Singing Nettle Herbcrafts
May 29- October 11
Herbal Arts in the Garden
The focus of this seasonal community journey is to deepen our relationship with the living world around us, and practice co-creating together! This is a unique community space that gathers weekly through the growing season to learn and craft together in the Herb Garden. This is an opportunity to learn about herbal gardening, and making herbal remedies such as teas, tinctures, vinegars, oils, and syrups for your home healthcare and wellbeing.
This is a learning space.
We will learn practices to tend an herbal garden, focusing on organic methods for ecological healthcare. We will learn to preserve and prepare these plants in delicious and nutritious ways for personal and community wellbeing. We will learn practices in community herbalism in the folk and blessingway traditions.
This is a practice space.
This is hands-on – in your garden, in your habitat, in your kitchen, in your journal, on your canvas. This Circle offers practices of attention and intention in how we engage the living world around us with reverence and reciprocity; practices of deep listening and sensory engagement; practices of curiosity and imagination.
This is a healing space
You are invited to create your own intentions for your journey here. May this contribute to your healing. May this contribute to your lineage healing. May this contribute to cultural healing. May this contribute to ecological healing. So the future generations may have healthy bodies, minds, spirits, and soils to plant their dreams into.
How it works:
This is a 4-month Herbcrafting Immersion. If you can only come for part of it, you can pay for the months you can come.
(Wednesdays - May 29-October 2)
Monthly Membership: $122
4-Month Membership: $444
A Membership includes:
You receive a subscription to the weekly journal Hello Giant, includes recipes and reflections from the Garden.
Every Wednesday we gather in community to garden together and learn to craft herbal remedies as the plants are ready for harvest.
You receive an immersive foundation in community herbalism and ecological and heart-centered gardening.
By the end of the season, we decant all of our tinctures, vinegars, oils, and glycerites, and your kitchen apothecary is stocked full!
Singing Nettle Herb Group Membership
Herbal Gardening
Each week throughout the growing season, we will meet up in the garden and tend it together. Learning and creating happen spontaneously and continuously. Over the season your skills knowledge will increase in plant virtues, identification, cultivation, harvesting timing and technique, and basic herbal preparations for your kitchen apothecary. I chose plants that are easy to grow, have tonic actions to various body systems, with long histories of safe use.
Immersive Herbal Education
We are partnering with CommUniTEA Love to deepen our education in herbal healthcare. Amy Chavez will offer intermediate workshops for those interested in going deeper into study. Bodies of Wisdom: Nutritional and Herbal support for the different body systems, and more!
“Hello Giant!” Eco-Story Tracking
One season I had a dream that revealed me as “the Giant” in the garden. It cracked me up (!) and altered my perspective - from me as the center of what’s happening, to me as a side character in so many other beings’ storylines!!! The dream gave me a song.
So, “Hello Giant” has become the title of my electronic almanac that tracks the comings and goings of the blossoms, the critters, and the pollinators during our growing season. It’s designed to help you deepen in your ecological awareness by seeking the stories of your habitat.
Co-learning Space
We all come to this space with rich knowledge and experience to share. While I will be hosting, facilitating, and sharing what I know, I believe that we are all teachers and learners together. And new learning will be generated through our seasonal journey together as we approach this garden with wonder, curiosity, and awakened senses.
Root Healing: A Step Towards Personal, Ecological and Cultural Healing
I believe that personal and cultural healing happens from the roots up. Many of our lineage streams come from different continents, but we find ourselves here now. All of our Ancestors, no matter where our motherlands are on the planet, had intimate relationship with the wild and cultivated ecologies of their place. They knew how to feed and heal themselves from their habitat. Their stories and songs emerged from culture in place, in the forests, in the gardens, in the waters, in the stars, through encounters with the other-than-human worlds in their physical and dreamtime landscapes. We have all the same wiring, yet we have forgotten much.
But it is all here, waiting for our attention and intention, to engage.
Nature is powerful and wise in its ability to regenerate itself, and when we focus our creative power here, then co-healing happens quickly, in unpredictable ways. Our woodland and river valley landscape is abundant and generous, if we create the conditions within and around us for such flourishing.
It’s doable.
It's joyful.
It’s healing, on a root level.
We are the emergent edge of an ancient storyline. We are here now.
There once were 52 tribes here in this Ohio Valley. It remained fertile and abundant because of how they stewarded it. They love this land, they hold it as sacred. They were displaced by westward expansion of colonial settlers. Some of them your or my ancestors. There is much reparations and healing work to be done. One way we all can begin to do this is to learn about our place, learn to respect it and to love it, and consider what we can do now to help it regenerate and remain abundant for the next generations. This task is upon us now.
It’s about falling in love;
re-awakening states of wonder;
taking risks to create.
working hard and purposefully
and celebrating small and all successes
Being humble
Being accountable
Being willing
to be changed by an intimate encounter with another.
This is about becoming acquainted and tending relationship.
This is about empowering our personal, community, and ecosystem health for the long-term.
This is about remembering our belonging.
and rising to meet our times.
My name is Nikole Rosaria. I began my first herbal garden in 2005. I mostly failed, but that is when I met my first herbal ally: Stinging Nettle, who took over the space. In 2007, I was a part of my first “Herb Group” with my friends. A peer-led practice group, where we took turns being the ‘Motherwort’ and leading the study lesson and hands-on projects. In 2009, I started my first herbal business, ‘Singing Nettle Herbcrafts’ and began making and selling my first herbal product: Singing Nettle Herb Truffles’, which featured Nettle that I wild-crafted with song. While raising a child, I devoted myself to being deeply ‘of place’. Learning to be of these soils, streams, stones, and learning to track the living world around me through the seasons of our life together. In some phases I have actively produced, taught classes and sold various herbcrafts for the community, and in some seasons I have just sat in the garden and forests, and let myself by held while I grieved, dissolved, and re-imagined myself anew. Whether the garden has been part of my active economy, or whether the plants and critters are the subjects of my poems and stories, we have been co-creating together for 19 years. This gentle and generous landscape, and the co-creative relationship we share, has stitched my soul back together, helped me grow new roots when I only knew them as severed, and has gifted me and my family with belonging. I am deeply, eternally grateful.