Mama G's Traditions

Wildlife biologists from the Yurok Tribe and partner conservation agencies have confirmed that a pair of reintroduced California condors (Gymnogyps californianus) are incubating an egg in Northern California. This is the first wild condor nest documented in the Pacific Northwest in more than a century.

The parents are a pair of nearly 7-year-old condors from the first group released in the region in 2022. Field teams tracking their movements found the nest high inside a remote cavity in a massive old-growth redwood.

This nest is a major milestone for a species that came close to disappearing. In 1982, only 22 condors remained worldwide. Today, the official count is 607, including 392 living in the wild and 25 in the new Pacific Northwest flock, thanks to captive breeding and release efforts.

The Yurok people know the condor as pre-go-neesh. The bird holds a sacred place in the Tribe’s culture and in the region’s ecology. Condors once ranged from British Columbia to Baja California, but poaching, lead poisoning from ammunition, and habitat loss drove them toward extinction in the 20th century. This egg is an important step toward building a self-sustaining wild population at the northern edge of the condor’s historical range.

Today I had to postpone La Tata's Table due to the rain.

And she was still honored.

I went out this morning as I do every day - picking up my Monarch babies who had fallen in the night, returning them to the tree. And while I was there I gathered flowers from my Giant Calitrope and my desert rose and laid them at her name.

No store. Just what the land gave me to give her.

María de los Ángeles, mi Tata bella, 24 years ago today you left this realm. And yet here you are, in the tree, in the butterflies, in the flowers, in everything I am becoming.

La Tata's Table will happen. The community will gather. Your table will be set.

Just not today. Today was just for you and me.

Te amo mi viejuca bella 😘😘😘
Tu Glorita, aka Mama G 🐎❤️🔥

I watched a woman stand over her lavender for twenty minutes last spring, shears in hand, frozen by the question every gardener eventually asks: *Where do I actually cut this thing?* She was staring at those woody brown stems like they held some secret code. And here's the thing—they do.

Most people think woody stems are the enemy, the dead zone, the place where lavender goes to retire. But tucked just above that bark-like surface, invisible to the naked eye, are clusters of dormant buds that have been sitting in biological suspended animation since the plant was young. They're not dead. They're patient.

When you make a clean cut in the soft green growth—that tender, pliable tissue just above where the wood begins—you trigger a hormonal cascade. The plant reads that cut as opportunity. Within days, those sleeping buds receive a chemical wake-up call, a flood of auxins and cytokinins that say *now is your moment.* What looked like a stick suddenly bristles with fresh shoots, each one capable of blooming for the next ten years.

This is why lavender that gets pruned correctly can outlive lavender that never gets touched. The unpruned plant blooms, sets seed, exhausts itself, and slowly turns into a hollow wooden cage with flowers only at the tips. But the pruned plant? It rejuvenates from the inside out, replacing old wood with young growth season after season.

The trick is knowing where that green zone actually starts. Run your hand up a stem from the base and you'll feel it—the moment the bark gives way to something softer, almost spongy. That transition point is your target. Cut a few inches above it, leaving a cushion of green foliage, and you're not just trimming. You're activating.

Timing matters because the plant's ability to respond shifts with the seasons. After the first flush of blooms fades in summer, a gentle trim redirects all that energy away from seed production and back into vegetative growth. The plant stops thinking about reproduction and starts thinking about expansion. Then in early spring, before the new growth hardens off, you can go deeper—taking back up to two-thirds of the green—and the plant reads it as a reset, a chance to rebuild its architecture from the ground up.

English lavender handles this like a champion. Those narrow gray-green leaves are tough, resilient, almost eager to be cut back. French and Spanish varieties, with their fringed or toothed foliage, need a gentler approach—they'll respond, but they prefer persuasion over force.

And here's the part that changes everything: throughout the growing season, every time you deadhead a spent flower stem back to the first set of leaves, you're not just tidying up. You're lying to the plant in the most wonderful way. It thinks it failed to set seed, so it tries again. And again. You get waves of blooms instead of one tired flush.

That's the real secret hidden in those woody stems. They're not the end of the story. They're the foundation for everything that comes next. [1T57T]