Month: June 2025

Weeding for sickos

Photo looking down on a section of garden bed. The ground is covered with a thick layer of dry cut grass, like straw. Four bamboo poles are sticking up, with bean seedlings growing next to each. A few isolated green weeds are visible

This was my first time trying a cover crop for weed suppression in the garden, and I think it’s been a success!

My lazy method was to let some volunteer grass grow tall here over the winter and strim it when it had green seeds, around the end of March. Then I covered it with a tarp until it was time to plant beans in mid May. This spot previously had frequent mullein, herb robert, and grasses.

There are a few things coming up through the mulch, which I pulled after taking this, but way fewer weeds than in the parts of the garden that got mulched with compost.

I’ve been researching different ways of coping with weeds, especially around annual veggies, trying to find something more sustainable for my energy impairment / dynamic disability / chronic illness situation.

I got a lot out of the various videos by No-Till Growers on cover crops, mulch, etc. They have a book too, that my library had.

Old friends

I remember herbalist Kelly McCarthy suggesting that good herbs for perimenopause are the ones you already have a long relationship with. To just find ways to incorporate your plant friends into your life a little more, as a starting place, whether that is a digestive bitter, calming tea, moisturizer, good-smelling garden plant, or whatever.

That seems like a good approach for general times of stress or illness too, to start by turning up your existing support.

This random herb thought was brought to you by me running a pain management bath at 4am, and deciding to add rose water and make a rose tea. Rose is not an herb for pain, and yet it is nice to be with my plant friend when I am sore.

Fake-yet-real makeovers of my heart

Aww man. Shout out to local beauty salon for kids Lizzie Lee and Me for having a receptionist who says things like “makeovers have no gender” and “anybody can love sparkles”, and who will book any hair, makeup, or spa service for any kid (and any grown-up, if they want to get side-by-side mini manicures).

I appreciate them also just for taking kids desires seriously. It’s so fun to have a kid salon where it’s halfway pretend play. You can wear a pink robe and get a “facial” that is just face mist and cucumber slices on your eyes. You can get a pedicure with no sharp tools, but you get to soak your feet in bubbles and read a kids magazine. The “makeovers” are sparkly face paint with rainbow or flower themes. I dunno, it’s all just very sweet.

Extensive abstract physical evidence

There’s a moment in Kidd Pivot’s Revisor where someone exposes an atrocity by presenting “extensive abstract physical evidence” in the form of a dance solo, and it works. When I watch someone move their body, I can sense in my body how that would feel. We can communicate abstract things that way, and we can have a shared understanding without language.

I knew this before, but the phrase “abstract physical evidence” comes in handy surprisingly often.

(Revisor is streaming on Marquee if you need some dance theatre about corruption, comedy, and the relationship between language and the body.)

Anyway I think about “extensive abstract physical evidence” in relation to ME/CFS a lot.

A disease that doesn’t even have a satisfying name so we put two flawed names together with a slash, a disease where it’s not defined by specific symptoms so much as the meta pattern of how symptoms come and go, a disease where nobody knows the root problem or how to explain how all the symptoms and patterns fit together. A disease where we have fatigue “but different from normal fatigue”, where “malaise” can be life-threatening and “exertion” can mean something as small as perceiving light.

Just a trainwreck of inadequate language, and yet, people with ME manage to know so much about the situation in, like, an abstract physical way.