, climbing roses, there were calla lilies, big, giant Jade plants, cactus, sage, it was lovely. And an entire wall, for those of you who don't live in mild climates, pelagonium, the zonal and Ivy geraniums were climbing up the entire wall. They were seven foot tall. We live here in Portland. It's a little potted plant we grow in the summer because it's tender to cold this higher wall of beautiful red blooms. And so no one I knew was gardening, so I just was self taught. I started going out to the nursery. I got a bunch of books at the second hand store, and the very first plants I grew were herbs, and I got herbs and I put them in containers, and I grew a couple vegetables, and it went from there. And so what I have seen over like this long history of gardening, is that gardening has become a pastime for everyone, not just older folks. It's become a pastime for lots and lots of people. And we saw during the pandemic, the first year, we saw something like 1 million new gardeners were added in the United States in that year. And I hope that we have kept all of those gardeners, because this is such a wonderful and there's so many ways to garden. So I just wanted to speak a little bit to this idea of, like, being born a green thumb. Or, you know, I learned this from my, you know, my mom, my grandma. That was not my situation. There was no one in my life that inspired gardening in me. It was something I was just called to do in that very first garden. And so anyone can be a gardener. Being a green thumb is learned. Gardening is a learnable skill that we learn through, we learn through practice, through experience. I don't think we come to this being born a gardener like we learn it through trial and error and practice, and that's what I wanted to offer to the gardeners, that if your crops fail or you have disease on your plants, you can't get a certain type of plant to grow for you, Keep trying. I'm right there with you. I kill plants every single year. It's not like you become this expert gardener, and that never happens anymore. There is so much we cannot control about gardening. Plants are living, breathing beings that we have no control over. We can provide input with fertilizer, water, sunlight, compost, containers, what, you know, what, Putting them in the right in the right places, quote, unquote, right places in the garden. But they're going to do what they want to do. So I just want to offer, like, don't give up. Keep trying. Any way that you garden is valid and worthy and plants are going to do what plants want to do.
50:31
Somebody at a plant nursery told me once you're not a true gardener until you've killed 1000 plants.
50:35
Oh, my goodness, made me feel better.
50:38
I think I was,
50:39
I had said something to him about the number of plants that I was buying, that I had already killed, and I was being really hard on myself, but I really want, I don't remember what the plant was, but I really wanted this plant. And he was like, Oh, you're not a true gardener, so you've killed 1000 plants. And it's sort of sad to think about in that way, in our consumerist attitude in some ways, towards like buying plants and keep, keeping trying to make the wrong plant grow in the wrong place, right? There's that sort of phrase, right plant right place. But he was referring to the learning process of attuning and knowing what the right plant in the right place is, and also just trusting the wisdom of the garden itself. And, oh, I didn't know you wanted to be there. Well, you sent a runner over there, you put some seeds there. Something just popped up, and I didn't put it there. And I have no idea where it came from or how it got there, but it seems happy there have a big Lupin plant--regionally, I grew up in Texas with lupine in Texas--but, but I have one of those in a big open space, and I didn't put it there, and it takes up a lot of space, but it's a nitrogen fixer, and it attracts pollinators, and I just left it in the middle of this bed that I'm building. And so I love that process of attuning to the conversation between myself and the garden itself, and what does the garden want? And what do I want? And how do we negotiate in a certain way? Because I'm trying to create something, but it's creating something and where, where is the the give and take and the push and pull and the resonance and relationship there. So that's what I hear in what you're describing.
52:28
Yeah, and really like what you were saying, attuning to the plants. There's so much that we can do that we're trying to force things to happen, like remove this. I'm going to cut these branches off. I'm going to I I-I-I-I-I when really I, I think it's like, just the older that I get, I feel like I'm I'm a steward, a steward of of land, and I'm a steward of these plants, and I'm in relationship with them. I'm not dominating them. And so just listen, like, taking time to listen in the garden about what the garden wants is a really meaningful practice. Like, that's just slowing down, because as garden gardeners, we can become so busy with all of our projects that do that and that we love doing, but that need to be done, like taking that time to slow down, just to attune to the natural space. And that's what I mean about a magical, seasonal life. Partially is like, the more we slow down and spend time, and Poppy is just snoring away next to me right now. If I don't know if you all can hear,
53:44
I can't hear this. That's Jolie's dog. For listeners, very, very cute little puppy.
53:50
She's really relaxed by this conversation, and we help keep our nervous systems regulated together. She and I so and that made me lose my train of thought, slowing down to the rhythm of the seasons, just spending that time to like, where's the moon at? You know, where are we at in that moon cycle? Where are we at in this the spring, summer, fall, what's going on with the daylight hours? What's to me, that's what the seasonal life means. And there's so much magic in that, and that's the slowing down. And for me, I was always very interested in that, but I was so busy with my business and working multiple jobs and building big, huge gardens and having a social life and a marriage, and all the things that you know, being medically retired and having a much slower paced life has really enabled me to connect so much deeper with the seasons and the earth and the rhythms of the cycles of the moon and the seasons and the. So, yeah,
55:03
yeah, boy that really speaks to the way that our societal rhythms are so disconnected from those seasons and those rhythms. And it makes me think of Masanobu Fukuoka and his journey. I cannot think of the name of his very famous book off the top of my head right now. I don't know if it's top of mind for you, but it okay. But his his journey that he describes in in his book is that he was working in mainstream science labs, and really kind of had what we would colloquially call a nervous breakdown, and moved back to the family farm and decided to go in the direction of allowing the orchards to go completely wild. And then he realized that there was this relationship with the trees, that if he just let them go completely wild, they actually became a tangled mess, and they became less productive. And these trees had co-evolved with humans in relationship for very long time. And he started to explore how he could be very minimalist in the way that he tended to the plants. So just making, just a cut here, a cut there, by observing and being in relationship and allowing the garden to thrive and not trying to control it. And he says Westerners have too many digging tools and not enough cutting tools that that our gardening culture in the West is very about disturbing the soil and turning up the soil. And he says, You really need to more just kind of like do little cuts and trims here and there and let the soil build. And so your story there reminded me of that wisdom.
56:54
I love that.
56:57
And one of those many soil disturbing tools is a dandelion removal tool, like plants in the garden, have an actual, have actual tools specifically only for them, for their destruction.
57:12
Yeah, wow, that's so true. Yeah,
57:18
yeah. I do find that tool useful if I want to harvest the dandelion roots, though, if I want to make some tea or something like that with the with the dandelion roots, because they go so deep. But I know people say when they're making tea, they like to harvest the whole root and keep it intact. And I actually like to let little pieces break off, because then I know the plant will come back from that little piece. Yeah. Well, it has been so lovely to speak with you, and I'm so appreciative. I know that that you really have to budget your energy each day, and I really appreciate your taking the time to meet with me and to share your wisdom and experience with listeners. And I do want to tell people that they can get your book, which, again, is called the gardening goddess, Guide to edible gardening in Portland, and it's Jolie Ann Donohue is the name on the book, but your name is Jolie Flora, and the best place to get it, so that you get the most money from it, is bookshop.org and I'll post a link to that on the show notes. And then, if you're local to Portland, Powell's books, independent bookstore is great bookshop.org also supports independent bookstores. And then, if you're outside of Portland, good old Amazon also is a great place to get Jolie's book. And is there anything else that you would like to share with people before we wrap up?
58:51
Well, we didn't talk about food, but perhaps another episode. I
58:56
mean, I'll talk about it, if you have the energy for it. I didn't mean to cut things short. I'm always down to talk about food.
59:04
I know I was like the intersection of food. Jeanell, yeah, yeah.
59:11
I'll, I'll leave that up to you. Should we? Should we make that a trailer for a future episode? Or do you want to talk about it?
59:16
Now, let's make that a trailer for a future episode. All right, Jolie comes back for food. Coming
59:24
soon: Jolie comes back for food. I love it. Oh, because you taught me about Bierler's broth,
59:31
I put dandelions in Bieler's broth. So that's a that's a teaser for people to come
59:37
back and learn more about that. Yeah.
59:39
Well, thank you so much for having me today. It was great to be here and talk with you. Likewise, thank you so much,
59:57
Jolie. Thanks for listening to The Lettuce Loves You. Don't forget to like, review and share this podcast so more people can benefit. Your one small action helps us get these reflections on belonging and nourishment to the people who need to hear them. And I appreciate it more than you know. I have more free offerings at Eco that's eco spiritual education. http://www.EcoSpiritualEducation.com/freestuff. This podcast provides educational information about traditional edible and medicinal uses of plants. This should never be construed as medical or dietary advice. Always consult with a medical provider before making dietary changes. The music you've been listening to is Tu BiShvat by Batya Levine, used with permission and a lot of gratitude. Until next time, remember the lettuce loves you, You belong to the earth, and Life really does Want to nourish You.
