I want to share with you about some of the Flower Essences you are gravitating to right now but first…. I thought I’d do a quick check in about….masks. How are you feeling about them? Hmmmmmm…..me too!

What style do you prefer? The ones I have sewn are rather plain in design. To learn how to sew them, I found a funny little video in which a man watched a woman sewing a mask. I wasn’t quite sure why the man was there. The woman did all the explaining and the sewing. Did she need supervision to sew it correctly? Who thought it would be a better video with a man chortling over her remarks about tucking in the threads? So many questions about this strange new world we live in.

One thing I have noticed about masks: They seem determined to lose themselves. Each week, I need to make more. Where do all these lost masks go? We have a designated place in the kitchen for all masks, but most days another one has disappeared. Why, like socks, do masks go walkabout?

Out in the world as I check out other people’s masks. I covet some masks more than others. I had no envy of the Bud Lite mask I saw. Then a friend had a mask that resembled a strawberry. I wanted that one. It even was embroidered with the little seeds that strawberries have. Clearly the creator of this masterpiece had no intention of losing her mask. May the force be with her in this heroic task.

There is so much awkwardness with masks. Yesterday I had to go someone’s house to pick up Green Hope mail that had been misdelivered to her house. As our mail goes to POB 125 in the post office and as her street number was 205, it is a little hard to know why this happened….. Anyways, she came to her door without a mask. I had mine on, but I wondered how rude it looked to back up slowly to get to that six foot distance. We had a lovely chat , but it still felt awkward.

I spent a good part of my childhood in Mexico City where manners were paramount. Shaking hands and being polite were the name of the game. If we went to someone’s house for a meal, and they served something that might make our gringo stomachs rebel, my parents told us kids to eat the food and have tourista later. And we did. Now, I have to fight all those instincts. This is pretty weird for all of us, isn’t it?

Another thing I’ve learned is that no one can understand the last name Sheehan said through a mask. Or maybe it is just me mumbling. Who knew watching each other’s lips was something we all did ( and needed to do for that matter).

As Jim awaits word on whether he will be going back to school or doing more online teaching, he asked me to research masks with clear sections over the mouth so his students can see his mouth and potentially understand him better. I found a 17 page pattern for masks with clear plastic sewn in. This was 16 pages too many for me. I turned him loose on Etsy.

Now he wants something that involves an elastic collar around the neck and some sort of blooming of plastic pieces encircling his head. Think Darth Vadar and you’re on the right track. That’s going to be one mask I might have disappear (It makes the Bud Lite mask look like a winner).

To write of other things…… When the quarantine began, I took over many jobs because, temporarily, there was no one else to do them. As the staff goddesses return, masks in place, we are reconfiguring who does what. As we sort through this new beginning, I have decided to keep doing one job I took on unexpectedly and that is bottling the Flower Essences.

There are many things I like about this job. I love visiting with the Flowers in this way. As I go to make an Essence, I think about what it is for and why it might be helpful right now. I also like seeing the patterns of what flows out the door here and wondering why certain Flower Essences fly off the shelves.

Our Flower Essence collections is a bit like a big collection of people. Some I always know are going to be in the limelight and go out the door to you week after week in a very steady stream. They seem born to be out there in a big way. From the moment they hit our shelves, they make a splash and help a lot of people and animals.  But some are more retiring. They hesitate to go onto the mainline up and often don’t make enough noise to be noticed. Yet I know they are gems. With these more reserved Flower friends, it is not a matter of self esteem. I do not think I have ever met a Flower that didn’t know it deserved to be here. It is more that some Flowers seem very content to just be who they are and let others find them or not. 

I love it when you do find these retiring Flower Essence allies in spite of their reserve. I love it when you see their strengths as much as the more gregarious Flower Essences that enjoy the spotlight.

As I bottle, I relish seeing that you have found and embraced these more low key Flower Essences. Their ability to wait until the right moment with absolute equanimity and then deliver when called upon carries its own wisdom. I love seeing how these Flowers have confidence in your discernment, a confidence that is deserved.

I thought I would share a half dozen or so of the more reserved Flower Essences you all gravitated this week. I know you found them because I needed to restock the shelves with them. As I bottled this group, I was struck by how precisely some of these Flowers answered the concerns of these times.

Comte de Chamborg Rose– To quote a bit of what the Comte says about itself, “Use me when you must prevail but want to do so with a light touch or when you have need to assert yourself but do not want to offend. I have a vibration of self-articulation in harmony with all around me. This is my strength: an ability to be fully myself without ruffling feathers.”

Is it just me or is anyone else needing help with this light touch? An astrologer friend explained it is something about Mars being in its home sign of Aries for the next six months leading to fiery interactions. Let’s just say that as I bottled this one, I put it right into my drinking water and said a grateful THANKS!

Los Arcos This beloved Camino Essence describes itself succinctly in this way, “Finding the bravery to move ahead on your own and at the same time being open to support from unusual places and activities.”

As you have noticed from other recent blogs of mine, the theme of moving on without trying to drag anyone else along has been a big one for me. So too has the precious experience of unexpected support from unexpected places. I have found Los Arcos to be very validating in this letting go process. It is one of many Flower Essences we have for helping us to let go, but like all the Camino Essences it has a particular gift in helping us know that the letting go is just a moment on the trail and not our final destination. It can be very disheartening to find oneself in the emptiness of letting go, yet Los Arcos helps us feel the palpable promise of serendipitous new chapters.

Belorado was another Camino beloved that needed bottling this week. It shares similar gifts with Los Arcos describing itself in this way, “Holding faith in the emptiness before the dawning of the next chapter when you will find your authentic and supportive community.”

Jade Flower Essence helps us roll with the unexpected quality of what happens as we heal. We all have these conceptions of what it should look like as we heal individually or heal as a planet. For me, it is pretty clear that I should refer to my ideas as misconceptions versus conception, but then I doubt I am alone. Could any of us have imagined 2020?

In any case, Jade helps us to ride the waves of what our healing actually entails. While I would like it to be a more serene course, Jade knows healing is a roller coaster ride. Fortunately Jade knows how we can hang on without throwing up!

Whenever I think about Jade I remember of a story one of you told me about partnering with Jade. This dear woman had gotten a very strong prompting to work with Jade and had been taking the Essence for a few weeks. Then one afternoon she was driving down the Pacific coast highway in her convertible having a lovely time when a mattress from the truck in front of her flew off the truck and fell on top of her. Well…… she lived to tell the tale, and she always linked this to working with Jade which she felt had prepared her for this very, very unexpected moment.

Ginger Thomas– This wise Flower friend from St John, USVI sits in quiet reserve on our shelves. He is present 100% when called upon, and he arrives with a sparkle, humor and a powerful depth of wisdom unlike any other Flower Essence I know. Here he briefly and rather mildly describes himself and his immense vibration, “I AM the translation of inner wisdom into wise action, refined and pure, unsullied by discordant and extraneous ideas. I help you ground in your inner wisdom, helping you make wise choices in your life, because I hold the vibration of the long view, the wisdom of a true elder.”

I am so delighted you have found Ginger Thomas. Maybe his time has come, and he has opened shop in a bigger way. Maybe something has shifted and we can finally hear his wisdom like a bell ringing in a still night. In any case, I am glad he is going out to you now. He has so much to offer us.

Foxglove from Patagonia As we experience quarantine and social isolation through this confusing time, I am grateful for the wisdom of the Patagonian Flowers including this magical Foxglove. It brings a hard earned wisdom about grounding in our immutable inner Divinity when external circumstances are on the move as they are right now. This and other Patagonian Flowers carry the wisdom of the Patagonian land mass which over geologic time had a particularly big adventure of splitting off from supercontinent Gondwana then rotating around and around alone in the ocean for eons before coming to its current location joining the tip of South America.

So quarantine hasn’t gone on for eons (though some days it definitely feels that way), but it has flipped us on our heads a few times. Foxglove’s vibration helps us stay present but also calm- even radiantly joyful- as we flip around. It reminds us that everything we need is within us. As we let go of what is already gone and accept the dizzy spin of the times, solace, purpose, meaning, humor and truth are revealed via a deep dive into our hearts and the Divinity that lives there within us. Foxglove from Patagonia shows us exactly how to dive in.

As we rise up into our Divine selves, we become the healing we need.

How do we embrace this process? I have been thinking so much about this question. Half jokingly but half seriously I have always referred to the lovely women who work here as Staff Goddesses, but it is time for all of us to completely own this Divine identity AND live it fully.

What does it mean to be our Goddess self? What interferes with us doing this?

Well….. sometimes family and others deriding our belief that Divinity lies within us has slowed us down…….especially in the lives where we’ve been burned at the stake for owning our Divine inner love, power and wisdom. Many of us have have continued to suffer from this in our current lives too.

However, it is time to let our old fear tapes go and to ignore those who would say it is wrong to own our Divine identity. It is also time to stop trying to drag people along with us. The only self that needs to accept that we are one with Divinity is our own self. How many lives have we spent trying to pull people along spiritually when they did not want to go? How often have we given ourselves 100% to people who want our light energy but also reject and abuse us for holding this light? Game over. It is time to let everyone be where they are and just go on ahead.

And now for one of my side tangents that is hopefully relevant…. Last night I was out in the gardens at dusk, just minding my own business (or as I thought of it in retrospect, minding my own beeswax) when a Honeybee flew into my hair. Honeybees have a thing about hair. This one was making a lot of noise, and I reacted in a decidedly human way by slapping the top of my head.

Well… despite my efforts to squash the Bee, it stung me right there on my crown. Ouch! I always try to welcome the stings as healing when they happen, but they are always shockingly intense.

Then this morning as I was tying up pole beans and minding my own beeswax again, another Bee flew into my hair. This time I wondered, what would a Bee Goddess do? I decided to sit down and welcome the Bee energy and just try to Be the Bee. For a good 20 minutes the Bee buzzed in and around my hair. Clearly I was not embodying the zen of Bees deeply enough for her alarm bells to go off, so I kept going deeper into loving the Bee, being the Bee and Beeing one with the hive. And the Bee departed.

This brings me to notion #1 about Beeing the Goddess. When we fail, let’s gently pick ourselves up from any learning lesson and prepare to embrace the next opportunity to try a different tack with humor and kindness to ourselves. Life will give us another opportunity to do it differently! Sometimes almost immediately!

I recently heard someone describe Princess Diana as the embodiment of a Divine and sovereign being not because of her position in the British royal family but because of how she carried herself in the world and how she never faltered in going forward with her Divine mission. Obviously as we embrace our Divine selves, we will have messy human moments as Diana did. That is part of being here on Earth, but like Diana, we can gently pick ourselves up from our human messes and kept going on our Divine path.

Back to my second Bee encounter, I was not confident for much of this buzz session but I kept going. Sometimes the best we can do is, “Fake it until we make it.” I’ll call this “Fake it.” notion, Notion #2. Faking it is a helpful bridge for recovering perfectionists like myself who expect ourselves to get an idea and execute it flawlessly the first time. Somehow the pressure eases when all we have to do is fake the serenity or fake the confidence or fake the kindness. I love the Honeybees but not so much an individual Bee nose diving into my hair, As I faked the love for this buzzing Beeing, a genuine energy of serenity, confidence and love came in to meet me.

Building from this is Notion #3 that while there are those that don’t want us to go on ahead, there are many more coming out to meet us and help us become our true Divine self. And they bring a Divine toolbox so filled with love! We need only make an effort and our effort is amplified and supported beyond our wildest imaginings by a cast of thousands.

I kid you not, a third Bee has joined me as I type this IN MY KITCHEN! They really want me to get a lot of practice today!

I am going to pause and practice my loving a harassing Bee skills…… Sometime very soon I look forward to sharing more thoughts and ideas about how we can embody our Divine selves!

A few minutes later….. Bee #3 departed without a visit to my hair. I now sit here with a cup of tea with honey, feeling most grateful for all three encounters and all I learned!

The incoming Divine energies require us to come into a completely different relationship with time. What is this new relationship? I do not know, but certainly it requires us to dump our current stuck constructs of time. Dumping old constructs is the nature of the game right now.

As these massive energetic shifts sweep over us, each of us have our daily lives to show us where we need to let go and where there is a breath of the new.  Here in my life at the farm, I see the shifts reflected in the gardens. I wonder if my struggles with slugs represents those energies which would hold me and the farm back from new beginnings. The owls calling at night remind me there are beneficent beings watching out for us that can literally see in the dark. The burgeoning honeybee population (our third swarm this last weekend brought our hive total to seven) suggests that when protected from pesticides and in a place where the higher energies are being grounded, the honeybees, with their unity consciousness, relish the new energies pouring into the earth.  The particulars of the garden reflect where my work to ground the higher vibrations is working and where I need to concentrate my efforts to resolve energetic leaks.

As I look at something like the Golden Glow, shown above, which has been decimated by an infestation of caterpillars, I try to remember difficult stories don’t define me, they just show me my work.  This work is so often about detachment.  

Last night as I plucked hundreds of slugs off plants in the vegetable garden, I saw an opportunity to practice detachment.  The immense population of slugs indicate that out of balance forces press in inappropriately- and I take that into advisement as I note that not only is what people think of me none of my business but what they do to me has nothing to do with me either. I work to hold the light as best I can and let go of results. I don’t have to lose my cool when someone treats me badly nor do I have to take the slugs behavior personally. I just need to free myself and the gardens from as many slugs as possible as do we all.

But why the specific mention of dumping old constructs of time?  For reasons unknown to me, the Angels made clear from the Winter Solstice that the theme for this year’s Venus Garden was TIME. 

Each year the design for the Venus Garden changes.  Each year the new design creates a unique garden mandala with its own distinct electrical vibration. Each year we make a one of a kind Flower Essence combination from the garden.  Each year’s garden and its Essence is the Angels and Elementals effort to help us along spiritually in a timely way.

Some years I receive the design at the Winter Solstice with no information about its significance or spiritual purpose.  Sometimes I get one design then another design replaces it before I can make the plan into an actual garden. This happened last year. Sometimes I get told what the garden is going to help us with and sometimes I don’t. No matter what, as we live out the growing season, the garden reveals itself through the lessons we take on as a community here at the farm. Then, at the Fall Equinox when the garden becomes a Flower Essence combination remedy, there is a reveal when I am given the name and a description of the vibrational gifts of the new Venus Garden Flower Essence. I’m expecting a fun name for this year’s remedy as there are so many quips and puns about time.

This year’s Venus Garden is unlike any other we have co-created. The garden itself has been planted above ground in an assortment of flower pots. So far, the Angels and Elementals have had me move and rotate the pots on a near daily basis. The only element that I vaguely get the gist of is the central pot- an enormous pot at that- of THYME.

Even as I am clueless about the significance of this garden or how it is serving us, it feels well, timely. I know very little about the precise nature of how time has been manipulated to confine humanity but the one example that comes to mind irks me. A natural calendar of time would have us keep track of days in relationship to the moon cycle with a yearly cycle of 13 months, yet instead we have this clunky and imprecise 12 month system created by Julius Caesar in 42 BC.

WHAT ARE WE DOING BUILDING OUR WORLD ON ANYTHING JULIUS CAESAR CAME UP WITH?

Needless to say, this is just one of a great many ways we have been tied to time cycles that have no flow and no connection to natural rhythms of creation (natural rhythms which are, right now, taking us forward very fast no matter who tries to mess with time).

I also have been thinking a lot about Divine timing, mostly in situations in which I find myself confused or impatient with timing and wonder if events are tied to unnatural delays or if the delays are in alignment with Divine timing.

I would like to know what exactly is unfolding, yet so much remains unclear. I would like situations of pain and injustice to be resolved ASAP. I would like to be at our next spiritual destination of a world community operating from the principles of selflessness and conscious oneness. I feel it is coming, but I want it to be here NOW! Be it unnatural timing or Divine timing, we remain in a murky place of unexpected challenges and unknown outcomes.

Clarity. What an understatement to say that this is not yet what we are experiencing. I don’t want to be in charge, so why do I think I know better or even dimly know what is actually going on.  I do not. Underneath my confusion, my most grounded experience is of this incoming Divine Light I keep writing about and this conviction that Divinity is taking us to a New Earth. So why do I fuss about what happens between now and then? I just wish we could all wake up and be our best selves. My spiritual guides tell me all is in Divine order, all is flowing towards a healed planet, and my job is to not so much despair at what appears to be, but do the inner work to prepare myself and have faith. In this as in so much else, the Flower Essences help me.

Just as I was typing this, my husband, Jim, came in to tell me of yet another subcontractor who had slotted into place to help with his summer (and fall and winter and spring and summer…) project to rebuild our barn to make it into a home for one of our daughters and her two small children. No sooner had he turned off the computer after his last Zoom virtual classroom gathering than he took up his nail belt to begin the partial destruction and reconstruction of this barn.

This barn was built for the one and only summer we were open to the public in 1993. The fall before, imagining our needs for a summer open to the public, I asked Jim to build me something for housing our vegetables, Flowers and Flower Essences on offer. He asked me what size and I piped up, “16’ X 24’ with a second story.  He noted, “That is a BARN not a shed.” 

Nonetheless, he put on his nail belt and started to build. I remember with chagrin and terror the chilly November day when a wind from the arctic was blowing hard and Jim and his brother Stephen were trying to put the ridge pole in place in gale force winds.

Ah good times!  Especially if one was observing from the ground!

This barn has been used continuously by us since its eventful stint as headquarters for the unexpected arrival of thousands of visitors in 1993. Since then, it has offered storage for our cobalt blue bottles, our Flower Essence boxes, our various publications, bottle droppers, and mailing supplies- all the inventory necessary to getting our Flower Essences off to you.

We made the upstairs into a big open and insulated space where each of our adult children lived right after college. There was no plumbing which of course made it easier for the men than the women, but this room has always been “the room of requirement” for post college life. It has the best view at the farm and is a lovely sunny space. Now it will be the upstairs for a tiny home complete with bathroom. The downstairs will sport a kitchen.

In any construction job a lot of the efficiency comes from having good subcontractors willing to step into the fray when needed and to come back again quickly when needed and so do a dance of coming and going in a timely fashion.  Since Jim has been doing construction jobs for forty years, he has friendships with excellent subcontractors who know him well and who have happily agreed to the dance ahead.

Another thing about any building project is that it ALWAYS takes longer than I think it will. But even for realistic Jim there have already been snafus that set him back. There was more rot than he expected due to rain damage and he had to reframe one corner of the building and also replace sills along one wall.

It was a bit of Divine Timing that Jim came in when I was typing away. Both the instance of the subcontractors falling seamlessly into place and also the unexpected slowdowns because of rot reminded me that I have absolutely no idea what is being taken apart right now or even what NEEDS to be taken apart by the things happening in the world. I also have absolutely no idea of how all the Divine subcontractors are dovetailing into the breakdown and rebuild of our world.  But they are, and sometime soon, I hope, we will see the new foundations of New Earth!

PS Here from the Flower Essences for Common Concerns document is a list of Flower Essences for various issues around time. I can’t wait to have this bespoke Flower Essence for helping us all flow with the element of time in our fifth dimensional New Earth.

Time:
Time management: Gallandia Rose, Spiderwort
Illusions about time and aging process: Date Palm, Mallow, Redwood
Timelessness: Rosa Mundi, La Belle Sultane Rose, Don’t Worry – Bee Happy, Redwood
Experience timeless self: Omey Island, Redwood
Improved relationship with time: Mountain Avens
Feeling you have enough time: Thyme from Omey Island, Thyme
Adjusting to vibrational changes in time and space: Gallandia Rose
Moving in time differently: Gallandia Rose, Thyme, Thyme from Omey Island
Faster healing: Thyme, Thyme from Omey
Being in Now: Thyme, Thyme from Omey, Trillium, The Sunflower Spiral, Mountain Avens, Don’t Worry – Bee Happy
Experiencing eternal now: Redwood
Finding time to rest and restore oneself after fiery times have burned out our electrical system:
Thyme from Crete

We’ve been privileged to share the farm with Honeybees since the 1980’s. Over the decades, I’ve tried to learn as much as I can about these amazing creatures. Early on, a bee shaman from the Andes came and heightened my feelings about the significance of Honeybees. Everything he said has reverberated in me down through the years. Among other things, he warned of the bee crisis that would occur in America.

I also have read many books about Honeybees. Some have been helpful and some very strange. Beekeepers of the last century, at least the ones putting pen to paper, seemed to have been mostly men, and many of them had some very peculiar ideas about the almost entirely female composition of bee colonies. In the gardens here, I have greeted every Honeybee I’ve encountered as an opportunity to thank a treasured friend. Mostly, I have spent countless hours sitting with the beehives watching the Honeybees come and go. All this to say, I deeply love Honeybees. Yet after all this time, they remain an immense and glorious mystery to me.

This last week was a prime example of this. We noticed Honeybees were bearding on the outside of a couple hives. Bearding is when a lot of Honeybees come out of their hive and sit on the outside of the hive boxes. Sometimes a beard will almost cover the front of the hive. They will do this during hot days to cool off, but it has been cold here this spring ( in fact, it was 39 degrees last night). They also beard when they feel crowded in the hive and need more hive boxes. We put more hive boxes on the hives with the beards and crossed our fingers. Why? Because Honeybees will sometimes swarm and leave a hive even when it is spacious. They divide themselves and a swarm departs to create a new colony for mysterious reasons or mysterious to me.

Swarms are one way to increase our Honeybee community but not a reliable one. This is because we cannot always encourage a swarm to move into one of our hive boxes. If the swarm lands high in a tree, we cannot even reach the swarm to give this a try.

When a swarm leaves the hive, it is quite a moment. Tens of thousands of Honeybees take flight and all of them hum and fly in circles interweaving with one another. The new queen is always somewhere in the whirling mass of bees doing what some (male) beekeepers like to call the “flight of the virgin queen.” This new queen will eventually settle somewhere temporarily, and all the other bees following her will cluster around her to protect her. Then the swarm will send off some scouting bees to find a new home for the new colony. This means the swarm will stay in this temporary location until the scout bees find the perfect home. This temporary situation can last a couple of hours or a couple of days before the scout bees find somewhere they think will work for a new hive location.

This time of waiting when the swarm is in this temporary location is our chance to get the swarm into one of our hive boxes and settle the colony here at the farm. I have tried to chase a swarm when it goes to its permanent home, and let me tell you, they move so fast there is no following them. The temporary in transit moment is our only chance to hive a swarm here and must be done as soon as possible in case the scout bees find a new home quickly.

Yesterday I was weeding the Red Shiso babies when I heard the enormous humming noise that indicated a swarm had left the original hive and was on the go. As I settled near the old hive box to see where the swarm would first settle, in air space at least 50 feet wide the Honeybees were all moving in a swirl of what appears to be random circling but is a much more choreographed dance. Somewhere in there was the new queen on the first leg of her journey to a new home.

I asked the Deva of Honeybees and the Elementals of the Honeybees in this swarm to land the swarm low to the ground so we could reach it, but only IF the swarm wanted to stay at the farm. I felt like the swarm did want to stay here, and their choice of temporary location seemed to underscore this.

This time the swarm chose an apple branch about 8 feet off the ground. This was a pretty good placement for us to get a hive box under the swarm and gently shake it into the hive to see if we could get the queen settled into new quarters provided by us.

So began several efforts to house this swarm. With the first try, the swarm didn’t settle in after the first bee drop. We think this was because the queen didn’t go into the box with the first drop. The swarm was a long icicle of bees but also one spread out on the tree and one group of the swarm fell outside the box when they dropped.

The mood of the swarm was restless, and that feeling was also in play. The swarm regrouped in an odd place underneath the lip of a wheelbarrow, and we tried again. With the second try we were confident the queen was in the hive box, because the Honeybees outside the hive box were interested in entering the box to join her. The second time, in a few minutes, the rest of the hive of many thousands of Honeybees had joined her in the hive. By dusk we had a new hive next to the new hive from last week’s swarm.

Yes, we had another swarm last week! For us, swarms usually happen later in the summer if they happen at all. We know of beekeepers who go into their hives and kill any incipient queens that the hive may be growing. I have never been one for interfering too much with what is going on inside the hive boxes. One summer we had a “bee expert” give us a lot of hands on advice and show us a lot of his tricks. I found his behavior around the hives very aggressive and macho. He was constantly in the hives moving frames and doing stuff he said would make the hive more productive. I was very relieved when our lessons with him were over, and we could leave the Honeybees in peace. Somehow I never could buy into his ideas that Honeybees were not productive enough in their own right. My goodness, they literally work themselves to death for the sake of the hive.

Anyways, it’s been a bit of surprise to have two swarms so early. At last week’s swarm I got some photos to share here. This swarm dropped into the new hive box seamlessly and settled in for good within an hour of the drop. All the staff goddesses watched the whole process which added to the feeling of harmony. Here are a few photos of this earlier swarm.

Do you have a weed in your life that is the bane of your existence, a mortal foe and a constant thorn in your side? I hope not. But if you do, I hope it is not Bindweed.

Bindweed came to the farm via a truckload of native bark mulch ( mulch intended to keep the weeds down not grace me with an enemy). This was probably fifteen years ago. I had no idea what life would be like after Bindweed’s arrival.

What is it like? Bindweed is now a part of my every gardening moment.

Each day I go on a Bindweed patrol through the gardens. I don’t have the time to go everywhere, but I do have a couple spots I hit every day in hopes of having a few Bindweed free zones. No such luck.

Even if I have pulled up all the Bindweed in a bed the day before, there are shoots 6 inches long everywhere. If I have missed a shoot or not been to that part of the garden on patrol in a couple of days, the Bindweed will be a vine several feet long and wrapped around some other plant as it heads for the sky.

You can’t just pull up Bindweed and have it go away, because even a small piece of root will happily send up a new shoot overnight and yes, the roots break into bits when you pull them up. It’s a very successful plant. I just don’t happen to like it.

Another reason Bindweed is so hard to remove is because it wraps itself around other plants. If you just grab and pull, you pull up an innocent plant that is just minding its own business while Bindweed chokes the life out of it. You have to go to the ground, find where the Bindweed emerged from the earth then pull it up and unwind it from the victim plant.

Sometimes we will be sitting at the kitchen table and I will see a particularly gnarly and aggressive Bindweed that I missed, and I will race from the table to do battle. When I dash out the door, everyone knows why.

Somehow I never expect the Spanish Inquisition OR Bindweed and I can’t believe what it does when I am not looking.

My Bindweed Battle is one battle I would love to put a wrap on. Sometimes I think of literally plowing in places like my raspberry patch where the bindweed is particularly bad and just covering the whole thing with a tarp for a year or two before starting from scratch.

My daughter Emily liked to pull up Bindweed when she was younger, but now she has a life and a baby too and not so much time for Bindweed wars. Lucky woman.

When I used to do workshops on Gardening with the Angels and Elementals, we would spend time on questions like. “What can I learn from the groundhog eating my garden?” Now I do not CARE what I am supposed to be learning from Bindweed. I just do not want to think about Bindweed anymore.

Sometimes I get tired of our long winters, but one bright spot about our winters is that at least there is no Bindweed out there.

If I was a better person, I would post a photo of Bindweed here, but I am not.

I really love almost every Flower there is and Bindweed Flower is beautiful white Flower that looks like a Morning Glory, BUT I AM NOT going to dignify Bindweed with a photo, so, if you are fortunate enough not to know this plant, just imagine a incredibly fast growing, long, twisting vine that chokes the life out of every other plant in the garden before throwing off a few white Flowers.

Thanks for letting me rant! Can you tell where I have been this morning ands what I have been doing? Head down in the bushes, pulling up Bindweed.