The Calendar Pages

Using The Calendar Pages

Designing sustainability and resiliency is a holistic approach to life. Part of this involves conscious consideration in how we create, modify, and manage our living spaces and work spaces. The goal for both sustainability and resiliency is to work towards spaces that are self regulating. It is also important that we produce the food that we need to survive close to where we live, ideally in your own yard or space.

The calendar pages are designed to give you one piece of the information to help with that. On the top right hand side of each month, you will find the length of daylight and the angle of the sun at the beginning of the month. I have done this for roughly central Iowa in the US, but this will hold roughly true for anywhere on the north 42nd parallel. North and south of this line will require some adjustment. This is critical information for designing both garden spaces and structures to make them environmentally efficient.

When you are designing most structures, your highest efficiency for both heating and cooling in temperate climates will be to place on the south side (in the northern hemisphere) to collect winter sun and then to have those windows shaded during hot weather.

This also helps you in the garden. By knowing where your sun is going to be, you can extend the season for both heat loving crops and cool loving crops. By predicting where the sun will be, you can build cold frames to collect that sun for the warm crops. By knowing where the shade is, you can extend the cool season crops into the summer by taking advantage of the shade.

Here are your calendars for the week.

Journal Prompts for the week

The Plant Profile

While I am not an expert on every plant that I will profile, I am trying to provide a complete profile for each plant. For the plants that I know, I will supplement the research information with my experience as a mid-western US gardener and as someone who has gardened in pots in an RV. For those plants that I don’t personally know, this is information that I need as well. My primary focus for 2025 is on useful plants that can be raised in almost any circumstances, from an RV or apartment to a small yard garden, to a permaculture garden.

Each profile includes as much information that I can find and is organized in a reference template that will be the same for each plant.

This is what you can expect to find in each PDF profile:

Identification

Plant growth and the conditions that the plant prefers

How the plant matures and develops

How to use the plant

The medicine and magic of the plant.

And when I know, suitable varieties for small spaces.

Any nutritional, medicinal, and magical properties that I include are intended for your informational purposes only. Always check with a reputable medical provider or herbalist before using an herb medicinally.

The version of the profile that I include in the PDF files here are a manuscript version. I welcome and encourage your input as I edit them for final publication.

5 Minute Hack

I learned this one from a mistake that my mother made.

First the story:

My mother had a huge garden when I was growing up. She also had a lot of old lilac bushes near the garden. She had a habit of breaking off the lilac twigs to mark her garden rows in the spring. Well, one spring was cold and rainy and the bushes broke dormancy late that year and the ground stayed cold and wet. When it finally did warm up, those twigs that she stuck in the ground to mark her rows started to grow. I surprised her. It turns out that lilac is one of the shrubs that propagates very easily from cuttings, and it just takes a few minutes. This works very easily with lilac, willow, and roses (and a few more).

In late February or early March in my USDA zone, before the bushes break dormancy, but when you start to see the leaf buds form, take a 6 to 8 inch cutting from the end of the branches. Place the cut ends in damp sand in a cool spot ( 50* F to 60* F is ideal). Keep the sand moist until leaf growth begins, then check the cuttings for roots. If they have roots, pot them into individual pots until spring. If you have rooting hormone, treating the cut ends with rooting hormone increases the rooting percentage.

The added bonus: If you use a pretty container for rooting, willow and lilac are beautiful as they leaf out.

Here is a link to my propagation tray article on Buy Me a Coffee.