Tag Archives: sage

It’s Apple Blossom Time

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Apple blossoms smell heavenly!

Photos by Enchanted Seashells

After a decent two inches of rain, our weather turned unseasonably warm, nearly eighty degrees, which totally confused my apple trees and they began to furiously bud and flower, at least a month sooner than normal.

It looks like we might receive a bit more rain in the next couple of weeks but I hope it stays warm-ish so that every blossom grows into a juicy, delicious apple.

Good news/bad news time…

It had been a while since I injured myself but that’s no longer the case. The upper garden is mostly planted with California native plants. When it rains, they go crazy because winter is their time to shine.

Flowering white sage

I noticed a white sage that needed to be pruned. As I ran down the steep set of stairs with a huge armful of freshly cut branches, I misjudged the distance because I couldn’t see where I was going, caught my shoe on the edge of a step, and before I could stop myself, I tumbled down to the ground.

This time I didn’t suffer any broken bones, just a sore shoulder (where I fell) and another injury to my knee (also where I fell). As luck would have it, this was the same knee that has already has a torn MCL, so now I’m limping AND again wearing a brace.

The good news is that the garden is nice and tidy…Happy Monday!

White Sage

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Thanks to all the rain we had this year, all of my sage plants are healthy and flowering, but this white sage is especially full of delicate lavender-colored sticky blooms.

In fact, the entire plant is more than six feet tall and equally as wide.

This is the variety of sage that’s made into smudging bundles tied with string. “Saging” is the term for burning the leaves of the white sage to cleanse, purify, and protect by dissipating negative energy and spirits. 

Smudging (or smoke cleansing) with white sage is sacred to many Indigenous nations of California and Mexico,

I also learned that scientists have observed that sage can clear up to ninety-four percent of airborne bacteria and disinfect the air.

My method is to gather the leaves that naturally fall to the ground and create a smudge stick from them. Sometimes I’ll add lavender, but I prefer the fragrance of white sage all by itself.

Have you ever smudged or is it just a SoCal thing?

Burning down the house

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(To fellow WP bloggers, this is the weirdest thing. Apparently this post did not publish, or it published in a draft format that was not at all what my final result looked like to me, and that’s why I’ve reposted it. Strange limbo zone!!)
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Do you smell the smoke?

It’s a rainy SoCal day and I was in a state of cleaning bliss, dusting and polishing and organizing.

I lit dried sage from the garden to smudge in a metal bowl on top of a mirror on my bedside table to bring a little pungent sagey/outdoorsy fragrance.

It seemed safe, right? Metal bowl placed not directly on wood, but on a mirror to protect it.

Apparently NOT safe.

I continued cleaning the other rooms, enjoying the sagey perfume. After a while, I thought that it seemed to be smoking for much much longer than the amount of leaves in the bowl and as I walked toward my bedroom, I was engulfed in smoke!

A MAJOR smudge haha.

I ran over to the window which was closed ‘cos of the rain, and slid it completely open, then to my beside table where I could see the mirror had cracked and the metal bowl had fused to the wood and was too hot to touch.

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The table was literally seconds away from going up in flames!

The smoke was no longer from the sage; the antique and very dry wood was burning.

Oh, and somehow the carpet had a few burn holes too.

Now there’s a nasty burn mark on my mom’s antique bedside table,img_6903

It took about an hour for the smoke to dissipate. There’s not a smoke alarm in my bedroom and it hadn’t yet reached the dining room area where there are TWO smoke alarms, so that’s why I was oblivious.

Well, one reason why I was oblivious.

The other reason is that cleaning puts me into a Zen-like trance and I was lost in my own little world.

Moral of the story? DO NOT put sage in a metal bowl on top of a mirror on top of a wooden surface. EVER.

I repainted this room recently, and noticed that it no longer reeks of fresh paint, so there’s a sort of silver lining???

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