-If you’re anything like me, you are doing your best to keep your head above water in the deluge of 2020. Thankfully there’s an end in sight, forty-four days to be exact, and we can all wish for some much-needed grace come 2021.
In the meantime, we can carve out peaceful interludes for ourselves. A great way to do this is by creating a safe haven to suit your style no matter how big, small, thrifty, lavish, quiet, or rock and roll!
There are many ways to do this; plants, herbal teas made from fresh garden cuttings, candles, bath salts, good books, a patch of sun by the window, and all kinds of herbal tinctures and remedies. The Scarlet Sage Herb Co, and Rainbow Grocery are just a few of our favorite local places to pick up some of these items. And of course, we’ve got you covered on the plants and garden decor front!
When I was a kid, my sanctuary was a treehouse nestled in a large Juniper about twelve feet up, scented with fresh juniper berries and sage. I’d go up there to read books, have tea parties, and pretend I was worlds away.
Here at Urban FarmGirls, we recently created an indoor sanctuary affectionately named "The Green Room." In the wake of Covid-19, Tina felt we needed a refuge within the workplace -a space to take a moment for ourselves.
The Green Room is brimming with house plants, tillandsia, dried arrangements, good books, a lifetime collection of artifacts, trinkets, and fine art. The green velvet couch lent to the name, topped with cushy pillows and favorite blankets.
The room is home to many beloved plants, especially the Fiddleleaf fig trees canopying the room’s corners. Tina's been nurturing one of the Ficus lyrata for over ten years now.
When I ask Tina about a common thread in creating a sanctuary, she deliberates on how this ties into landscaping and garden design. When clients reach out to have their outdoor spaces transformed, Tina always approaches the design as an extension of their indoor living space.
“In urban spaces, it is essential to create private, intimate, peaceful places where one can connect with nature,” Tina says.
“Tell me more,” I nudge, “how can we emulate this kind of refuge in our indoor spaces?”
She happily obliges, “Indoor spaces yield endless ways to create tranquility and beauty in the home with plants. Plants do a lot to create the peace and happiness we crave.”
Tina goes on, “Not only are they healthy and beneficial for your home (producing oxygen and purifying the air), but the simple act of nurturing plants is proven to be therapeutic. Caring for plants and spending time with them has been shown to improve symptoms of depression and anxiety. With all the stressors of this year, plants can be an easy and enjoyable way to find refuge.”
Some of Tina’s indoor favorites are Streptocarpus saintpaulia, Bromeliads, Tillandsia, Pothos varieties, and Pilea peperomioides, to name a few. That’s Latin for African Violets, subtropical flowering plants, Devil’s Ivy, air plants, and Chinese money plants!
And those Ficus in the Green Room, the fiddle-leaf figs; They’re tropical, well suited for soft light and mild San Francisco humidity. Tina inherited one and bought the other two after finishing an interiorscape full of Fiddle-leaf figs.
Over the years, we’ve watched them grow and take on a life of their own as they extend their arms high and wide. A mature canopy reaches over our heads now, giving us our very own urban jungle sanctuary in the Green Room -our sweet eclectic space to duck into for a cup of tea, a good book, respite, peace, and reflection.
We'd love to hear about your creative sanctuaries, leave us a comment below!
Rarely are we humans truly capable of comprehending the effort, passion, and gritty determination circulating behind the scenes of local small businesses. If you look for it, you’ll discover these labor of love attributes shapeshifting into products and services like our handmade pottery and well-tended plants. You’ll find it up the street from our shop at Gratta Wines, swirling around bottles of Sangiovese and tubs of homemade marinara. And a few blocks from there, you’ll taste it in the specialty cocktails served up in to-go cups alongside delicious food nestled in compostable take-out boxes at Cafe Envy.
This evening, I soak all this in as I sip on a cocktail and resonate on the conversation I’ve just had with a small business owner in the Bayview, San Francisco’s African-American Arts and Cultural District. I can only describe her as a powerhouse of a woman with the rare gift of spinning a plethora of plates in the air.
I’ve been hearing about her through other businesswomen in the Bayview.
Just over a month ago after work, a few of us from Urban Farmgirls walked the two blocks to Cafe Envy on Juneteenth. Though it's not yet an official national holiday, Juneteenth is the oldest celebrated commemoration marking the ending of slavery in the United States on June 19th, 1865.
As we entered to place our order, Tina Calloway, Urban Farmgirls’ owner, greeted the owner of Cafe Envy, who was holding her beautiful two-month-old baby girl.
This was the day I first met April Spears. And when I say beautiful baby girl, I mean little Mazahari Mays is long-lashed, wide-eyed cupid perfection!
Newly reopened as a take-out and curbside restaurant, Cafe Envy had been shut down for three months due to COVID restrictions. April’s other restaurant, Auntie April’s, is still closed, but staying afloat by contracting with SF New Deal and World Central Kitchen. That Juneteenth night at Cafe Envy was our first time enjoying food & drinks out in the open with other human beings after being sheltered-in-place for what felt like a very, very long time. There was a warmth there despite the chilly outdoor air. The people, the vibe, the food, and the drinks were terrific. I’m still thinking about the Salmon Sliders and Cafe Envy’s "15 3rd," a twist on a margarita with pineapple juice and Grand Marnier named after the old bus line.
“She is very tenacious, forthright, honest, and thoughtful in everything she does,” Tina says of April. “She’s opened two successful women-owned businesses in the Bayview. I admire how involved she is in the SF community and with this neighborhood."
April’s face lights up when I ask her about her daughter, “I was in labor with Mazahari while on a conference call. Mazahari literally started working before she was even born, up to now; she’s been on conference calls, she’s been to Restaurant Depot, she’s been to the mayor’s house, she’s been everywhere!”
April makes it look effortless, keeping her two restaurants afloat with a newborn in her arms amid a pandemic and global protests invigorating the nationwide movement for Black Lives Matter following the death of George Floyd.
“How do you make it look so easy?” I ask, “I keep hearing these stories about how much energy you invest in this community along with being at the forefront of founding The Bayview African-American Arts & Cultural District in San Francisco.”
“Why do you do it?" I ask, "What drives you?”
“You know, I think when you maneuver this way, it’s actually a talent. Because you have to get your groove and have a rhythm to this thing, and you can get pulled in any type of direction. My Grandma raised me. She had six boys, no girls. Basically she took me on as her daughter, as opposed to a granddaughter, so she taught me to cook at a very early age. I was literally cooking on the stove at five-years-old. Like scrambled eggs, stuff like that at that time -nothing that would pop oil on me or burn me. And when you have seven hungry men to feed, including my grandfather, you gotta move fast and you gotta cook a lot. It started there.
To reach the stovetop, she stood on her Grandmother’s chair, a french antique type with a cushion on top, “...it was something you shouldn’t really be standing on, but I had one of those.”
“That, and just being a women-business owner doing everything -I mean I had to move around and move fast! When I opened my first restaurant with a business partner -Olivias. I was ‘The Everything’....the shopper, the cook, the server, the cashier -it forced me to do everything.”
“When I opened Auntie April’s I only had one employee. I would literally go out to the table; take the order, back to the kitchen, wash my hands, make the order, serve the order, wash my hands, ring it up, wash my hands, go back, take someone else’s order….. it’s a talent, ya gotta be made for this sort of stuff!”
Born and raised in Bayview, April wanted to start a business in this historically African American neighborhood. She opened her first restaurant with a friend on her 30th birthday, then moved on from that to open her own, Auntie April’s, in the height of the 2008 recession. Last year she decided to open a second business, Cafe Envy, and was the first to be granted a liquor license in San Francisco in about eighty years.
Like many businesswomen in the Bayview, April and Tina put a very high value on collaboration and reaching out to other small businesses in the neighborhood. They are both members of Merchants of Butchertown, co-founded by April and Barbara Gratta of Gratta Wines. I’ve seen a similar stubborn determination in Tina, to push through economic storms and other unexpected hurdles while simultaneously expanding her creativity. These women are not the type to give up and quit when times get rough.
“There’s a real genuine bond to support each other through so much adversity. Women just stick together.” Tina says of neighborhood businesses, “I want people to do well here and thrive. Before I moved my business to the Bayview in 2010, San Francisco was starting to feel really isolated. I found a great community here in Bayview over the last ten years while growing my landscape design business. The business community that has grown here in this neighborhood feels like what San Francisco used to be twenty years ago when I moved here.”
April has a similar vantage, “I’ve collaborated with Tina a lot over the years, which has been really fun. It’s been exciting and inspiring to see so many women-owned businesses collaborating in the Bayview. New businesses add flare, and having more businesses open to patronize, brings in more foot traffic to the area.”
With the shutdown orders of COVID, April experienced some mixed blessings. The downside hurt; closing down, losing 100% of her revenue, and laying off a lot of employees with the responsibilities of caring for their kids and their older parents.
The upside came in the form of a contract with SF New Deal which led to a contract with World Central Kitchen to feed up to 1,500 people per week in homeless, low-income, and senior populations. This was enough to pay her rent, catch up on bills, and bring a few of her employees back to work. “I was able to feed people that were definitely in need, so that was an honor for me.”
“What was it like,” I ask April, “to reopen the same week as Juneteenth, during such a tumultuous, monumental time in history?“
“That week is basically my life, you know, so to sum it up in a week -it's something that’s ongoing for African American people. And it was nice to see the comradery of other demographics -folks coming together for the solidarity of the movement. There was a sense of empowerment to that because people were like, ‘okay, we’re going to put Juneteenth on the map for what it means.’ I feel like we took ownership of this past Juneteenth. It’s also good to see people educating their children about Juneteenth, with some not knowing that this is their true independence day. We're educating ourselves, knowing more, and educating our children.”
A month after she gave birth, April, along with some other women, went to London Breed’s house to mobilize with a group of women and let antagonizing protesters know that using scare tactics at someone’s home, sanctuary - is not alright. “Whether you agree with her or not, this approach is not something we agree with or will tolerate. For many of us, London has been our friend, long before she became mayor.”
Last week, Tina wanted to do something to support Cafe Envy’s re-opening and add some green to the spacious new curbside dining areas framed in a beautiful new wood slatted fence and dotted with colorful little french tables and chairs.
“Our service has completely changed,” April says of the new set up, “Cafe Envy is now a take-out and curbside restaurant. Customers are adjusting and getting used to being outdoors. Adding the beautiful replanted pottery from Urban Farmgirls has been really awesome and made the dining space so much brighter, especially with those big pots in the outdoor seating area. I’m so glad Tina had the idea as I wouldn’t have thought of it!” April says.
After we’d finished watering the new plants, April insisted on treating us to a bite. It only took about two seconds to order; “Salmon Sliders and two 15 3rd’s please!”
]]>Have you ever had something surprise you with a completely different narrative than what you’d expected?
I’ve got an Urban Farmgirls story for you which involves a backyard in Potrero Hill, the movement of the sun, a blossoming agave, fish in a pond, and a woman well versed in art history.
]]>By Shelley Eades
Have you ever had something surprise you with a completely different narrative than what you’d expected?
I’ve got an Urban Farmgirls story for you which involves a backyard in Potrero Hill, the movement of the sun, a blossoming agave, fish in a pond, and a woman well versed in art history.
Last week Urban Farmgirls Founder, Tina Calloway, and I stood in the garden of one of her long-time clients during our weekly maintenance service. Lynne Rutter’s backyard is different than most I’ve seen in the city. The passion guiding her green thumb is showcasing unusual plants. It’s a family thing, it seems. Lynne’s father was a surfer enamored by tiki culture, with a penchant for collecting exotic tropical plants, many of which are now transplants in her garden. Lynne’s brother, who works in the orchid business used to collect carnivorous plants like Venus Flytraps.
When entering the side-gate to her backyard, my eyes are immediately drawn to about twenty beautiful staghorn ferns hanging at eye level and higher on a redwood fenceline. Tina designed it with this in mind to give Lynne the freedom to rearrange the ferns as she pleases along horizontal slats in the wood.
Toward the end of the walkway, the garden opens up to an exotic mix of plant life, a vibrant little pond, and hundreds of air plants, growing in trees and bushes, on lawn furniture, and rocks. The rarity of seeing so many air plants thriving outdoors in San Francisco gives off an ere of otherworldliness -imagine a visual concoction of Alice in Wonderland and pre-historic reverie. San Francisco’s climate provides just enough fog and moisture for air plants to thrive in filtered light. Given the right conditions, air plants are happy indoors and out. View Air Plant Flutes and Sconces in our online boutique.
In talking with Lynne, who specializes in ornamental restoration, particularly from the Victorian era, it’s not hard to make the connection between artistry and gardening. While some art lovers flock to the Lurve in Paris for a glimpse of the Mona Lisa, you’d be much more likely to find Lynne at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence studying the elaborate ceiling decor, rather than pursuing artwork below. She is one of a handful of artists in the world specialing in this line of work.
When I ask Tina about her work at Lynne’s over the past two years, she points out how much she values the rare creative flow this collaboration reflects in the design of the garden. One of the goals was to design the landscape as an extension of Lynne’s living space. The final result includes a whimsical staircase that opens into the garden with custom iron handrails handcrafted by Bayview artist Derek Castro at 1770 Workshop. He also makes the metal stands for our Bespoke Tablescape Collection.
Last fall not far from those steps, an agave Atttenuata formed a small spike that grew into a blossom. Native to Mexico, this phenomenon rarely happens in San Francisco, as the plant needs dry heat and a massive dose of sunshine to bloom. The common name for this agave is the century plant because it takes years to bloom (it succumbs to its death shortly thereafter). Lynn, Tina, and the Urban Farmgirls team had been keeping track of the unusual bloom as it grew nearly six feet high. It continued to follow the sun so religiously that it then curved south-west, eventually morphing into a swan neck shape with its spiked tip growing down toward the pond. They decided not to cut it out of pure curiosity about what it might do next.
Though created to lure in bats to feed on pesky mosquitos, Lynn’s pond serves more like a birdbath of sorts, attracting a variety of small birds, bees, floating plants, algae for her fish, and even hawks and snakes. “I don’t know why more people in urban areas don’t have ponds in their gardens,” she said, “it attracts so much life which in turn has the benefit of a more vibrant, pollinated garden.”
In any case, this peculiar agave, which is loosely known to bloom once every hundred years, was bestowing its nectar on bees, hummingbirds, and little finches via thousands of small yellow blossoms.
An agave blooming into a beast like this is alluring. Lynne took pictures regularly and posted them on social media, fascinating her friends and family. Our Urban Farmgirls team watched and waited, making weekly maintenance rounds as it pointed it’s tip down in a way that nearly gave the appearance of deliberately zeroing in on the pond below. It over-powered everything around it and seemed to have a personality of its own. “That agave must have been really freaking happy in that garden to bloom like that!” Tina recalls.
One day Lynne walked into her garden and was shocked at what she discovered. The pond was now clear -all plants, algae, and fish had all been wiped out, dead. A sticky sap beaded up on the stones around it. The spike had kissed the water’s edge. This had happened in less than forty-eight hours since her last venture into the yard. Tina remembers Lynne's phone call a few minutes later, “Tina! You’ll never believe what just happened....”
Being that Lynne loves history, she didn’t let the story end there. Upon digging into a little research, she learned that the sap from this particular agave is very poisonous to small creatures and foliage, cyanide of sorts, which she had not at all expected.
Native Americans used this plant to their advantage by dipping their arrow tips into the sap, as well as using it to poison waters, then harvesting the fish that died instantly and floated to the top. It turns out that while it’s toxic to small creatures and might make a dog or even a small child sick to their stomach, it’s not strong enough to poison the average-sized human and only acts as an irritant to the skin. Due to the shape of its bloom, the agave Atttenuata is also commonly referred to as the foxtail, lion's tail, dragon-tree, and swan's neck agave.
This week at Lynne's, I was thrilled to spot a new little school of fish in her pond. She'd ordered a batch by mail which had just arrived. They look so happy swiveling through the algae and darting under lily pads. A few unassuming pups from the infamous Agave Atttenuata bask sleepily in the sun nearby.
Several plants in California are poisonous, but far more have holistic benefits and make for sumptuous edibles as well. One of our favorite books in Urban Farmgirls' library is an excellent guide for local plants in the San Francisco Bay Area. We highly recommend reading The Bay Area Forager by Mia Andler and Kevin Feinstein, to learn more about the marvels of local plant life.
Have an interesting plant life story? I've love to hear more! Email shelley@urbanfarmgirls.com.
Photos courtesy of Lynne Rutter
]]>The Potrero Hill Community Garden sits at the top of the hill with sweeping views of San Francisco. There are about forty or so small plots here where neighbors cultivate fruits, veggies, plants, flowers that do well in our Mediterranean climate. Goats once grazed on the slopes below years ago, before houses took over.
This place usually tells me exactly what I need to hear which is to shut up, slow down, and listen. Like most of us, I’ve been taking in this pivotal moment in history, fighting, and hoping for change.
Thousands are marching through city streets right now for Black Lives Matter, joining millions of others around the world in protest following the death of George Floyd.
I’ve been fishing around for some inspiration relating the cultivation and care for gardens to this collective voice of perseverance, persistence, and determination. One that comes to mind is “A gardener must project years into the future with vision and optimism toward deciding what to plant in the present,” by Coleman Alderson.
Along with sprouts, buds, berries, and bumblebees, there is vigorous, unrelenting growth here. Everywhere I look in this garden I see resilience -vines twisting metal, roots breaking out of their pots, and tendrils climbing up and over tall wire fences.
Humans are no different, we cultivate and climb, bust out of containers, building strength and resilience with unrelenting growth, especially when we do that together!
]]>“Here it is,” Jenny said, “shortbread with only five ingredients!”
Perfect, we had the butter in the fridge and the flour, salt, and sugar in the cupboard to the left. The fifth ingredient, fresh rosemary, was growing on a bush in the garden!
]]>This is one of the interesting dichotomies of Shelter-in-Place for many of us. Though we’re inundated with the buzz of split-second social media updates, a retro simplicity now lingers in the air around us. I remember my mom grinding wheat into flour and kneading bread when I was growing up in the seventies, of course back then I thought storebought would be so much cooler.
“Here it is,” Jenny said, “shortbread with only five ingredients!”
Perfect, we had the butter in the fridge and the flour, salt, and sugar in the cupboard to the left. The fifth ingredient, fresh rosemary, was growing on a bush in the garden.
Urban Farmgirls’ founder/gardening guru, Tina Calloway, likes to infuse her water with this herb and knows more about rosemary, AKA Rosmarinus officinalis than most people know what to do with! Happy in its own pot or as a handsome decorative in the landscape, rosemary is a woody perennial that can be cut back and will grow out again each year. It does well in California as we are one of the five Mediterranean climates in the world. This herb has a variety of benefits including positive effects on memory, circulation, and inflammation.
While I preheated the oven, pulled out measuring spoons, baking pans, and such, Jenny went outside with scissors to clip some fresh sprigs. The French lavender bush nuzzled in next to the rosemary, got her thinking that lavender might be tasty in shortbread too. It makes for beautiful dried flowers and decorative arrangements. And along with it’s calm, soothing, and antiseptic medicinal qualities, the scent of Lavandula dentata is said to have been used seductively by Cleopatra to lure Julius Caesar and Mark Antony.
I keep a jar of lavender buds in my kitchen, so Jenny and I split the dough in half and went about gently kneading in herbs into one batch of lavender and one of rosemary.
After a short stint of chilling in the fridge, we cut the dough into cookie-sized slices and popped them in the oven. They turned out so perfectly crumbly and melt-in-your-mouth good, that we promptly gorged ourselves silly, then surrendered the remaining portions to neighbors who share our beautiful backyard. And with that, the preceding thought of hoofing it down to the hill to stand in line to purchase a package of treats seemed ridiculous and futile.
Today, I ventured into the unknown territory of making vegan shortbread.
A few days ago, I was in the midst of telling my friend Jayanta, via Facetime, about these yummy little homemade cookies, when I saw a distant look in his eyes -pads of butter pasts casting a shadow over his vegan diet for a split second or two...or three. Because I hate to see people suffer like that, I enthusiastically promised to bake him a batch with what is quite possibly the best non-dairy butter ever. The thought of shortbread without real butter hurts me a little, but after four years of going vegan, he’s used to a plant-based diet.
Plant-based -which brings us back around to gardening! Tina and I were in the courtyard of Urban Farmgirls recently, looking over the plants and discussing which ones are medicinal, which ones are edible, etc.. There are endless possibilities in the benefits of gardening; The diverse uses of rose petals, for instance, which I’ll write about soon.
And just for the record, the vegan shortbread turned out splendidly. I just shared them with my neighbor Christina who texted me promptly to say she’d gobbled them right up!
“Maybe the last batch were richer,” she wrote, “but these tasted healthier. Either way, I loved them!” She ended with an eye-heart emoji smile and a big thumbs up.
In all honesty, Christina does tend to gobble up and praise pretty much everything I share with her, but I think she really means it.
And now dear readers, I must close my laptop, dawn a homemade mask, and transport these vegan rosemary and lavender shortbreads to a doorstep in Twin Peaks before I eat them all. Given this awkward Stay-at-Home moment in time, I plan to drive off before he even knows I’ve been there.
Then I’ll shoot him a string of emojis: eyeballs + cookies + door + wink and save him a trip to the store.
Check out our Edible DIY Gardening Kits, and send us any ideas you might have of enticing edible possibilities we might offer in our online store: info@urbanfarmgirls.com.
]]>Like everything else, Mother’s Day is going to be different this year. No going out for leisurely brunches or meandering in and out of sweet little shops and cozy neighborhood nooks. But as the saying goes, if the water is too shallow, find different place to swim.
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Like everything else, Mother’s Day is going to be different this year. No going out for leisurely brunches or meandering in and out of sweet little shops and cozy neighborhood nooks. But as the saying goes, if the water is too shallow, find a different place to swim.
Whether it’s in memory, in person, video chat, snail-mail or phone, there’s plenty of options to connect with our moms. If you are looking for gifts, pop by our Mother’s Day Curbside Sale this Saturday, we'll have a bevy of super lovely items including fifty lavender bouquets at $3 each with tea recipe included.
Lavender is in bloom just in time for three generations of Urban Farmgirls to spend a few days cutting and drying this year’s harvest in the fields of the Schulenberg Vinyard surrounding Tina's tiny house in the Central Valley.
Today, in partnership with Schulenberg Vinyard, Urban Farmgirls delivered a donation of 85 bouquets with tea recipes, along with 9 DIY succulent garden kits to Wise Health, a non-profit in San Francisco’s Bayview district doing amazing things right now for the people in need and serving up Made With Love produce kits to isolated seniors during Shelter in Place. Because it's a very much a community effort, fueled by volunteers, we may need an entire blog post to tell you all about it!
Perhaps this lavender harvest will grow into a sweet new Mother’s Day ritual for this trio of strong and beautiful women, Tina, her mother Christine and daughter Maddie, who keep Urban Farmgirls on the ball, with bells on.
In lieu of my mom's annual Mother’s Day visit to San Francisco, the two of us will be 300 miles apart chattering on Zoom..."remember the time...," cajoling laughs over awkward tween mishaps and such from days past. With any luck, the Living Wreath I'm making her today will arrive at her doorstep in the boondocks on time.
By now, I’ve surrendered to “the new normal,” and am dawning a thicker skin from the unavoidable barrage of news and speculation. This morning however, I came across an absolute jewel of a headline on NBC News:
“Five-year-old boy pulled over in Utah while driving to California to buy a Lamborghini.”
His poor mom! All because she’d told him that buying a Lamborghini was out of the question. The boy had sneaked off with two dollars in his pocket and the keys to the family SUV. With toes barely reaching the peddles, he hit the highway and made it three miles before getting pulled over by a very surprised highway patrolman.
Because he was unscathed, my gut reaction was wide-eyed admiration for this kid's remarkable gumption, though I hope he never tries this again. I’m a bit envious of this epic story that will go down in family history for decades with shaking heads and bellyaching laughter. Apparently I’m not the only one.
In the past two days since the get-a-way, Adrian and his mom have discovered a few pre-Mother’s Day silver linings: The owner of a shiny black Lamborghini arrived at their doorstep and offered them a jaunt in his car, because he’d been greatly impressed by the five-year-old’s magnificent "success principles". On top of that, a company in California has offered to fly Adrian and his mom out so he can get behind the wheel of a Lamborghini and take it for a spin.
Now that's a kid who knows how to step out of shallow waters and find another place to swim. And a mom that deserves a giant Mother's Day bouquet!
We hope to see you this Saturday, May 9th. We'd LOVE for you to pop by for some Mother’s Day curbside shopping while supporting Urban Farmgirls during this challenging time for small businesses like ours. It’s a win win for both of us!
Interested in volunteering at Wise Health? They've got plenty you can help with! Check out their website.
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Feeling a little boxed in? Me too!
Nearly a month into our Shelter-in-place order, I’m feeling a little restless after spending so much time indoors. I’m lucky enough to see the sun rise over the Bay most days, propped up in bed sipping a hot cup of tea.
When there’s fog, it’s often just as stunning -thick layers of white, pale gray and blue, melding together water, land and sky. I’m always amazed at how different it looks every single morning. And yes, I will admit to watching cargo ships and birds through an old pair of binoculars, hoping the neighbors don’t glance up and think I’m spying on them.
The other day on a whim, I stepped way from my laptop to rummage around my apartment for any soon-to-be planter I could drum up.
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Nearly a month into our Shelter-in-place order, I’m feeling a little restless after spending so much time indoors. I’m lucky enough to see the sun rise over the Bay most days, propped up in bed sipping a hot cup of tea.
When there’s fog, it’s often just as stunning -thick layers of white, pale gray and blue, melding together water, land and sky. I’m always amazed at how different it looks every single morning. And yes, I will admit to watching cargo ships and birds through an old pair of binoculars, hoping the neighbors don’t glance up and think I’m spying on them.
The other day on a whim, I stepped away from my laptop to rummage around my apartment for any soon-to-be planter I could drum up. I found a translucent avocado pedestal vase my grandmother had given me twenty-some-years ago. It has a chip on it’s rim, but never mind that!
I have an affection for succulents and I think the feeling is mutual. They make themselves at home and get along with the orchids on my shelves.
For this particular planter, I chose String-of-pearls. It was easy enough to clip some starts from a plant in my backyard. Not all succulents thrive indoors, but luckily this one does quite well.
Succulents like to dry out between watering so I put a layer of rocks in the bottom of the vase which helps evaporate any excess water and minimize moisture in the soil. Check out our Plant Care tips on how to keep them happy.
Back in the house I spread out some newspaper on the kitchen table and sat down the vase and clippings.
The rest took less than 5 minutes, I made a few little holes in the soil with a sugar spoon, tucked in the ends of each little String-of-pearls and pressed the soil around each clipping. Then I moistened the soil, cleaned any dirt off the vase and placed it on the hearth above my fireplace.
I'm loving this sweet little bohemian addition to my living room and the process of planting it got me out of the house, moving about and feeling creative.
Now I've got a new morning ritual of misting the vase with water and the pleasure of seeing a little more life in the room each time I look up from my laptop.
By Shelley Eades
Need help getting started? Get your hands in the soil with Urban Farmgirls DIY Kits including plants, soil, handmade pottery -all the fixings shipped to your door for your own creativity
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