My exact meditation & journaling practice

Over the years I’ve meditated and written in my journal. As a yoga teacher, I dipped my toe into meditation because that was part of the whole picture.

As I’ve traveled through life, I can’t say how many times the importance of meditation has come up for me: from business heroes and mentors, from athletes, from ALL sorts of people.

As an ex-yoga teacher, mom and entrepreneur, I now view meditation as the most important part of any self-care practice. Why? There’s lots of science behind it! I’m not a science writer BUT I’ll get to that later. And from experiencing my own .

Now let’s just clarify - I am not an expert. I am not a guru or even an accomplished meditator! I meditate 10 -15 minutes a day. Anyone can do that. I am not special!

So here are the steps to get you going:

1) Set a time each day that will work for you. Before bed (this is me), when you wake, during your lunch break.

2) Start with 1 minute. Or 2 minutes, if you’re really feeling mighty. Seriously! Do it.

3) Each day, add a minute until you’re up to your desired time limit.

4) After you meditate, pull out your journal and set your timer again. Journal for the same amount of time as you meditate.

5) Start your journal with 3 Good Things (just write down three good things from your day). This gets the pen moving quickly.

6) Next, show appreciation to those in your life, starting with yourself. I know there are lots of people to feel appreciation for, but just choose 3-4 per day, STARTING WITH YOURSELF.

Actually write out: “I appreciate myself for writing and publishing that blog post I’ve been thinking about” OR “I appreciate my husband for serving me a coffee on the couch this morning” (yes, this actually happens to me!).

7) Then just write. About feelings and observations. About epiphanies had during your day or during your meditation. About something you’re working through. About a new belief you want to have about yourself or someone else. Just to give you a few ideas.

8) Tools to make all this easier and more fun? There’s an app for that! Insight Timer. It’s amazing.

9) Insight Timer favorite meditations and content creators to follow:

• Dr. Karolien Notebaert. Listen to her TEDx Talk (available on InsightTimer). So this is where I get back to the science part. Listen to this TED Talk to get the low down on what’s really happening in your brain! Then meditate to her “Body Scan to Let Go of Thoughts & Rise & Shine”.

• Jack Kornfield. Listen to his “Breathing Meditation” and his “Loving Awareness: Mindfulness of Breath and What is Present”

• Sarah Blondin. Listen to her “Loving and Listening to Yourself” and “Remembering Your Worth"

10) Don’t get lost in the app - find and follow a few people (like my favorites above) and stick with it.

11) And finally, anyone can meditate. Everyone’s mind wanders constantly. The practice is acknowledging the wandering and then redirecting it back to your body or your breath.

Ok, now you’re ready to go.

Comment below to let me know how your practice is going. And remember it’s called a practice because it IS a practice.

Some days suck.

Some days you feel amazing.

But I know from experience, this will take you places.

My House is a Mess

Recently my husband and I took the “Working Genius” quiz, formulated by Pat Lencioni. Which I highly recommend and sort of blew our minds.

It was of little surprise that we both do not thrive in the genius of “Tenacity”. Finishing tasks to the end brings neither of us any joy. Paying bills? Freaking boring. Making the kitchen sparkle? It’s fun to start, but seriously? Not interested.

I thrive on imagining and starting things and figuring out how to make things better.

He thrives on decision making and galvanizing (or bringing people together).

Unfortunately this means our house is a disaster area most of the time. I still struggle with feeling like a complete failure when I sit back and take in my messy house. Shouldn’t any remotely responsible adult be able to keep a house clean?

To make things worse a neighbor girl and her mom popped by one day and neighbor girl exclaimed: “why is your house so messy?” Major shame trigger.

I curtly (hopefully not TOO curtly) told her that I don’t clean my house on the weekend. Which is mostly true - It’s not that I don’t clean. It’s that the cleaning is never finished and I just give up. Or I just don’t do - especially on the weekends. Because really - why waste your time when you could be out playing or gardening or doing ANYTHING else?

So you’re probably wondering what this has to do with flowers?

Yeah, I was too until I heard someone say the reason they love flowers in their home is because it makes their house feel clean even when it’s not.

When I heard that I perked up! First off - there’s someone else without a clean home?!

And second - they’re SO RIGHT. Although I hadn’t put my finger on it - I too feel a sense of peace amidst the clutter, toys, crayons and laundry when a vase of flowers are in the room.

Isn’t that amazing?!

Do you feel this?

How do you feel when you have a vase of flowers in your home?

If you now know you NEED flowers CLICK HERE to learn all about our summer bouquet subscription!

Big hugs to you mamas out there.

With Mother’s Day right around the corner, I’m taking a wander back through the years to when I became a mama. And thinking on the ways in which mama-ing and farming are intertwined and connected.

If you’re a mama, you know how everything changes once you have a little one join the family. Your time is no longer just yours, your body is no longer just yours, your dreams no longer just involve you! It’s an exciting, scary, and beautiful time.

The first night Llewyn was with us after an amazing morning birth he nursed continuously from 9 pm until 4 am. At one point I went back into our bedroom (I had made up a snuggle/nursing/area at the top of the stairs that had good lighting and felt cozy and airy at the same time), laid tiny Llewyn on the bed, and said to Jason, “I can’t do this.” He looked at me and said gently, “you have to, you're his mama”

Holy crap! Yes, he was right.

The next morning I relayed to my midwife the nursing marathon in hopes to get some sort of sympathy. None there either. She cheered and said, “Great!”.

Seriously?! Do you know what it’s like to nurse continuously for 7 hours?!

One of many sweet baby snuggles.

As I look back, that first night became good training, and a good metaphor, for parenting, for farming, and for life.

There are always things that come up that seem impossible, that you “just can’t do”. Until you do them. And then, you’re like - OK!

In farming, you’re considered a “beginning farmer” whether you have 0-10 years of farming experience. So after 9 years of farming, you are still a beginner! For some reason, I like this. It keeps you humble and makes mistakes and failures feel more acceptable. Because even though failures happen at every level of expertise, they are especially OK when you’re a beginner.

For some reason, I think of parenting in the same light - at 6 years in, I am still a beginner. Lighten up on yourself! Give yourself a break! You just started this journey! And it is not easy. Though at the same time it is beautiful and tender and joyful and fun.

So to all you mamas out there (beginner, intermediate, and expert): here’s to this incredible journey! It’s OK to make mistakes and to have failures. It’s OK to feel anything and everything about your mothering experience.

When Llewyn was born I was gifted with an incredible community of new mamas. We’d gather weekly in a small room in the back of a baby-mama retail store to talk about some deep stuff, all facilitated by a pre or post-partum professional. They weren’t scared to get us to talk real and open up. We spent two entire sessions telling our birth stories.

We talked about ALL the fears, the self-doubt, the partner frustrations, the loss of self, the nitty-gritty hard stuff. And what I learned the most was that all these feelings were NORMAL. Nothing was wrong with me or anyone else in the class. And by sharing we were helping everyone else feel normal too.

As I grow as a person in my business I’m learning this too - the hard feelings of business and life are normal! It’s not normal to feel good all the time. It’s OK to feel scared, to have self-doubt. As silly as this sounds, I didn’t know this! I thought everyone around me was just cruising through life happy and content and thoroughly self-confident. While I was the only one feeling ALL the feels.

So to wrap up this pre-Mother’s Day ramble, I just want you to know: you’re not alone. In your mama-ing, in your doubt, in your fears, in your dream-chasing, in your disappointments.

It’s awesome to celebrate the joy and love in life. LET’S CELEBRATE!

It’s also awesome to voice the hard stuff. Because it makes it feel less hard and makes us feel more connected. And who doesn’t want that?!

Me and a sleepy new-born Llewyn walking the road by our WIsconsin farm in 2015.

Garden Picture Escape

I just want to share some beauty with you! Here goes…

A few of my early dahlia varieties! Can I just say, I am loving these :)

Ready for bouquet making! My backyard gets transformed into a floral studio at least once per week.

Poppies! These are some of my favorite blooms this summer. They are bringing me SO MUCH JOY!!

A quick afternoon harvest. During the peak blooming months I’m harvesting 3 times per week.

A seasonal bridal bouquet using stock, ranunculus, peonies and ladies mantle.

June 15th Two Minute Garden Tour

As the days grow longer the garden is slowly coming along. Every year there is a point a few weeks after transplanting out that everything really starts to take off!

Here you can see that in the first part of the video. Most of these plants were planted over a month ago. And they’re getting huge!!

I finished planting (or at least filled all the beds) a couple weeks ago. Now I’ll just fill in as things get cut.

I had a super successful tulip harvest this year and sold every bloom through my home delivery program (and one wedding). What fun!! Thanks to EVERYONE who supported the roll out of home deliveries :) I’m planning to continue it through the summer as long as I have blooms available after my subscription customers are taken care of :)

So without further delay - here is my digital June 15th garden tour!

May 12th Two Minute Garden Tour!

This summer I’m inviting you to join my digital garden tours! I’ll walk you through the garden (2 minutes at a time) to showcase what’s up on the farm.

Here’s my first one, taken on May 12th. About half the garden is planted and irrigation is set up.

The garden always looks a little worrisome this time of year. Plants get a bit shocked going in the ground and every year I worry!

But I promise, by my next tour, things will have perked up and in no time I’ll be sharing some gorgeous blooms with you!

Enjoy :)

How I started flower farming

Want to know how all this started?! Thought it would be fun to indulge in enjoyable recollection of past events by taking you through my farming start-up years.

Read on to find out how this all began. I’ll take you back to 2013. Back to our time just outside Madison, WI. Back to a wild, homestead turned commercial farm.

But my farming actually goes back even further, to when I was a child. I’ve always had the plant-lover in me, even from a very young age. I remember insisting on having my own garden, apart from the family plot. And one of my favorite crops: strawflowers! I still grow them to this day. They remind me of being a kid and the magic of growing - from seed to flower.

My very first job was in a greenhouse. I have very fond memories of biking 10+ miles (I couldn’t yet drive) from Eagle River to Muldoon to work at the now-gone Alaska Greenhouse.

I was all set to take this passion further into college but changed course at the last minute from Sustainable Ag to Ecology and Art. In retrospect what a perfect major for a gardener. Being a gardener is part artist, part scientist, part naturalist.

Here I am with one of our laying hens. In addition to flowers we raised 200 + laying hens, turkeys, meat chickens, sheep and pigs!

But honestly I lost touch with gardening for some time and pursued other interests. It wasn’t until I found myself living in the midwest that reconnected with gardening and farming in a big way.

My husband and I moved onto a 40 acre farm in south-central Wisconsin in the summer of 2013.

This was after he worked on a variety of farms in the Madison area. And boy, does he have some wild stories to tell - from milking cows on a raw-milk dairy to holing up in a donut shop to avoid a tornado on the way to his job as manager of a vegetable CSA farm.

His love of animals and the desire to work outside was the motivator in making this farm happen. We started with a flock of 200 laying hens, pictured above on a a property we found to rent on craigslist for dirt cheap.

As a life-long gardener, I was thrilled with the opportunity to go from having my neighborhood community garden plot to having ACRES to grow.

Soon we added meat chickens, turkeys and pigs. Sheep came soon after as a means to mow the pasture on our property.

8 foot tall ragweed in the perennial flower bed :(

There was a small perennial flower garden on the property that was covered in 8 foot tall rag weed. I conned my mom to help and we practically broke our backs weeding that thing. In fact, most of the growing area on this property was covered in ragweed. We weeded and weeded and weeded.

This was my first taste at flower farming and I loved it!

A pic of our market stand. Flower bouquets and stems by the each on the right.

The following year, I planted a patch of annual flowers and grew for a flower subscription and a tiny new farmers market in Madison.

Spring planting! There’s always so much hope and potential that comes with planting. Plus sore backs and endless work.

Here’s me and my farm dog Max, netting my first bed of snapdragons.

Our son was born on the farm during that third growing season. What a joy it was to have him come into the world.

Living on a 40 acre farm, working off farm and trying to grow a family was a lot!

When our son was 8 months we made the painstaking decision to leave the farm and move back to Alaska.

This was one of the toughest decisions I’ve ever made. I’ll probably never forget Jason and I walking the rural road with our dogs running and baby in the backpack, ruminating on this decision over and over.

This picture just sings BOUNTY! You can see our turkeys in movable houses to the left. And there’s me taking stock of my zinnia bed at the height of summer.

Here’s me harvesting for market. And there’s the farmhouse in the back. Our son entered the world in that house with the help of three fabulous midwives.

After leaving the farm I knew I had to continue growing. I just had no idea how this would happen. After a hiatus from farming and growing a small home garden in our yard I discovered that people were farming in the city! Who knew?

Llewyn reaping the benefits of a small backyard garden.

I poured over google earth and online property tax info to find the dream properties in my neighborhood.

I wrote a few letters to the land owners got interest! An amazing couple was open to having me garden on their vacant lot!

And so began Turnstone Farm 2.0 - an urban flower farm. The first two years I also grew herbs and salad mix but have since decided to focus my growing strictly on flowers.

My current flower farm is a small plot on a vacant lot.

So what’s next for the farm?

I’m always looking for more land. I have my eye on a few properties in the neighborhood. And wouldn’t turn down something rural again if an opportunity came.

But more than thinking about expanding the footprint of my tiny farm, I want to 1) make a profitable business, 2) pay myself a living wage 3) grow demand for Alaskan flowers 4) make really happy customers!

The urban flower farm in full bloom.