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Jun 26 •
👋 Welcome
If you landed here through search, or found your way in from somewhere else ~ hello. Glad you made it. Eaborn is a blog about ancestral living skills. What I write about: growing food, reading the seasons, working with botanicals, knowing your soil and water, and the deeper rhythms that used to be common knowledge. I'm Marama ~ permaculturist, certified herbalist, and frequency healing practitioner with 25 years of practice in the Northern CA Sierras. I write from observation and lived experience. What you'll find here: ✦ Field notes on food sovereignty, seasonal rhythms, and land stewardship ✦ Honest observations from the ancestral record ✦ A curated Affiliate Directory of communities and resources I actually use Comment on what resonates. Ask a real question. That's what the comments are for. When you're ready to go deeper ~ live calls, courses, a real practicing community ~ that work lives in Eaborn Living Otherwise ~ browse, read, find what calls you. And, make sure to ring the bell, if you would like to meet new members as they join. ✦ Marama
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15d •
My messy yard is full of life
Without getting into the details of why, we can just say my yard looks a little unkempt. Besides the fact that I find the physical act of mowing to be exhausting, the stress of it destroys my peace when I’m worried about all the little critters I could potentially be killing. I have managed to cut a small area along our front sidewalk so I can set up a few chairs and my dog has a place to roll around, but the rest of the acre+ is uncut. Yesterday I was visiting a friend in a quiet subdivision a few minutes away from my house, and while sitting on her front porch I was looking around and marvelling at how clean everything was. My friend mentioned she sprays for wasps, but clearly that poison spread like a plague…there was a sparse display of spider webs but no sign of any insects. She doesn’t have any garden whatsoever and her lawn looks like a golf course. It all felt very sterile to me, but I’m sure the average person would deem it a neat and tidy, acceptable suburban yard. This morning I woke up and took my tea outside to sit in one of the chairs I have placed in a small patch of shortish grass. I took my shoes off and let my feet linger on the ground, I watched cardinals and hummingbirds and blue jays feast on the feeders, and listened to the mourning doves cry their sad song. Red winged black birds splashed around in the bird bath and chipmunks and baby bunnies ran around the base avoiding the drips. Squirrels ran through the treetops, turkey vultures circled above, and I could hear deer crashing through the field beside me. I saw toads hopping under the decaying rhubarb leaves, monarchs fluttering around the milkweed, honey bees collecting pollen on the vast array of weeds and native plants, bumblebees resting on the echinacea, and even a garter snake sunning itself on the sidewalk. In a span of 15 minutes I witnessed an entire ecosystem thriving around me. The grass is waist high, the outside of the house has webs in every corner, and the gardens have weeds, but there is life in every inch of it. I grow food and herbs and maintain a habitat that houses probably hundreds of species of beings. People scoff at my lack of maintenance, but I’m happier being a friend of nature, than fighting against it.
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1d •
What Lughnasadh Actually Marks: First Grain, First Claim
Litha gave you abundance you couldn't eat fast enough. Fruit dropping off the branch under its own weight, more than any one household could process. Lughnasadh is different. This is grain standing in the field, ready for the scythe. It doesn't fall into your hands. You have to go get it. You have to claim it. The English name for this threshold, Lammas, comes from Old English hlāf-mæsse ~ loaf-mass. The first bread, baked from the new grain. And it's worth knowing that "bless," the word we'd reach for to describe that moment, has a rougher root than we usually admit: bletsian, tied to blod, blood. The original gesture at this threshold wasn't a prayer. It was closer to consecration ~ acknowledging what the land had produced, plainly, with weight behind it. I'd rather use a phrase without that inherited baggage: named the harvest, gave it thanks. You look at what grew. You say what it is. You say thank you for it. That's the whole gesture. One more thing worth naming clearly: small-plot grain growing coexisted with forest and hedgerow for thousands of years before agriculture went sideways. The topsoil loss, the water cycle disruption ~ that's a much later story, tied to forest clearing and continuous monoculture, not to the simple act of marking first grain. This threshold is older, and more modest, than what came after it. 𝘊𝘶𝘳𝘪𝘰𝘶𝘴 𝘩𝘰𝘸 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘵𝘪𝘦𝘴 𝘪𝘯𝘵𝘰 𝘣𝘶𝘪𝘭𝘥𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘺𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘰𝘸𝘯 𝘧𝘰𝘰𝘥 𝘴𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘦𝘪𝘨𝘯𝘵𝘺 𝘱𝘳𝘢𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘤𝘦, 𝘱𝘭𝘰𝘵 𝘣𝘺 𝘱𝘭𝘰𝘵? 𝘐𝘯𝘴𝘪𝘥𝘦 𝘌𝘢𝘣𝘰𝘳𝘯 𝘓𝘪𝘷𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘈𝘤𝘢𝘥𝘦𝘮𝘺, 𝘸𝘦 𝘨𝘰 𝘥𝘦𝘦𝘱𝘦𝘳 𝘰𝘯 𝘦𝘹𝘢𝘤𝘵𝘭𝘺 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵. 𝘑𝘰𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘈𝘤𝘢𝘥𝘦𝘮𝘺 → #Lughnasadh #Lammas #first harvest #grain harvest #seasonal living
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3d •
Why August 1st Isn't the Real Lughnasadh Date
Most calendars will tell you Lughnasadh is August 1st. Full stop, mark it, move on. 𝗛𝗲𝗿𝗲'𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗯𝗹𝗲𝗺: the sun doesn't run on the Gregorian calendar. It runs on where it actually sits between the summer solstice and the autumn equinox, and that exact midpoint moves a little every year. This year, it landed on August 7th ~ the sun at 15° Leo, dead center of the window. So if you've ever felt like you missed the day, like you're doing a late version of someone else's ritual, let that go. You're not late. The astronomical threshold is a window, not a pin on a calendar, and today you're standing inside it. There's a second layer to this too. My own practice tracks the second new moon after Litha ~ the same method I use for Imbolc, just anchored to the light half of the year instead of the dark. This year that's August 12th. Five days out from the solar midpoint. Two different, both legitimate ways of tracking the same season, both landing in the same general window. That's actually the whole point of this threshold. It was never one fixed day. It was always a season with a moving marker inside it. 𝘞𝘢𝘯𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘥𝘦𝘦𝘱𝘦𝘳 𝘥𝘪𝘷𝘦 ~ 𝘵𝘩𝘦 2,000-𝘺𝘦𝘢𝘳-𝘰𝘭𝘥 𝘣𝘳𝘰𝘯𝘻𝘦 𝘤𝘢𝘭𝘦𝘯𝘥𝘢𝘳 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴, 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘦𝘵𝘺𝘮𝘰𝘭𝘰𝘨𝘺 𝘰𝘧 "𝘩𝘢𝘳𝘷𝘦𝘴𝘵" 𝘢𝘯𝘥 "𝘣𝘭𝘦𝘴𝘴," 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘸𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘩𝘰𝘭𝘥 𝘢𝘤𝘵𝘶𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘺 𝘢𝘴𝘬𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘺𝘰𝘶? 𝘛𝘩𝘢𝘵'𝘴 𝘪𝘯𝘴𝘪𝘥𝘦 𝘚𝘶𝘣𝘴𝘵𝘢𝘤𝘬
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8d •
What Is A Biodynamic Gardening Calendar (And Does It Actually Work)
Most gardening advice runs on frost dates and a paper calendar. I don't plant that way, and haven't in years. A biodynamic calendar tracks the moon's position against the constellations, not just its phase. As the moon moves through the zodiac roughly every 27 days, it passes through signs associated with four elements ~ earth, water, air, & fire. Each one corresponds to a different part of the plant: root, leaf, flower, fruit. 🍠 Root days favor anything underground. 🥬 Leaf days favor greens and foliage. 🌻 Flower days favor blooms and cut herbs. 🍉 Fruit days favor anything you're growing for the fruit or seed itself. Biodynamic farming has been tested against conventional methods for decades, and the pattern holds often enough that I plan around it, the same way I plan around soil temperature or daylight hours. Not the only input. One of several. I track this weekly and adjust what I'm doing with my hands accordingly ~ what to plant, what to harvest, what to leave alone. Inside Eaborn Living Academy, that weekly breakdown goes out every Sunday as the Sky Clock, mapped day by day against your actual calendar. #BiodynamicGardening #MoonGardening #GrowingByTheMoon #PermacultureBasics #SeasonalGardening #FoodSovereignty #AncestralGardening #GardenPlanning #HomeGarden #NorthernCaliforniaGardening
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