Did you hear about that freak storm on Lake Tahoe last week? We were in it! Hiking in Yosemite, just reaching the top of Mt Hoffman, my daughter and her friend started shouting, “It’s snowing!” Sure enough, white flakes began to swirl around us. We thought it was just a weird little flurry as a cloud passed over. After all, there had been zero precipitation in the forecast. At the very top of the mountain, as my feet tingled from peering down the sheer drop over the other side, thunder...
14 days ago • 3 min read
Such a backlog of gardening news! My husband and I are both recovering from illness. It hit our daughter first like a regular cold, albeit one with copious, copious mucus and corresponding quantities of tissues all over the house. We grownups had light congestion and severe exhaustion. Walking the 15 minutes home after dropping my daughter at school felt like a monster hike and I needed to lie down afterwards. Normally I get kind of itchy if I don’t get out and move around for an hour or two...
28 days ago • 4 min read
When I was first learning to slip cast pottery (the molding technique we use to make Orta pots), I had no idea when to take the pots out of the mold. The very patient guy at the ceramics store who I peppered with questions said I should wait until the clay was "cheese hard." Cheese? Really? Cheese hard? Do you immediately wonder which kind of cheese? Because I sure did. There's a big difference in cheeses! The guy was patient, but in the end not super helpful, alas. I ended up figuring out...
2 months ago • 4 min read
On receiving grant funding in 2025: Last Monday I spent a couple hours on a zoom, listening in on the deliberations for awarding grant money I applied for, money that comes from a 1999 settlement with a local landfill. The grants fund projects to reduce landfill waste in Alameda county (where Orta is based), and in particular to educate the community about waste reduction. This was the first time I was ever able to hear the discussions behind the scenes of grant allocations, and it was both...
2 months ago • 3 min read
Welcome new subscribers! (Last week I was featured on Culture Study, one of my favorite Substacks, which brought in a bunch of new readers - welcome! I'm so glad you're here! If you haven't seen the interview yet, you can find it here.) On Tuesday, Earth Day, I almost sent you a long quasi-rant about climate grief and cognitive dissonance. I was pretty deep in it, and feeling quite low. But I decided to pause and wait until Seedurday to see how things were going before sending anything....
3 months ago • 3 min read
It wasn’t until high school that a friend of mine made the connection between chicken, the animal, and chicken, the pinkish food that comes on a styrofoam tray. In every other way, this friend was an over-achiever: Straight A’s, excellent athlete, went on to a prestigious law school and legal career. Precisely because she was so accomplished in every other way, we spared no expense in ribbing her for the, “wait, chicken is chicken?” moment. It’s more common than you might think, this rooting...
3 months ago • 4 min read
I fell off a roof when I was 14, trying to capture just the right moody, black and white, nighttime scene. Oh the angst of a teenage “artist” in the ‘90’s. I was fine, BTW. There was a lot of blood from a scrape on my head, which was scary, but no lasting damage. AND I caught the camera, saving those masterpieces. (They weren’t masterpieces.) There was a certain look we were all after in those days: gritty, dark, “real.” Friends, I finally captured it: This is the yard behind the Orta shop....
5 months ago • 3 min read
Hypothetically, if you bought something online as a “pre-order” that said it would ship the week of December 2nd, but actually arrived on January 8th, do you think the company should relax its 14-day money-back return policy? If they get to be a month late, should the customer also be given the grace to be a little late as well, and get money back instead of store credit? Also, what if this isn’t actually hypothetical? 🤔🤣 I made the non-hypothetical return in person to avoid return shipping...
5 months ago • 5 min read
This was going to be a punny post about “dry january” and how around here that has meant dry gardening. Like, almost no rain for the whole month, during what should be our rainy season. February 1st is the end of “Dry January” (the alcohol trend) and also water dry January here in Northern CA, because as I write and send this email to you, rain is arriving! Halleluja! Here's a story about water in gardens: I met a friendly young gardener from Belgium last week who shared something interesting...
5 months ago • 4 min read