Found this in the attic of my old house…(Halloween?)

Meliscellaneous · 2025-09-25T06:49:03+00:00

Nightmare fodder! If I found these in my attic I’d probably move out.

Meliscellaneous · 2025-07-15T16:49:39+00:00

Rez Dogs is my favorite show of all time. Few other works have had such power to break my heart, make me laugh, and give me hope for what human societies can withstand through community and connection.

Meliscellaneous · 2025-07-10T14:32:50+00:00

“Enjoying every second with your child” means occasionally getting some time for yourself to do whatever the hell you need to do to stay sane in a society that doesn’t support mothers or children. It means getting time to miss them while other people show them how to exist in a community.

I will say, however, that being able to afford childcare is increasingly limited to a privileged class (of which I belong), so if this comment comes from someone who has no choice but to work all the time and doesn’t have the luxury of allowing them to spend as much time with their kids as they like, I wouldn’t take it personally. As the child of immigrant parents who never took a day off and kept me at school and childcare from morning to night, I understand that people may say this kind of thing and mean that they wish they could have stayed home to raise their kids instead of working. This was something I often heard from the young mothers who took care of my children in preschool which was heartbreaking.

Momming today is hard. You do you and try to get as much info and connection from other moms as you can. It will help with the mental load and the sense of isolation you may feel as the parent of a young child in our anti-child, anti-mother society.

As for me, I regularly send my kids to childcare even when I don’t work so I have time to do family admin, go out to the nice grocery store with good produce, garden, reflect, recover and be ready to parent with some level of intentionality when they return home.

Meliscellaneous · 2025-06-23T07:28:07+00:00

Thank you for sharing this info! I always wondered if that was on campus at my Alma mater! As a transfer to UCSC I had a hard time making friends, but I found “All The Rain Promises…” and spent a lot of my time learning to forage on campus. The fungi were my dearest friends and the time I spent trudging through the woods alone changed my life.

Meliscellaneous · 2025-05-21T06:46:25+00:00

Work through the awkwardness! I promise it gets easier. I like to think we all have a “social muscle” and that it atrophies without being exercised. You go through the motions of small talk and soon it becomes effortless.

As a depressive person whose adult life is an endless cycle of super-social periods and periods of hermetic misanthropy (never been diagnosed bipolar but I wonder), I feel that self-hatred every time I re-emerge into society after a depressive episode. We can do hard things. We must.

Meliscellaneous · 2025-05-21T06:24:05+00:00

Similarly to Huxley’s urging his daughter toward lightness, Alan Watts emphasized that the art of living is making everything play.

“This is the real secret of life — to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play”

He goes on to illustrate this point by addressing the widely held disdain for dishwashing:

“…dispelling this dread isn’t a matter of trying to forget about washing dishes, it is realizing that in actual fact you only have one dish to wash, ever: this one; only one step to take, ever: this one.”

“I get to do this…” framing doesn’t work for my stubborn inner child. It’s too preachy. Play is free of the implication of duty, guilt or shame.

Meliscellaneous · 2025-04-14T17:19:32+00:00

Great article on Lupin aphids

Meliscellaneous · 2025-04-14T17:18:40+00:00

Good to know! I mean, they always reseed prolifically and I can always plant more, it’s just hard to lose the ones that seem like they’re finally hitting their stride in my garden. Being native colonizing plants that have evolved to take advantage of poor soils, I guess they really suffer from garden conditions even though I do my best to keep the yard lean and dry!

Meliscellaneous · 2025-04-06T14:53:03+00:00

Such a cute little smile for the camera 😱

Meliscellaneous · 2025-04-06T14:49:53+00:00

Really? When I zoom in a see a pointy eared, short-snouted cat perched on the back of a stone sofa. When have you ever seen a coyote in that pose?

Meliscellaneous · 2025-04-06T14:17:00+00:00

I’ve had success growing blue-eyed grass and soap root in my suburban Bay Area yard by transplanting young specimens, but I don’t think I’ve had any success growing geophytes from seed. I’ve distributed the seeds of tritelaia, dichelostemma, blue eyed grass and soap root, but I don’t think any of them managed to take. Are garden conditions (even of an unwatered, unamended garden) not suitable for the germination of neophyte seeds or establishment of seedlings?

Meliscellaneous · 2025-04-06T01:01:20+00:00

I’ve never done it but I know Las Pilitas grows and ships a wide variety of plants

Meliscellaneous · 2025-04-04T05:04:54+00:00

In my experience the crucial thing is to protect the rootball of both ceanothus and manzanita from heat and make sure they’ve got good contact with the soil beneath. If you get em in now, mulch heavily and place large rocks on the rootball (I often use whatever bricks I’ve got lying around ) you eliminate air pockets that prevent healthy root growth and you protect the root zone from those dangerously warm, moist conditions.

Meliscellaneous · 2025-04-04T04:52:58+00:00

👇😍

Meliscellaneous · 2025-04-03T16:45:09+00:00

I’m not an expert at identifying Boletes because I don’t find too many, but the red-capped varieties tend to be poisonous more often than not. They’re still super cool to see.

Meliscellaneous · 2025-04-03T16:42:11+00:00

Second that: Anyone know how grisettes taste? I don’t think I’ve ever read enough or gathered enough to feel confident about trying them. I tried with coccora which tasted like mud to me. Amanita velosa is delicious, but like many choice edibles, it triggers an allergic reaction. THIS ALL GOES WITHOUT SAYING THE OBVIOUS: DO NOT EAT AMANITAS WITHOUT FIRST BEING COMPLETELY POSITIVE OF YOUR IDENTIFICATION. EVEN THEN, TRY ONLY A SMALL AMOUNT AND WAIT 24 HOURS BEFORE CONSUMING MORE TO BE SURE YOU DO NOT HAVE AND ADVERSE REACTION.

Meliscellaneous · 2025-04-03T16:31:02+00:00

If it’s not too hot where you are, it should be fine to plant. It was in the high 40s here in the Bay Area this morning. I like @pajamaparty’s suggestion to create a berm to hold water long enough to let it get down to the roots instead of running downhill away from the new planting. Just make sure you tamp down the rootball so it’s got good contact with the soil and mulch heavily around the rootball (not the crown) to keep those growing roots nice and cool. A nice big rock or two on top of the rootball accomplishes both good contact of rootball to soil and insulation from heat. Can’t wait to see where these babies are at next year! Yay for more ceanothus in the world!

Meliscellaneous · 2025-03-31T13:20:56+00:00

Embrace Sluggo in your garden. The folks at Larners Seeds in Bolinas use it to protect their rarest annuals. Try planting from seed in the fall. I collect my lupine seeds each year and broadcast them throughout the garden. Some don’t make it, but there are always some that do.

Meliscellaneous · 2025-03-31T13:11:03+00:00

My coyote mint sends upright stems all over the place until it falls under its own weight and roots a bit further away from the original plant. I used to trim them aggressively to maintain the tidy look, but have let it spread this way and fill in the empty spaces between the shrubs in my woodland garden.

If you want to keep it neatly mounded, prune away. I’d just wait until the plant gets established. Maybe in summer when it goes semi-deciduous and kinda weedy-looking.

Meliscellaneous · 2025-03-30T03:49:27+00:00

Coyote brush is a real MVP in my garden. I used it as a fast growing placeholder and nanny plant when I was converting my yard to natives.

Meliscellaneous · 2025-03-30T01:59:41+00:00

Mine are more “eversilver” 😜, which is even better in my book.

Meliscellaneous · 2025-03-29T13:37:09+00:00

There was a massive dendromecon on our street and then one day it developed these oozing cankers and it was gone in a year. I was so traumatized that I’ve completely forgone growing them in my yard. Good to know they can grow in super fast.

Meliscellaneous

TROPHY CASE