by Marlene Bumgarner | Aug 16, 2020 | Health, Nature
Morning Each morn I soak my bones. Steaming water soothes the pain. Watch the sun break through the clouds. Hear the birds proclaim the dawn. I concentrate on my breath. A tiny cloud Drifts out to sea. I concentrate on my breath and wonder...
by Marlene Bumgarner | Aug 4, 2020 | Back to the Land, Cooking and Eating, Family, Gardening, Health
Help! My Lettuce is Bolting. The heatwave that hit Santa Cruz recently fried my chard leaves and caused the leaf lettuce to bolt. Looking at the gangly plants, overnight grown to four feet in height, I wondered why we call this sudden growth “bolting.” I...
by Marlene Bumgarner | Jul 16, 2020 | Back to the Land, Books, Family, Good Reads, Writing
Transition from Writer to Author – it’s crazy! I’ve been absent from these pages for nearly month. A month that at times felt like a year, and at other times like a single moment. So I thought it only fair that I bring my loyal readers, and my new...
by Marlene Bumgarner | Jun 23, 2020 | Back to the Land, Books, Cooking and Eating, Family, Gardening, Good Reads
From the Prologue: “We all worked together. Ate together. Sang together. Learned together. We had a good life. After living close to the natural cycles of the earth year after year, good and not good, we grew stronger and more resilient, learned to manage our...
by Marlene Bumgarner | Jun 3, 2020 | Back to the Land, Cooking and Eating, Family
A Sourdough Story Note from Marlene: Please welcome my new friend Tara Besore. She and I were both inspired by Laura Ingalls Wilder to seek the simple life in our gardens and in our kitchen. Here’s her wonderfully honest account of the first time she attempted...