BotanicalWays

🌱 Planting: 1. Alabama rock clay: temporarily defeated. 😂
In this heat, getting a shovel through Alabama clay feels less like gardening and more like a full-body negotiation with the earth. But after digging, sweating, and questioning whether I needed a shovel or a jackhammer, our very first plant is officially in the ground!
And it had to be American Beautyberry (Callicarpa americana). 💜
Once established, those brilliant purple berries can become future batches of beautyberry jam. Its leaves also have a long history of traditional use as an insect repellent; people would crush a leaf in their hands and rub it on exposed skin. Researchers have since identified naturally occurring compounds in beautyberry that help explain that traditional use. As with anything applied to the skin, patch-test first.
Someday, this plant will provide berries for jam, leaves for experimenting with outdoor products and cuttings for even more plants.
But today, it represents something bigger:
Something I chose.
Something I grew.
Something I dug into my own land.
Something that will produce for years to come.
There is something incredibly special about planting the first useful plant on land that belongs to you.
The beginning may look like one little beautyberry bush beside a stubborn patch of Alabama clay, but I can already see the garden it’s becoming. 💚

Happy Wife Vibes! The Mr. Hubbie mowed my garden path😁 Totally did not expect this today and here I thought I was just planning and imagining where to plant herbs & plants 🌱🌻 He always goes above and beyond to reach our goals 🥰And man that John Deere Z530R is a beast!

Transforming the Studio: after being here for a few months; taming a field of wildness, painting our living spaces, getting somewhat situated, fixing/updating things we didn’t know were wrong upon checking some things off our checklist- painting the studio has begun!! I am super excited and yesterday we trailed out where the garden will be! Soon I’ll have a mowed path and can’t wait to share the progress with y’all! The GOAL this week is to have the BotanicalWays Studio painted.

While we're working on getting the new BotanicalWays studio in order, I thought it would be fun to slow down and starting sharing little lessons about the plants wildly growing right here on our property. Getting to know what I've discovered around here has been eye-opening. Some of these plants I've never seen before and others are easy to overlook because they look like nothing more than a common w**d. I'll try not to completely overwhelm your feed with all my plant discoveries 😂 but if you enjoy seeing what I'm finding and learning along the way, please share these posts🌱
After all, we're learning together and knowledge is power. Our precious Earth has so many wonders waiting to be discovered and sometimes, we don't have to look any farther than our own backyard. Yesterday afternoon, I spotted a plant I had never seen before - Cutleaf Ground Cherry. It's an upright, branching wild annual with angular stems and distinctive leaves that are notched or toothed, giving them that characteristic "cutleaf" appearance. It's fruit are small greenish-yellow berries that develop inside a papery, 10-angled husk. Unlike some of the sweeter ground cherries we may be familiar with, Cutleaf Ground Cherry tends to be more tart and can sometimes be bitter. It isn't as commonly cultivated for eating as some of the traditional ground cherries. Then I noticed something else that made this little discovery even more fun... Right there on one of the flowers was this tiny little pollinator, a Sweet Bee Bug going about its business. I just thought that was super cool. That's what I'm really enjoying about this new chapter, learning to really see what's growing around me. What looks like a simple w**d at first glance might have a fascinating story, a role in the ecosystem or a history we've never taken the time to learn. So come explore with me 🪰🌻🌎 Lets see what we can discover in our own backyards. And if you enjoy these little plant lessons, share this post so we can learn together 💚 ⚠️As always, identification matters. Never consume or use a wild plant medicinally based solely on a photo or social media post. Proper identification and research are essential.

This is something to adjust to. It’s fully lighted by 5:30 am, by 6 the sun is rising and it’s finally dark by 9pm. It’s been an adjustment to see light outside so early and later at night. Most nights it’s almost til midnight my eyes see the back of my lids for a few hours before they open again. Been busy with working our farm to get it to where we need it. Pulling the poisonous plants out has been a chore yet rewarding. I know we’re one day closer to being able to plant some seeds and fruit trees in the ground, as long as we’re making progress it’s what matters.