Life updates from your favorite Tree Girl
Fruit job, house building, domestic summer travel, coursework, yard progress, etc.
The sapling that is my new fruit tree care career
My job with Fruitstitute has been great (thanks in LARGE part to the perfect people I have been blessed to work with) and it seems I am inadvertently climbing the corporate ladder, much like a vigorous grapevine in spring. While I still frequently crawl beneath branches to deliver compost, mulch, and love to root zones, I now also get to perch upon ladders and use shoulder muscles I never knew I had to properly prune fruit trees big and small. Additionally, I am training to be a consultant, which means I’m learning all about tree biology, soil health, pathogens and stressors, diagnosis, and more in order to come to your house, inspect your trees, and propose a healing course of action. I’m becoming a tree doctor??? Life is cool.
I am learning to build a (tiny) house
At the other end of the tree life cycle, I will be sawing and driving nails/screws into lumber during Wild Abundance’s Tiny House Workshop in North Carolina next week. I’m super excited to get hands-on construction and carpentry experience, and I’m curious to see how these building methods compare to the ones I learned during the Natural Building Workshop (see below). If I end up building myself a home one day, I suppose I might end up using a combination of the two? Expect a full report on this experience by the end of summer.
My full East Coast (& back) adventure
June 18 - 28: Tiny House Workshop outside Asheville, NC
June 29 - July 5: Visiting pals in Roanoke, VA
July 6 - 9: Visiting family in Martha’s Vineyard (haven’t been back since 2019!)
July 9 - 17: Visiting NYC for Yin Yoga Training with YO BK, a desperately needed haircut, seeing friends, and finally removing all my things from storage…
July 17 - 25: …so that I can shlep them back to LA via a cross-country road trip! I’ll be stopping in (possibly Pittsburgh), Ann Arbor for nostalgia, Kansas City, Denver, Albuquerque, and Sedona. (Please share any tips you might have!)
Making my Chinese Medicine & Ayurveda geekdom official
Because I’ve had to watch ~20 hours of video homework for the tiny house workshop (which I am not even done with at the time of this writing), I am behind on my year-long Academy Healing Nutrition course that I started in February. (Turns out there is such a thing as learning too many things at once, even for me!) Once I “graduate” in January, I will technically be a Certified Holistic Health Coach, but TBD on how I’ll utilize that professionally—could maybe be combined with yoga teaching? Recommended to me by a friend, I decided to take this course as a way to dive deeper into—and give some authority to—my infatuation with Eastern nutrition and healing without going all in on a Master’s/Doctorate of Chinese Medicine (although that could still be an option one day). Perhaps I’ll share more about this later on. In the meantime, feel free to reach out if you’re curious about a food-based approach to any health issue you’re dealing with.
My mother’s yard is slowly progressing
Just as the cobbler’s kids have no shoes, the fruit tree specialist’s garden can be surprisingly neglected and underwatered. This is why progress has stalled a bit on Marta’s land. However, I have managed to remove a majority of the dead hedge along the back wall, and recently covered half of the backyard with compost and mulch to hopefully transform our sand into soil. A bonus of working at Fruitstitute is being able to take home extra compost tea at the end of each week and spray it on my own plants and soil.
Our new and old fruit trees are doing very well (with the exception of the Mexican Lime, whose exposed location requires a bit more water than I was giving him previously) now that they’re actually being cared for. Our baby peach tree produced a small harvest of DELICIOUS tiny peaches and our baby plum tree is full of almost-ripe plums. There are few greater joys than eating food that you watered and tended to full ripeness. I imagine this is similar to what having children feels like? Aside from the eating part, of course.
Our front yard natives have exploded in growth after just 3-6 months in our now-fertile front yard soil. The few individuals who aren’t thriving likely aren’t cut out for our hot and dry street, so we will likely replace them when it comes time for some fall planting.
One day, I accidentally broke off a full branch of White Sage, so naturally I turned it into a large supply of smudge bundles.
All in all, things are good despite being very busy. I’m trying to take more breaks at the beach, and hope you can do the same.
Thank you for sharing all your adventures. It'll be fun hearing all about your adventures in NC and NYC. Looks like your doing wonderful work and learning alot.