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GARDEN PARTY PREP WITH the Goddess Gardener, cynthia Brian

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Empowerment
GARDEN PARTY PREP WITH the Goddess Gardener, cynthia Brian

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Digging Deep with Goddess Gardener, Cynthia Brian
Azaleas do well in shady areas and will bloom profusely. Photos Cynthia Brian

“I was reared in the garden, you know.” ~ Emily Dickenson
If you are like most people who have been hibernating and following CDC social distancing protocols during the pandemic, you are probably itching for a gathering of friends and family. If you have been vaccinated (and, I hope you have), small outdoor get-togethers without masks are considered relatively safe.
Is your garden and patio area ready for a party? While many people have baked bread, learned to crochet, or tackled puzzles, I have been busy helping clients prepare their landscapes for small garden shindigs as well as creating quiet spaces as a peaceful, restorative sanctuary.
You don’t have to do an entire expensive makeover to make your place look pretty and presentable. There are several ways to get a streamlined look on a budget that you can afford.
I call these “garden hacks” and I’ll share suggestions with you.
Walk around your exterior perimeter and take notes. What areas need more TLC? Do you have debris anywhere or everywhere? What about weeds, broken or dead branches, or an overabundance of fallen leaves? The first thing you want to do is clean. Remove whatever is broken and not fixable, recycle or re-purpose other items. Rake the leaves and put them in the compost pile or green bin. With pruning shears, cut any dead branches on shrubs or trees and remove dead or dry foliage.
Next, tackle the weeds. If weeds are growing in beds, it is best to pull them by hand. If they are on a hillside or area without many other plants, you might be able to use a weed-eater. My preference is always hand-pulling to get the roots. Pulling out the roots ensures that they won’t sprout again this season.
Once your garden is free of weeds, check the soil. If it is hard and compacted, it behooves you to bring in bags of enriched compost before planting. Soil is the foundation of verdant growth. With our glorious spring weather, blooming flowers, trees, and shrubs are in abundance at nurseries and garden centers. Before it gets too hot, you’ll want to add any shrubs or color spots. Until plantings are established, you will need to water deeply and often. I prefer to plant colorful perennials, biennials, and bulbs that will return in future seasons. Some of my favorites are azaleas, foxgloves, delphinium, lavender, roses, and calla lily, all available in several colors. To soften a fence or arbor, I recommend clematis, honeysuckle, or jasmine. Wisteria is a strong, spreading vine that requires heavy-duty support systems. Also, seek drought-tolerant species and succulents. In my garden, I like to create a painter’s palette of color with minimal spacing between plants, however, strategically placing just a few select plants is impressively impactful.
Ornamental grasses are easy to care for and add a natural stream-like flow to a garden. Clumping bamboo is excellent as a rustling screen that blows in the breeze. Both offer a feeling of serenity and calmness to any space.
After you have planted, you’ll want to top-dress with mulch to enhance the aesthetics, increase moisture retention, and minimize weed growth. You can buy wood chips in at least three different colors: red, black, and forest brown by the bag or you can order other varieties in bulk. Any flammable mulches such as chips, bark, straw, or pine needles must be distanced two feet from structures as per the fire ordinance. Gravel or rocks can be placed around the structure as a preventive measure.
Add steppingstones surrounded by small pebbles or pea gravel to enhance a dirt path. Gravel and rocks add texture, and the crunching sound is soothing. If your porch or deck needs refinishing and that project is not in your current plan or budget, buy inexpensive indoor/outdoor carpeting or rugs in natural tones to temporally cover the flaws and make walking comfortable and splinter-free.
When it comes to patio furniture, take an inventory of the condition of what you have. Can it last another summer with a bit of cleaning and updating? Do you need new pillows and pads, or can you just wash and refresh the ones you own? I recently worked on a project where the homeowners were going to discard their table and chairs because they were rusting. Their dilemma was that they didn’t have the time nor the money to invest in new patio furniture before a scheduled garden get-together for a few vaccinated friends. My suggestion was to use a little elbow grease: scrub, sand, and spray-paint. It took only a couple of hours, and the result was that the set looked brand new. Painting is one of the greatest hacks offering immediate, inexpensive results.
Another hack that I employ regularly is adding cut seafoam statice to area pots or beds where a little pizzaz is needed. Bunches of straw-like statice will hold their purple color for weeks without additional water. Shaded areas with comfortable seating invite a cooling, quieting, and relaxing experience. Umbrellas add sophistication to a patio and two or three strips of vintage- looking LED Edison-bulb lighting to provide a warm inviting glow in the evening. Lay a row of tube lights on the ground behind hedges for ethereal illumination.
The smart choice when planning the party bites is to offer individually cupped appetizers to eliminate people double-dipping. Home-grown (or farmers’ market) carrots, celery, and peppers cut into long slices standing on top of hummus in tiny tableware mount a pretty display as well as a nutritious one. Cones with charcuteries adorned with springs of rosemary, orange slices, and berries will entice any carnivore. For drinks, individual bottles or cans of favorite beverages will quench thirsty friends. Glasses can be marked with the names of the guests.
Finally, fresh, free-flowing flower arrangements picked from a profusion of blooms from your garden will be a conversation starter. The ones I created for the event were a mixture of calendula, Jupiter’s beard, Mexican sage, mixed with mock orange which added a heady perfume to the outdoor occasion. After the festivities, the bouquets became fragrant favorites indoors.
I was reared in the garden and am proud of being a nature lady. By using these simple hacks, you are ready to host your outdoor garden party with your vaccinated friends. Give it your best shot!
Happy Gardening. Happy Growing.
REMINDERS
– Compliance deadline for wildfire risk is June 1. Make sure to cut your tall grasses, prune tree limbs to a minimum of six feet from the ground and away from roofs. Keep two feet of combustible ground covers including bark or mulch away from structures. Gravel is a good medium to use in this area. Also, plantings need to have a one-foot clearance above the ground. Clean out gutters and roof area of debris. Trim trees away from chimneys and remove flammable liquids and other matter away from your home.
– Once your daffodils, tulips, woodland hyacinths, and Naked ladies’ foliage have dried, remove them from the plant. By allowing the leaves to yellow, the plant is receiving its nutrition to develop flowers for the next season. The leaves can be added to the compost pile.
– Keep a bucket in your shower and use the water on your indoor plants.
– Empty all outdoor vessels of standing water. Even a teacup saucer will breed mosquitoes.
– Snakes are now out and about. Garter, King, and gopher snakes are great friends to our gardens.
Calla lilies are elegant and flower annually. Photos Cynthia Brian
Purple statice fills the back of a former solar light pelican Photos Cynthia Brian
The former dirt path is improved with black pebbles, steppingstones, and lined with mulch. Photos Cynthia Brian
As a highlight to your vaccinated outdoor gathering, make charcuterie cones with a slice of orange and a sprig of rosemary. Photos Cynthia Brian
Before planting, starting to put mulch, mostly bare ground.
After planting with mulch the appearance is much more appealing.
The repainted table holds a loose arrangement picked from the garden: calendula, Mexican sage, Jupiter’s beard, and mock orange blossoms.
Sliced celery, peppers, and carrots in an individual cup of hummus are a tasty appetizer.
A blue clematis is a great addition to a fence or arbor. .
 Cynthia Brian in the spring garden with purple wisteria

Cynthia Brian, The Goddess Gardener, is available for hire to help you prepare for your spring garden. Raised in the vineyards of Napa County, Cynthia is a New York Times best-selling author, actor, radio personality, speaker, media and writing coach as well as the Founder and Executive Director of Be the Star You Are!r 501 c3. Tune into Cynthia’s StarStyler Radio Broadcast at www.StarStyleRadio.com. Buy copies of her best-selling books, including, Chicken Soup for the Gardener’s Soul, Growing with the Goddess Gardener, and Be the Star You Are! Millennials to Boomers at www.cynthiabrian.com/online-store. Receive a FREE inspirational music DVD. Hire Cynthia for writing projects, garden consults, and inspirational lectures. Cynthia@GoddessGardener.com www.GoddessGardener.com

Anti-vaxers are trying to kill us all

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Variety
Anti-vaxers are trying to kill us all

When it comes to those that oppose mandatory vaccinations, you’ll only get half the truth on one side of the argument.

Here you’ll find the other side of the untold story.

A local TV news show did a couple of segments on the anti-vaxer debate, providing interviews with a family that can’t have their children vaccinated for Medical reasons and another interview with a family that doesn’t get their children vaccinated for Religious or Personal reasons.  Both made good arguments and stated well their fears associated with their concerns.

In the end, you felt sorry for the “Medical” exempted family because they had NO choice but to be vulnerable to what they believe to be seriously threatening diseases.  As for the family that voluntarily choose to withhold vaccinating, I went away with the thought that they are doing this for selfish, unwarranted, unloving toward others and their own children reasons.  The “anti-vaxer” family were “the bad guys”.

One of the wisest men to have ever lived said, one side of the story seems right until you hear the other side of the story.  The famed Paul Harvey had “…the rest of the story”.

In this article, I’m going to attempt to put this in a proper perspective, something the TV show DIDN’T do.

So I went to the news channels website to obtain the “numbers” of students in all the USD 259 public school district that broke down the numbers of children not vaccinated for both reasons.

USD 259 has 51,330 students grades 1-12. A total of just 444 students not vaccinated for a percentage of just 0.86%. The ratio for medical vs religious exemptions both here in Wichita, KS and nationwide is 40:60, that’s 178 medically exempt to 266 religiously exempted.

Elementary or Grade schools have 305 exempted students for both categories out of just over 27,500 students representing 1.1%. That equates to 122 vs 183. 183 divided by 6 grades equals just 31 students per grade attending more than 2 dozen schools puts the average number of religiously exempted students at just over 1 student per grade per school, NOT 1 student per class but rather per grade where there are multiple classes per grade.

Are you starting to get the picture? That’s hardly the invasion that is painted in the mainstream media or by the pro-vaxer community, that the anti-vaxers are gonna kill us all and bring back highly communicable, previously eradicated diseases.

Here’s what I find VERY interesting. There seems to be a mindset among people of the left leaning persuasion, especially seen here in the vaccination debate. If you are in favor of freedom to choose and liberty, and you believe that vaccinations (which btw has been proven to have adverse reactions to and in some cases causing death), that you should have the freedom to choose NOT to put you or your family at risk regardless of how small that risk may be. As opposed to the pro-vaxers who want to force ALL people (except for medical exemption) to get the vaccinations. If the anti-vaxers had the same mindset, they would be trying to force no one to get the vaccinations, but they don’t and aren’t interested in doing that.

You’d think that the pro-vaxers would be ecstatic when a disease breaks out as that would kill off the anti-vaxers, that would serve them right.

Now let’s look at just how “dangerous” the diseases are that children get vaccinated for. The Measles, Mumps, Rubela (German Measles), Chickenpox and Pertusis (Whooping Cough) all have very low mortality rates and are considered “inconvenient” diseases, meaning their threat of death level is very low.

Measles and German Measles is just 1 out of 6700 die (0.015%), Chickenpox is 1 out of 40,000 (0.0025%),  Mumps is 1 out of 8,000 (0.0125%) and Pertusis 1 out of 2,400 (0.04%).

The following are caused by their associated virus: Measles, Mumps, Rubella (MMR), Chickenpox which are all just inconvenient illnesses with extremely low mortality rates and had been declining for the first half of the 20th century primarily due to better living conditions and better nutrition. Polio, Hep B, and Influenzas are also viruses.

The following are caused by bacteria: Tetanus, Diphtheria, and Pertusis (TDaP). These bacterial infections do have a significantly higher mortality rate than their viral counterparts above and were also on the decline even before the introduction of their vaccines.

In all fairness to vaccines, it would appear that they have brought many of the diseases they immunize against to extremely low case counts and deaths, including the complete eradication of Smallpox from the entire planet.

But to continue with some vaccinations doesn’t make sense to make them mandated. For instance, Polio has been eradicated from North and South American continents, Europe, most of Asia and most of Africa. The last polio in the wild case in the U.S. was 1979 so if families wanted to abstain from the Polio vaccine, and they had knowledge of the Dr. Klenner mega-dosing treatment that cured 60 of 60 cases that came into his office in 1948-49, it would stand to reason that they should be able to opt out of that mandated vaccine.

The emotional volatility of mandated vaccines is not new.  Dr. Edward Jenner conducted the first true form of vaccination for Smallpox in 1796 in England. Prior to that, the art of variolation was to take infected matter from a lesion of a Smallpox infected person and put it into a cut or make a cut on the person to be inoculated. This method was used by General George Washington and is considered to have been a force that helped him win the Revolutionary War because the British did not inoculate their soldiers which wiped out significant numbers.

Dr. Jenner wanted to make it mandatory all children under 3 months of age in England to get the Smallpox vaccination.  He was met almost immediately with opposition and resistance by what became known as “anti-vacks” in the early 1800’s.  The first law was passed in 1853 of Compulsory Smallpox Vaccination. Not long afterwards did people find themselves jailed, fined, or restricted from jobs and insurance.

Because of a Smallpox outbreak in the early 1900’s in Europe, North America and South America, by 1904 there had been serious uprisings of citizens feeling their personal liberty had been infringed upon due to mandatory vaccinations.

Several “official” organizations were formed across the three continents as a result of the compulsory or mandated vaccines being forced upon them by their governments.

The safety of vaccinations have been in question for over 2 centuries and continues to be at the heart of the anti-vaxer movement today, coupled with the compulsory action from governments and in many cases realized tragic results of vaccines causing severe adverse reactions and in the case of the Cutter 1955 incidence of Polio vaccine, where Polio cases were induced by the vaccination itself more than were in the wild. The mandated 1976 Swine Flu vaccine was terminated when the vaccine had killed 100 people but the flu itself had only claimed 2 lives.

Now at the heart of the vaccine debate is the meteoric rise in Autism. The medical community staunchly stands by its claim that the MMR vaccine does NOT cause Autism, when the vast majority of Autistic children first noticed symptoms of Autism shortly after the MMR vaccination, it is certainly understandable why they would reach the conclusion that the MMR vaccination is the cause.

There are two indisputable facts, one being a survey of families that did not vaccinate and the results showing the same rate of Autism as was in the 60’s and 70’s when the vaccination rate was much much lower and that many other childhood diseases such as asthma were also dramatically reduced. The other being research into the Autism rate among the closed society of the Amish in Pennsylvania where 2 cases were identified but one was from a family that broke protocol and had their children vaccinated and the other was an adopted child that had been vaccinated before they acquired the child.

I wholeheartedly agree with anti-vaxers in that they are against vaccinations and while not necessarily pushing that on others, are interested in helping educate people so they can make an informed decision, what I do have a problem with is that they DO NOT offer a viable alternative to protecting people should they find themselves with the unfortunate scenario of getting infected by one of the diseases that perhaps might have been prevented should they have gotten the vaccination.

Here are some alternatives: get the vaccinations in individual doses, spread out over time, preferably without any preservatives if you find yourself in a “mandated” state.
Increase Vitamin C intake from Dr. Klenner’s protocol of 30mg per pound of body weight prior to getting vaccinated.

Learn about mega-dosing Vitamin C/Ascorbic Acid to ensure your body has the necessary ammunition to fight ANY viral or bacterial infection.

The Future is NOW!
Nicholas St Jon N.a.MD

Join Nicholas St Jon every Tuesday at 3pm PST on The Health Cure Show

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