Katie 5/6/16 “God’s Got You Covered”

By Katie

Mankind loves revolution. As a race, we have worked hard to progress to our current level of luxury, education, and convenience. One of our earliest achievements was the agricultural revolution, thousands of years ago. We had an industrial revolution in the 1700’s, and in our own era, a mind blowing technological revolution. These big steps have greatly benefitted us, but I’d like to bring up the elephant in the room.

Sometimes progress is too much progress.

There are free public schools, but high dropout rates and a loss of practical skills, not to mention the toll standardized testing has taken on the upcoming generations’ ability to think freely.

There is access to produce in the stores year round, with season barely affecting crop availability. On the same hand, those crops are often genetically modified or covered in toxic pesticides and herbicides, grown in depleted soil, leaving a low nutrient product at which even your dog turns up his nose. Consumerism demands thousands of products and we get them all for the cheap price of being in a few million lifetimes of debt to China. Oh, and the amount of waste is so extreme we ship it to other countries.

However, do not despair! We are the ones riding the wave of the new revolution. The revolution of reconnecting to God, reconnecting to nature, and reconnecting to our higher, spiritual selves. In general, it’s a spiritual revolution. People are waking up to see the damages caused by leaning on man’s understanding instead of acknowledging God’s power. I am excited to be here with you to share in this new era, laying the foundation of a better world for our children.

I write to you today about what seems to be the newest craze in gardening, but is in fact ancient and eternal. Many affectionately call it “Back to Eden” gardening. The idea behind it is when you rely on the Lord, He is able to answer you in his perfect creation. People realized the madness of tilling their fragile soil, putting expensive chemical fertilizers into it, and receiving ever decreasing yields of produce despite the myriad of “miracle” products used. Slowly, farmers have turned to God, asking why they are failing. He answered. He always does.

In nature, we have a powerful example of redemption and abundance from lack. No matter the climate, something can grow there. God’s design works despite challenges, whereas man’s design fails without challenges. What’s the difference, you ask? Go walk where man hasn’t polluted, such as a forest or prairie. What do you see? I’ll tell you what you don’t see, and that is uncovered dirt. God covers the soil with plants and fallen organic matter. Man is faithless and only believes there is dirt to be had if he can see it!

In the Back to Eden method, gardeners understand the need of this covering. In the fall, God covers the earth with leaves and twigs and needles. The winter rain and snow aid in breaking this organic matter down, and when spring comes, gorgeous, rich soil has been made under that mulch covering. No wonder spring blossoms so incredibly! The trees and flowers truly spring up with growth!

If you imitate this covering, you will see how quickly worms and fungi move in, turning everything beneath into useable soil. You can use anything to cover your soil that you have on hand, such as grass clippings, leaves, straw, manure, or woodchips. The traditional Back to Eden garden features woodchips, which are comprised of green matter from branches, leaves, and needles. They tend to be more absorbent, don’t break down as rapidly, are unaffected by wind, and work wonders for cleaning up wet spots.

I will briefly describe how to create a covering and then go into the benefits.

First, mow any grass or other plants in your desired garden space. Lay down a couple layers of newspaper or cardboard over the space. Avoid cardboard with any sort of laminate, gloss images, or lots of ink.

Now that you’ve created a barrier to kill the grass and such beneath, apply any organic matter you have. Make a layer of some lovely compost if you have it. Take a note from the Creator when you do this and always layer, never mix or till. God doesn’t mix or till in the forest. He layers and it is perfect. We have been taught incorrectly, and this is us trying to rewire.

As your final layer, put 4-6 inches of woodchips on top of your compost, manure, etc. When it rains, this will make compost tea for you. Free and abundant. You don’t have to break the bank buying compost tea. All of God’s gifts are free, and the garden is no exception.

That’s all well and good, you think, but what’s the big deal? I’ll tell you! The soil is a living organism and must be covered, the same way we are covered with skin. Now that it’s protected, it can flourish.

Here is the good part.

Year after year, this organic covering will break down and build better and better soil. It will balance out chemically, eventually reaching a neutral 7.0 pH. Both alkaline and acid loving plants flourish in neutral soil. Because the soil is covered, it doesn’t dry out. You get to remove irrigation and sprinklers and drip lines and all the other desperate contraptions you employ to keep your plants hydrated. The covering keeps it moist down there, even in the midst of summer. It also doesn’t suffocate roots or trunks. In extreme temperatures, it is insulation against both cold and heat. Hello, winter crops!

The covering supplies nutrients to the soil, giving you high levels of things like potassium, phosphorus, nitrogen, iron, and such. Your food gets tastier and plants healthier, especially if you save seeds and start to breed a superior strain. Another great relief is that crop rotation is no longer necessary. The soil is never depleted now that it’s properly nourished. You can plant again and again with the same results.

Another amazing benefit is freedom from pests. The plants are so full of water that insects drown when they nibble. They need cellulose, not water. Pest control becomes very minimal over time as everything improves together.

Say goodbye to backbreaking weeding, too! New weeds are easy to pull out of the woodchips, since they’re so light and full of air. Some gardeners take a rake and brush them out. It’s a cinch! I just told you that your biggest problems are erased. How do you feel?

Whether you are a seasoned green thumb or a hopeless, self-dubbed “black thumb”, anyone can have bountiful produce when this return to God’s method is employed. I hope you are inspired to pursue this. God’s yoke is easy and his burden is light. So can yours be, if you use His creation to your advantage and cast off your burdens.

Before I let you go, I’d like to briefly share my own experience with this method. I live in a suburban neighborhood and have a small backyard. I wanted a garden, but wasn’t sure how to achieve it since the yard is all grass and I wasn’t in a place to buy dirt. My mom discovered the Back to Eden method online and shared the YouTube videos with me. It was truly an answer to prayer. I got a few free loads of woodchips from a local tree service and started my covering! (Note that tree services often have to drive a distance to the dump and offload their chips. You are doing them a favor by asking for the chips!)

All winter my woodchips sat, percolating. I finally couldn’t resist and had to check out beneath the chips to see if it had worked. Immediately beneath were gorgeous, moist chips and white threads of healthy fungi. A little deeper were worms, creating precious vermicompost. Even now, no weeds have peeked out of my chips, except for a few that blow in on top. My vegetables are happily growing, and I am so excited to reap a plentiful harvest!

What are you still doing here? Go watch these videos and call up your local tree service! You have an amazing journey ahead of you!

Live well,

Katie

Chip delivery websites: abouttrees.com and www.chipdrop.in

(This blog post to be featured in a magazine soon! I will link it up as soon as I can!)

Katie 3/11/16 “Treat Yo’self”

Dear reader, I hope you’ve scheduled some personal time for this weekend. If you’re reading this, that is a good sign that your health is important to you (or maybe you just really love me). You’ve made an awesome commitment, and I’m proud of you! Health and wellness is something every person should prioritize, since it dictates our whole life. I’m going to ask you to do yourself a favor this week.

You work hard. Life demands everything from you and sucks your energy away. Hopefully most of that energy goes into things that fill your heart with joy: family and friends, creative projects and talents, fun opportunities. However, you and I both know that rarely happens. By the weekend, we’re spent and ready to relax. What I’m asking is for you to take this precious time and put it into something that will benefit you, instead of vegging on the couch.

Treat yourself! With your precious free time, fill it with what you’ve been wanting to do. Fill it with something that is special and different than your normal routine. Get a massage. Read a good book. Listen to a new album. Paint a room. Ride your bike. I want you to do something that benefits you. I want you to do it at your own pace, too. If you’ve been dying to try out your new car on some backroads, go and speed along without anyone else to tell you to slow down. Maybe you want to break out your easel and paints and disappear for a day--don’t guilt trip yourself into letting the kids into the studio and taking up all your time and creativity. This brief moment in time I want to be all about you.

No, it isn’t selfish. Yes, your kids might whine a bit. Remember that you work hard and that it is not only okay, but necessary to cut out personal time for yourself. It can be very restorative and invigorating. It will pour fulfillment and ease into your life.

You deserve a little get-away. Don’t deny yourself, and don’t waste your energy on worthless and wrongly placed guilt for giving time back to yourself. You’d do the same for people you love, so remember that you love yourself, too, and give this gift.

If we all take a little time on occasion to slow down and work on ourselves, over time we will have more to offer. You’ll finish that great hand-carved kitchen table and enjoy all the people around it. You’ll master a new skill. You’ll feel healthier physically and emotionally and have a better version of yourself to share.

This life is all we have, so we really need to invest in ourselves. If we want to get the most out of our time, energy, and natural gifts, we have to prioritize those great needs. You are so worth it!

Have you called up the masseuse yet? What the heck are you still here for? Go!

Live well,

Katie

P.S. It’s finally been warm enough that I felt confident to get my potted plants into the ground. My mom gave me two blueberries and two grapes (and some other plants that didn’t last the winter) last fall. I have the crazy, burning gardening itch to play in the dirt (if you haven’t noticed) and gleefully dug some holes in my lawn for my little plants.

First, I pruned them up on a sunny afternoon. The grapes had some dead shoots and the blueberries needed a little bit of growing guidance as well. They look ready to take off now! They even budded out dramatically just a few days after the prune. Healthy cuts direct the plant’s energy into productivity.

I got those babies into their holes and covered them with woodchips. They look so happy to be planted! I want to train my grapes to go up and get some wire fence or something that they can grow on, so I zip tied them in the general direction I need them to go.

On April 1st, I get to plant my early seeds! It’s less than a month away, people! I can hardly stand to wait. I’m excited to enjoy my garden and share my learning process with you. Until next time!

Katie 1/15/16: "Restore Your Power"

Welcome back!

Today, we’re going to “start at the very beginning, a very good place to start.” I find that when things are sequential and build upon each other, it is simpler to understand. “Precept upon precept; line upon line” (Isaiah 10:28).

We begin with the most basic question: What is holistic living? Some definitions follow:

“Characterized by comprehension of the parts of something as intimately interconnected and explicable only by reference to the whole.”

“Encompassing the whole of a thing, and not just the part. Holistic medicine looks at the whole person for answers, not just at physical symptoms.”

Everything is connected. Your childhood affects how you react to stressors, your reaction affects your choices and health, your choices affect your life, your health affects your quality of life. We already understand that. What we aren’t taught though, is how to advance our lives from lack and sickness to abundance, perfect health, inner peace, joy, and freedom.

In our modern American culture, we are dependent consumers. We don’t grow our food (In 2009, 37% of Americans grew their own gardens. Link #1 below), we don’t make our clothing, we don’t build our houses or furniture, we don’t repair our cars. The list goes on and on. I am in no way saying that having tradesmen and specialized professions is detrimental, quite the opposite. It is wonderful to have skilled people doing what they are good at and being able to make a living off it. Not all of us have the time and talent to provide for all of our needs.

The detriment with consumer culture is that we eat what is fed to us. We don’t have to look far for products that boast miraculous things, and we don’t do more than read warning labels. We are lied to every day, but we don’t even see it anymore. Too few of us question and dig for answers. We’ve given up our power in exchange for instant gratification and convenient access.

The people who are in control of our food and medicine do not have our best interests in mind. The animals we eat live in dirt or cages and are pumped full of hormones, no matter what your packaging says. Yes, grass fed and cage free is a step in the right direction, but it’s still full of antibiotics and growth hormones. If you bought it at the grocery store, it’s probably not good for you.

Your fruits and vegetables are sprayed with poison to keep bugs away, then dowsed in chemical fertilizer to try and get them to grow in hard dirt, and showered in tons of water in an attempt to keep them hydrated since they don’t have strong root systems or living soil to keep them alive. Farms get bigger and bigger every year because they are producing less and less. This unnatural way of growing plants isn’t working, and our land and water and bodies are paying for it.

Even organic isn’t organic. They spray things to make them keep longer on the shelf. Once something is picked, it loses 80% of its mineral properties within 10 MINUTES. Not hours, minutes! (see link #2 to read a bit about why.) Organic farmers have to do some non-organic things to get their food to last long enough from field to truck, truck to grocery store, then store to your fridge.

You wonder why you’re sick and tired and allergic and overweight? It’s because there is no live, clean food available to us at the grocery store. We’re all being poisoned (watch link #3).

My friends, there is a war being waged on us. If we do not take our food back into our own hands, we will continue to be unhealthy, pained, diseased, and obese. We are living in a time when almost all of our food is unsafe. It sucks. It’s evil. Why has this happened? Let’s think of who the god of this world is. God created the earth, but who rules the flesh? It’s Satan. He is the father of all lies. He spreads corruption and sin. He is in control now of our food industry, because he knows how much power he holds over us with it.

We have to fight back. We have to reclaim our right to health and wellness. If you want to be skinny, you have to grow your own food. If you want to be pain free, you have to grow your own food. If you want to be healed of your diseases, you have to grow your own food.

Please understand: you can grow your own food, and it will be simple.

You’ve been told lies your entire life about how much work it is to garden. No one will profit from you feeding your family by your own labors, so of course you’ve been lied to. Where is the money in telling you how capable you are, and how easy it is?

The thing about God is that he’s simple. His truth is simple, even a child can understand. His yoke is easy, and his burden is light. He tells us to ask and we shall receive! He doesn’t say, “Ask, and I will make you go on this long, roundabout journey to find an answer and it will be really difficult.” He says receive. It’s instant.

He loves us. He wants us to be happy. In Nephi 2: 25 it reads: “Adam fell that men might be, and men are, that they might have joy.” God put us here to gain experience and physical bodies, which allow us to have families and to progress! He never set us up to fail. He’s given us all good things. Read the first chapter of Genesis. Not once does it say that God made bad things. He saw that each thing he made was good. It was important to him to bless us, not curse us.

I truly believe that His yoke is easy. This is why I am so excited to share my findings with you. I want all of us to live abundant, healthy, joyful lives. If we live after God’s way, we can be nothing but blessed! Sin and lies are what make life hard and painful. That is Satan’s way, not the Lord’s.

Here are the solutions to the food crisis.

Clean animals make healthy bi-products. Buy your meat from local farmers who don’t fill their animals with shots and let them graze all day. Buy eggs from chickens who eat bugs and plants, instead of the sad hens locked in filthy cages and fed grain. Hunt wild animals. They have never been touched by growth hormones or antibiotics and feed solely on organic matter (do all of this legally, so we can begin to improve our rights as citizens).

Grow a Back to Eden garden. It is simple, suits your needs, feeds your family year round, and will be the best food you’ve ever had. Link #4 will show you exactly how to do this. I will also be chronicling my own experience with a Back to Eden style garden this year. You don’t need much space, you don’t need much water, and you don’t need much work! You will be amazed at the perfection God designed for us to partake of! And it’s all free from the Lord!

To return to my previous statement about advancing the quality of our lives, the first step is always a shift in consciousness. You have to become aware that something isn’t true before you can find the truth. Shift with me now. Shift to trusting God, that He will direct your paths if you let him. Proverbs 3:5-10 is powerful. If we depart from evil, it will bring health to us. That is amazing. The more connected we are to God, the more healthy. The happier. This holistic thing gets so clear. God doesn’t overwhelm us. He tells us to start where we are and trust Him to guide us. Wow!

Living holistically isn’t hard, it isn’t a burden, it isn’t unpleasant. It’s a joy! You restore your power as a divine being. Let’s move forward in joy together! Keep following us, and please leave comments, suggestions, and questions. This is our journey together as children of God. We can do all things in Him, who strengthens us!

Live well,

Katie

1. Home gardening on the rise
2. Nutrient loss in fruits and veggies
3. Powerful message on the crap we are fed
4. BACK TO EDEN GARDEN