Third-generation farmer turned ballroom dancer, artist, and photographer. Navigating life with Type 2 diabetes for 20 years. Sharing what I’ve learned along the way.
On tools, food, and health advice — and the slow discipline of not being moved by every new thing. Farmers don’t chase trends. You can’t. If you planted a new variety every time a magazine told you it was the future, you’d have a field full of experiments
Four posts from the field this week. Grab a coffee. Olive Oil Isn’t a Health Trend. It’s Chemistry. (Food & Diet) Walk into a kitchen in Spain, Greece, or southern Italy and you won’t find a bottle labeled “heart-healthy.” You’ll just find olive oil — on
Health & Wellness
Stress and the Body There is no word for cortisol in the traditional Mediterranean vocabulary. Not because stress didn’t exist — it did, in every harvest, every drought, every winter that came early. But because the life itself was built in a way that kept stress from piling up. The
Food & Diet
Your Kitchen, Your Success Food & Diet — April 20 A well-stocked kitchen isn’t a diet plan. It’s infrastructure. A Mediterranean pantry — olive oil, beans, whole grains, a handful of nuts, some herbs — doesn’t ask you to change your life. It asks you to stock your shelves.
Food & Diet
Tuesday — The Long View Farming teaches you to be skeptical of certainty. You’ve seen too many sure things turn out wrong — the weather forecast, the pest prediction, the market price. You learn to hold your conclusions loosely and keep watching. That’s how I’ve come to think about
Food & Diet
Sunday Harvest — April 19, 2026 A note from the Gardener of Life Every good week on the farm had a shape to it. You didn’t just do things — you did them in order, for a reason, and by Friday you could look back and see how the pieces fit.
Long View
Tuesday — The Long View The Art of Noticing Farming teaches you to pay attention or pay the consequences. You learn to read soil the way other people read faces. You watch the sky not for beauty but for information. You notice the color of a leaf, the behavior of water,
Food & Diet
GARDENER OF LIFE Three seeds planted this week. Here’s what grew. This week Gardener of Life put three ideas into the ground — one about what you eat, one about how you sleep, and one about the technology quietly watching over both. Separately, each one is worth your attention. Together,
GOL Launch Week WELCOME POSTApril 6 - 11 Twenty years ago today, I put down the bottle and picked up my life. Took control of my Type 2 diabetes. It seemed right to start something new on the same date — so welcome to Gardener of Life, where a retired dirt farmer
If you’ve been following along on Micro.blog, you may have noticed things look a little different around here. The schedule has changed. The platform lineup has shifted. And the name of this pillar — once called Farming & Agriculture — is now simply The Long View. Let me explain why,
When I first laid out the four pillars of Gardener of Life, Farming & Agriculture felt like the obvious one. I spent twenty-six years working California’s Sacramento Valley. Three generations of my family farmed that land. If anyone had the right to write about farming, it was me.
Long View
GARDENER OF LIFE — Food & Diet I spent twenty-six years farming in California’s Central Valley. We grew crops, we worked hard, and we used chemicals — a lot of them. Herbicides, pesticides, fungicides. It was just how farming was done. Then something shifted. A county farm advisor started talking