"This is your safe place." 💜

Happy Saturday friends!

Sometimes you don't notice something about yourself until people start commenting on it. We bought our first farm in 2016 and I started creating my dream of The Mother Ranch as a healing space. The first year was a heavy learning curve. I had coaching sessions but mostly it was all about learning to live on 15 acres with animals. The day in and out of fencing, near catastrophes, actual catastrophes, death, accidents (both animal and human). Two years in I was having multiple goat yoga sessions a month, coaching clients, neurofeedback clients, art classes, and retreats. Through it all, the one thing I heard the most was, "I feel so safe here." Second was, "As soon as I turn down the driveway, I feel my whole body relax."

That's when I started to realize it was, indeed, my overarching goal in life. I wanted to create a safe space, a place for people to feel safe with me, the land, the animals, the work I do. I've never thought about where that need of helping other people feel safe comes from, it's just a part of me. But this week in the middle of a coaching session, we were talking about having a safe place when a memory hit me like a bolt of lightning.

I'm in elementary school and my 5 year younger brother Michael and I are fighting about silly stuff like siblings do. Mom walks in and says (for the one thousandth time), "Enough. This is our safe place." 🥰

I can hear Mom laughing right now :-) "Just accept it, I'm always right." 😂

Who knew that I would build my entire life and business on a single idea that Mom gave me? Yes, I offer all kinds of healing modalities but the umbrella over them all is safety. First and foremost, safety is what I offer here.

THE RANCH:

I had a super fun experience happen this week. I was in the house, walking by the front door, when I noticed a doe and fawn out front by the pond. I took a little video through my window but wanted more of course. Little did I know what would happen! I opened the door inch by inch while it creaked (I must WD40 that thing) and finally squeezed outside, barely moving, barely breathing. They looked over at me, but didn't seem bothered. Over the next few minutes I realized there were three does and one fawn (it's been a low baby year for some reason, the drought maybe?) The fawn got sillier and sillier, kicking up its heels and then racing around in a huge circle—down the hill into the forest, up the side of the dam, and then a straight racetrack down the dam back to the family. Round and round, I was grinning like a fool 😁

You can watch it here!

Same Blue Heron from the video :-) I love watching it fly to the turtle rafts and use them to hunt from, although I'm not sure how it works, those things float and if he lurches in his hunt, they will move...:

When the Crepe Myrtles bloom, they leave a carpet of pink around them:

Brad found the donkeys fooling around in my dirt pile in the pasture. I wonder what Sweetness was doing up there?

Ok now, the Beautyberry bushes are a little over the top for the bed they are in. I've never seen them get this big AND they were cut down to 12" stumps in February. This fall/winter we will be moving them to a place that suits them better and putting something a bit smaller into this bed instead:

This little Green Anole on the stone fox made me smile:

And I found this pic from a few years ago when we were first here. Imagine my surprise when I was walking along and saw this cute little Rough Green Snake. What a beauty!

I loved watching this conversation between Jaffee on the left and Tori on the right. They both wanted this bag (there are 5 bags out, one for each) and finally after some fussing, decided to share. Tori's angry ears and Jaffee just not caring lol:

A random Johnny Jump Up, just, well, jumped up in the grass. I suppose it's the cooler temps we've been having with all the rain:

Bonnie has taught Blu to drink water out of her hand:

This is how Blu is when she's around, sweet, calm, gentle. He adores her:

Sweetness:

Tori:

The trimmer came out to do the ponies on Monday. I go out early to halter them and have them ready:

As much as they love people, they are not fans of the trimmer. (He's never hurt them, and the donkeys feel the same.) This week, after he left, I've been practicing making sure I can touch everyone's legs and feet, they all lift them nicely for me, at liberty, with no treats. If I don't go out early to halter them though, as soon as they see him coming, they cannot be caught. It's fascinating.

While in his halter, Blu was hanging out and learning how to not walk on his lead:

I kept putting the lead doubled across his back so it didn't drag but he managed to get it on the ground repeatedly. I figured I would let him and watched him start to figure out where his feet should go and how to not step on the thing.

Brad caught a photo of the mom and baby out the kitchen window:

Last weekend we had inches of rain, about 6-7 we think. This feed bucket for Cash (our full sized boarded horse) is attached to the upper pasture fence. It has to be attached because the ponies and donkeys will flip it off if we don't. Anyway, it's our unofficial rain gauge. No trees near it, in the middle of the open:

Looks like more rain is coming our way, and it's so appreciated! I know we are headed into El Nino, and this is what Google says:

Yes, El Niño is not only on the way, but it is actively arriving and pacing to be potentially historic in strength. According to the NOAA Climate Prediction Center, there is a 97% chance it will persist through early spring 2027.

Sea surface temperatures in the equatorial Pacific have skyrocketed, with the latest July 2026 data revealing anomalies already exceeding +3.1ºF to 3.8ºF. Climate models suggest this event could easily peak as a "Super El Niño," potentially rivaling or exceeding the most powerful events on record.

Expected Impact on North Carolina

While El Niño is a global event, its local impacts for Apex and the broader Southeast typically become most evident during the cooler months:

Late Summer / Fall: It heavily suppresses Atlantic hurricane activity. Stronger upper-level wind shear cuts off tropical systems before they can easily organize and approach the East Coast.

Winter 2026–2027: It typically supercharges the southern jet stream. For central North Carolina, this means a much higher probability of a wetter, stormier, and more active winter pattern.

Happy to have it! It will be a great fall to plant some trees and more perennials. With all the rain, I wasn't able to continue working on the big bed by the pond, looks like Saturday is the day to at least get the cardboard/paper down, dirt, and then wood chips before yet another set of wet days descends upon us!

A COUPLE OF SWEET MEMORIES:

I still feel this way about the tractor, all smiles:

Rayn LOVED her trimmer. She was special:

HOW TO WORK WITH ME

Equine Partnered Coaching! With horses (early morning appointments in the summer), without horses, or online, your choice.

Neurofeedback Train your brain to calm and ease. The most common response I hear about neurofeedback is, "I'm so much less reactive in my life!" It really does smooth out the sharp spikes. Super helpful if your world feels harsh and spiky right now.

Reiki Another way to facilitate relaxation, calm, healing. If the weather is nice, you can choose outside, or outside in the herd (this is an early morning appointment) and of course in my office is always available :-)

And Women's Circles! I've updated my website yet again so read up and then contact me if you want to talk about joining my Women's Circles!

Wednesday Women's Circle has a waiting list, I will add you to it if you'd like. Newer people do indeed get in occasionally, as sometimes the people higher on the list end up with upcoming vacations, too busy at work, or just life is life-ing.

Tuesday Women's Circle, runs 11am—1pm, Aug 4—Sept 8, the 6 weeks is $210, contact me if you're interested, there is one more spot left!

Monday online art class via Zoom. Ongoing, every Monday, 7:30-9pmET. $35 There isn't a public link for this one but you can contact me for the supply list and link here. I teach you something fun in watercolor or mixed media. It's a low key, jammies kind of class. Right now it's small so you get more one on one instruction if you want it.

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If you want the full post (with all the funnies), sign up for my Saturday morning newsletter here, it's free!

Hope you all have a great week!

Thank you for reading :-)

Baby spoons and ice cream bowls

Happy Saturday friends!

Let's start with my silly ponies and donkeys! I sent the video above to my fellow TBAH (Touched By A Horse) coaches, many of us have these heavy foam filled cubes for our coaching work. The cube lives under that pavilion and lately I've been finding it all around the lower pasture:

I figured one of the horses or donkeys had to be doing it, probably the donkeys since they are so playful and enjoy carrying toys around. Never could catch them until this week!

And then, not to be outdone in funny naughtiness, the ponies (probably Tori) decided to pull hay out of the storage area. Half a loose bale and then an entire bale with it's strings on. They drug it like 12 feet out!:

Brad had forgotten to close the gate the night before. Tori was like, "What?":

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It's garden bed building time again! Except this time it's at sunrise :-) This one will be called the "balloon bed" because I'm painting a hot air balloon garden pole and it will go in this bed. This one will have a ton of native plants in it and is the biggest so far: 50'x12' but it has to be to have American Holly as a back layer. Actually I'm not sure it's deep enough, but I'll start here!

I talked Brad into helping me and we started last Saturday morning, you can see the sun just peeking up:

I'm building a hugelkulture bed again, starting with logs (absorb rain like a sponge and then release it slowly), then sticks and leaves (that I scooped out of the forest), dirt, wood chips. This creates a bed that needs less watering and with the logs, sticks, leaves, creates a compost rich bed over time all on its own. Because these logs were not decaying yet, I drilled holes into the biggest to help speed that along. I wasn't sure about taking the grass up, would the logs roll around if we didn't? Decided to do it (fairly quick work with a tractor) but wouldn't do it again—more work, and I think the logs would have been fine.

When you use a backhoe, this is the way it's set up, the front bucket (or forks in this case) on the ground as a stabilizer, the rear stabilizing backhoe legs down, and then the tractor is hoisted into the air. It made me laugh a little. It's floating!:

As always, lots of steps:

The logs came from pine trees that Brad cut down in the spring. They were growing on the dam and it's not safe to have trees growing like that. If there is a storm and they go down, they could leave a hole in the dam. Now they are being repurposed:

While Brad was scooping logs and dropping them into the bed he found a copperhead hiding away in a solar panel:

And this skin which looks really long but, from owning snakes in the past, I know their shed skin does tend to stretch a bit as they slide out of it:

I got to this point:

And then the next time I went out, the tractor battery was dead, argh:

And then it started to rain for several days and that was the end of that for now. NOT complaining!

Last week I shared this pic of the edge of the pond:

But with the several days of rain we've had/are still having (looks like about 4" so far), this same area now looks like this:

A couple of feet of shore is back under water! Yay! That feels so hopeful!

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We harvested 59 pumpkins from our volunteer pumpkin bed. It's very early for them, but being volunteers, they got an early start. So, they are in the lower garage curing (hardening up their skin) for now.

Next year I'm going to grow, or attempt to grow Rouge Vif D'Etampes. If you're a lover of pumpkin pie and you're local, I'll probably be giving away a bunch of them. Years ago, we belonged to a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) and they gave us one of these delicious pumpkins. Brad and I still talk about it! We made pumpkin creme brulée for Thanksgiving that year and it was incredible. Did I mention this before? Probably. That's how yummy it was.

ODDS AND ENDS

The rain is bringing a bunch of mushrooms :-)

I love the way new canna leaves come out:

Look closely, do you see the deer?

Got up late on Thursday morning because of the dark clouds, nothing woke me up :-) I walked across the bridge that goes from my bonus room bedroom to the stairs and this is how dark it was at 9am, sooo much rain, lovely:

Everyone getting in their electrolytes :-)

Paused my garden pole painting to make myself some plant markers, aren't they fun!

I'm really loving the catmint, the deer stay away from it and they are such nicely mounding plants!

And finally...you will laugh...but that's ok, it makes me laugh too:

The search for my childhood spoon is finally over! When my brother and I were babies, my parents had several "baby spoons" that they used to feed us. As we grew up, these were our favorite spoons to eat ice cream with. When we left the house, they were still with Mom and Dad but somewhere over the years, they disappeared and Michael and I were bummed. A couple of years ago I searched for them online but only ran across short fat ones (ew) or plastic ones (double ew). But this week! OMG! I found them here, they are called "Oneida feeder spoons" and they look EXACTLY like the ones we had growing up. I also bought these little 8oz bowls to use with my baby spoons and was ridiculously happy this morning when I had my yogurt and granola!

HOW TO WORK WITH ME

Equine Partnered Coaching! With horses (early morning appointments in the summer), without horses, or online, your choice.

Neurofeedback Train your brain to calm and ease. The most common response I hear about neurofeedback is, "I'm so much less reactive in my life!" It really does smooth out the sharp spikes. Super helpful if your world feels harsh and spiky right now.

Reiki Another way to facilitate relaxation, calm, healing. If the weather is nice, you can choose outside, or outside in the herd (this is an early morning appointment) and of course in my office is always available :-)

And Women's Circles! I've updated my website yet again so read up and then contact me if you want to talk about joining my Women's Circles!

Wednesday Women's Circle has a waiting list, I will add you to it if you'd like. Newer people do indeed get in occasionally, as sometimes the people higher on the list end up with upcoming vacations, too busy at work, or just life is life-ing.

Tuesday Women's Circle, runs 11am—1pm, Aug 4—Sept 8, the 6 weeks is $210, contact me if you're interested, there is one more spot left!

Monday online art class via Zoom. Ongoing, every Monday, 7:30-9pmET. $35 There isn't a public link for this one but you can contact me for the supply list and link here. I teach you something fun in watercolor or mixed media. It's a low key, jammies kind of class. Right now it's small so you get more one on one instruction if you want it.

This coming week 7/27, we paint a little 5x7" koi:

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If you want the full post (with all the funnies), sign up for my Saturday morning newsletter here, it's free!

Hope you all have a great week!

Thank you for reading :-)

All of my art and writing is made with human intelligence!

If a friend forwarded you this post, you can subscribe to my full version of the Saturday morning newsletter that will be emailed to you by clicking here.

"And lo, they did proclaim..."

Happy Saturday friends!

I'm gearing up for 5am starts this weekend, I am so over this heat. I have a bunch of stuff that I want in the ground and I'm debating: do I want to get up extra early and start the process of creating my next big garden bed or just give up and wait until September? As you know, gardening is an extreme sport to me but, how extreme? My body got used to moving and working again and it doesn't like the idea of stopping!

Last weekend, I picked up a bunch of new native plants from home growers around the area. So much better deals than if you go to a nursery! Mountain mint, false blue indigo, saltmarsh mallow, sweetspire, spiderwort, the list goes on. I also found three more varieties of canna because I'm so in love with Mom's giant orange one (which is close to 10' now!) I'd really like to get all these into the ground, this pic shows about three quarters of what I need to plant:

Brad said he would (begrudgingly) get up with me...

Mom's cannas now:

I've water propagated some of my huge perennial lantana. With the drought they don't have the masses of flowers they usually do:

But someday the rain will return right? Right??

Here are the babies:

I'm excited to plant another big bed of them this fall, well, what will eventually become a big bed anyway!

The "Native Plant Police" will not be happy with me but pffftttt 😜 my farm, my flowers, bug off! I can't post butterfly pics on the lantana Nextdoor anymore without someone stating the obvious, "Not native."

Yes Brittany, you are correct. 🙄😁

Remember Game of Thrones when they paraded Circe naked through the streets with Hannah Waddington's character clanging the bell and chanting, "Shame. Shame. Shame." That's the Natives Plant Police silent mantra lol

😂

Speaking of natives, I found out that these cannas might be! There are only a couple varieties that are and I assumed they weren't. Dug into some research, because that's how my brain likes to roll and found that they have the flowers that are like a native Golden Canna (canna flaccida) which sometimes have spots in the throat:

and the seed pod shape of a Water Canna (canna glauca):

So, either there are two varieties and I've never noticed, or they are some old unknown non-sterile hybrid, or the two natives married and had a baby. All a possibility. I will be keeping an eye on them to see if I can figure out this little mystery.

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Walked out of the garage to the sidewalk along the house and almost stepped on this plain bellied water snake. It zipped off when I jumped back. Big but harmless!

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Had another visit from my umbrella loving tree frog. It fell out of the umbrella once again, so now I tip it over first before opening. Of course it's not been in there again LOL

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We have great blue herons all the time at our pond, but rarely snowy egrets:

Maybe it's happier that the pond is shrinking and there is a little beach now? We've been here five years and have never seen it this low:

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When I was out watering one morning I was visited by a five lined skink who seemed to be interested in the water I was spraying:

I sprayed a perimeter of water around him and he stayed still. I let the water mist over him lightly and he stayed still. It's been soooo hot. I sprayed more water around him, enough to pool a bit in the brick grout. And then he did this a few times:

He scooched his head in the water! Awwwww! When I posted it on Nextdoor someone said they did a little research and found that they do drink water but they also absorb it through their skin. Cool. I also filled up a little plant saucer with water, just in case it was too far to the pond for them.

This little one visited right after the bigger one, they have blue tails when they are young:

This is just a short post for this week, maybe my brain is too fried to think and it's too hot to take a bunch of pics! It might (because who can trust the forecast) cool down into the high 80s next week, fingers crossed!

Oh, wait! Did you guys see that there is a remake of Little House on the Prairie? OMG! My Grandma Johnson (Dad's mom) was a third grade teacher and when I was in third she gave me the set of Little House books. I was in love. Still have them. It's no wonder I felt so at home when we moved to Colorado ;-) This sweet series brought back all the feels 💜

HOW TO WORK WITH ME

Equine Partnered Coaching! With horses (early morning appointments in the summer), without horses, or online, your choice.

Neurofeedback Train your brain to calm and ease. The most common response I hear about neurofeedback is, "I'm so much less reactive in my life!" It really does smooth out the sharp spikes. Super helpful if your world feels harsh and spiky right now.

Reiki Another way to facilitate relaxation, calm, healing. If the weather is nice, you can choose outside, or outside in the herd (this is an early morning appointment) and of course in my office is always available :-)

And Women's Circles! I've updated my website yet again so read up and then contact me if you want to talk about joining my Women's Circles!

Wednesday Women's Circle has a waiting list, I will add you to it if you'd like. Newer people do indeed get in occasionally, as sometimes the people higher on the list end up with upcoming vacations, too busy at work, or just life is life-ing.

Tuesday Women's Circle, runs 11am—1pm, Aug 4—Sept 8, the 6 weeks is $210, contact me if you're interested, there is one more spot left!

Monday online art class via Zoom. Ongoing, every Monday, 7:30-9pmET. $35 There isn't a link for this one but you can contact me for the supply list and link here. I teach you something fun in watercolor or mixed media. It's a low key, jammies kind of class. Right now it's small so you get more one on one instruction if you want it.

---

If you want the full post (with all the funnies), sign up for my Saturday morning newsletter here, it's free!

Hope you all have a great week!

Thank you for reading :-)

All of my art and writing is made with human intelligence!

If a friend forwarded you this post, you can subscribe to my full version of the Saturday morning newsletter that will be emailed to you by clicking here.