Summer is peaking here in Portland and our sustained 90+ degree days have been fueling all these hot crops I never use to succeed with back when I lived on the Humboldt Coast.

Just brought in a beautiful little crop of potatoes too.

I know the time I spend growing food could be traded for enough money to buy all this food from the store many times over (well, maybe not the tomatoes), but growing food brings me sanity, comfort, and meaning, which often feel in short supply in this modern life.

My garden is my sanctuary and place of respite, and reminds me that we can meet our own human needs when we have access to the resources, like land, that should be held in common and held sacred.

{More classes have been added since this entry was posted – Check out the classes page for an updated schedule!}

I’ve got a few fun opportunities for you to participate in coming up this summer! I’ll be joining The Herb Shoppe crew as a practitioner in their booth at the Mississippi Street Fair, offering 15-minute mini consultations! I’ll also be presenting a hands-on workshop on growing medicinal plant starts from seed and cuttings at The Portland Nursery on Stark Street. Stay tuned for more classes to be scheduled at The Herb Shoppe soon.

UPCOMING CLASSES AND EVENTS

Saturday, July 14, 2018 • 1-3pm: 

Mini Health Consultations at The Mississippi Street Fair 

Location: The Herb Shoppe booth, 3912 N Mississippi Ave, Portland, OR

Cost: By donation

Consult with Selena to illuminate patterns in your health and reveal your unique constitution using the practice of Ayurveda. Selena can offer simple herbal, diet, and lifestyle guidance to help you realign with your natural rhythms and feel your best.

Wednesdays, July 18-August 22, 2018 • Noon-4pm:

The Herban Resilience Class Series

Location: private garden in Outer SE Portland. Cost: $165-240 sliding scale.

Registration deadline July 13th. Click here to learn more!

Sunday, August 12, 2018 • 11am-1pmMedicinal Plant Propagation Workshop 

Location: The Portland Nursery, 5050 SE Stark St, Portland OR.  Cost: $5

Join us to discover how you can grow your own medicinal plant starts from seeds, cuttings and root divisions. You’ll learn the best way to propagate plants like lavender, rosemary, sage, skullcap, mint, bee balm and more, and will go home with a couple new plant babies to nurture.

We’ve reopened registration through Friday July 13th, and have set a new start date of July 18th!

Join us for our weekly series for lively and intimate conversation and hands-on exploration of health, resilience in a time of crisis, community collaboration, and healing with medicinal plants.

In a quiet backyard garden setting we’ll touch in weekly on medicinal plants you can easily cultivate and prepare into healing tonics for your friends, family, and neighbors. Partial scholarships available to anyone in need.

Learn more here, and join the conversation on Facebook here!

by adrienne maree brown

http://adriennemareebrown.net/

“we claim the power
of our outrageous grief
our righteous anger
our responsibility for our precious lives
our interconnected individual and collective joy
and our impossible magic

we embrace our edges
that they may teach us to grow
in right relationship to the living world
our human messiness
our weird and brilliant wonders
we know how to be
in so many incredible ways

with these gifts we can
foment a revolutionary now
that centers love, care, needs
creativity and magic

we plant the seeds of radical honesty
vulnerability, authenticity
and the kindness that eases inevitable change

we will not settle!
we will grow weirder and wilder
more interdependent
for our liberation
for our liberation
for our liberation!”

How will we claim our power today? How will we embrace our edges now? Let us foment this revolutionary now, together!

On a visit home to the bay area to wish grandma a great 80th birthday as well as to give my blessings to my best friend’s soon-to-be little baby, I took a walk in the hills above Palo Alto with my sister and her two daughters. I had the great fortune to come across a plant in those rolling oak meadows that I love very much – California pitcher sage. It’s a tad stinky, on edge of fetid like clary sage can be, and it also has a rich balsamic sage scent that carries the overall essence towards the pleasurable.

It has a large, stature, with white bell like flowers on the ends of semi-herbaceous stems.

You can grow this amazing  plant if you’re in the central California region- it’s easy to grow if you offer the conditions it loves – which include the gorgeous meadows edges along the hills encircling the bay area and likely beyond. Native Here Nursery offers plants for those of you in the East Bay – all their plants are propagated from locally collected seed, so each plant contributes to the overall genetic resilience of the species. A cousin, Lepichinia fragrans, occurs in Southern California.

I’ve never harvested it, as I’ve never found it in abundance – but the medicine I received from just a few minutes of inhaling its scent was all I needed to feel most blessed. Like its distant cousin white sage, it holds space for magic.

Click here to check out the current newsletter!

Learn about upcoming classes and current offerings ❤

Have you ever been fascinated by the alchemy of creating the perfect body cream? Join us as we demonstrate how to create a luscious rose water and shea body cream that nourishes the skin and delights the senses. All participants will take home a sample of the cream made in class.

Pre-registration through EventBrite offering sliding scale $10-$30. No one will be turned away for lack of sufficient funds.

Class takes place at The Herb Shoppe, at 3912 N. Mississippi Blvd.