Green Gal

The Green Gal blog is moving to a new location! From January 2009 to early March 2021, the Green Gal blog was hosted here by Blogger at http://greenbeangal.blogspot.com/   Starting today, March 14, 2021, all new Green Gal blog posts will be posted on my website at https://www.greengalgrows.com/blog/ To subscribe to updates from the new blog, please join my e-newsletter mailing list . I send out a newsletter on the 15th of each month that includes my recent posts and other resources related to all of the things you've come to associate with Green Gal--and more!  I feel bittersweet about migrating to this new site for the blog. The Blogger site has been a familiar place to login and write to my heart’s content since I was 16 years old. But just as this blog has matured with me over time, it is now time to migrate to my own website.  Fortunately, the archive of posts on this Blogger site will remain available, and over time I will migrate some of the best and most relevant a...

When we prune a fruit tree, we simplify the branches in order to amplify the available sunlight to those remaining. Removing branches also directs the tree's energy to the remaining buds so that the tree can grow bigger and stronger and produce larger and healthier fruit.  We simplify to amplify. Lately, I've been reflecting on how this principle applies to many aspects of my life. It can be satisfying to simplify, such as when you de-clutter your home and finally donate all of the things you no longer need or want. What remains are the items you truly value, and you can better appreciate and use them because they are no longer buried by all the extra "stuff."  Perhaps this feeling is familiar to you if you went through this process within the past year during the pandemic. Spending so much time inside our homes has helped some of us recognize how much "stuff" has accumulated that we don't need anymore. Hopefully we also learn to reduce how much stuff we...