What's beautiful about this garden and the lineage that I grew up on is essentially all has to do with my grandparents and their lineage as Earth workers and tending the land farmers and also curanderos.

Curanderos are very much like Shaman considered, that they also work integrating holistic and traditional root work of herbal medicine into the kitchen, into the practice of community.

My name is Jesus Garcia.

I am a traditional shaman and herbalist.

I'm also an Earth worker and a gardener.

And we create beautiful spaces like our food forests that's really supportive for our children and the welfare of herbalism moving forward into society.

We are Herbal Action project, and that's an initiative that we started a few years ago, and that's me and my sisters.

We were in the school district being students and also being, of course, teachers in that position.

And after, you know, 2020 came around, we decided to really bring more future into our teachers by fostering homeschool support.

And we do that with education by not only the emotional aspects of how we feel and how we integrate our emotions with the garden, but also the education on how to be a better parent, how to be a better service for the land, and also how to be that child that we once were.

To bring wonder into the spaces that we're cultivating.

How we ended up with this property with something very special.

My grandfather, actually, was sick at the time and my father was looking for a particular place for us to call our home, to call our safety net.

And there was this property outside of UhlandTexas, where it was very kind of barren and a little bit in a destruction mode.

And we saw an opportunity there to really regenerate the land.

And my father had a lot to do with plugging in the trees, knowing the elements and understanding the season.

We have quite a few varieties of plants here that are not only indigenous natural to this world, but also medicinal.

We get to care for these plants as if they were our friends and how we want to foster a relationship with the spirit of these plants.

I'm here in one of our special places in The Herbal Action Project Garden, and that is essentially our floral and fairy garden.

And we have here growing quite a few different fairy connected herbs and native herbs like the sunflower.

We have some comfrey here, and this space was created from destruction, from broken limbs of our oaks, and we've turned this into a safe support system for the children so they can run wild, be free, and also be a little bit more open into their child connection.

And that gives this opportunity for us adults and elders to really think about how we were as children and how we want to foster this education and create our own safe spaces in the garden.

So this will be covered with blackberries so the kids can have a snack in the summer and really be shielded by these mammoth sunflowers as well.

So we thought about what can we really do to create space.

But food, food sovereignty is another big connection and community.

We are here in our mushroom bed and what what's really great about this is that this is part of our lineage work.

My grandmother, who was a curandero and an Earth worker and a gardener herself, would always grow mushrooms.

And that's something that is part of our child lineage as far as support for ecological health but also physical health for us.

And when we say ecological, is that the mycelium in the mushrooms here in central Texas really helps to retain a lot of the moisture for us so we don't have to overwater or try to water whenever we have droughts.

And the children really love playing with these mushrooms because it inspires them to really call upon something that is ethereal.

And we are so enamored by the connection and the magic of fairies.

So there are little pockets of magical spaces of mushrooms that they have planted that they get to see grow.

Now that is part of their fairy friendship.

My grandmother used to cook with mushrooms and a quick and easy way to cook with mushrooms, especially to provide for your family and kids of all ages is just take them with a little bit of butter.

And we do this with a recipe called calabacitas.

and calabacitas is going to be squash sauteed with a little bit of butter, oregano and mushrooms.

And you saute that just for a few minutes and put it on a plate on a bed of rice and you have a quick mushroom, a supportive connection to your mind, body and your spirit.

This is chia.

This is one of our amazing plants that we grow here and we grow for a lot of benefits, like the omega three that supplies our oil for our body during really hot summer months here.

And she is something that we start to plant in the March month so we can have a long harvest until June.

And this is a beautiful plant to have next to your sunflowers because it provides a beautiful canopy area of shade but also grows abundantly in our gardens.

May pops all the flowers and we'll use the flowers for dishes like we'll fry, we'll batter and fry the flowers and we'll eat them as like little popcorn connection.

So it's great medicine.

And these are black chia.

There's white, blue, purple and black.

And so this is the traditional Aztec chia, the black chia.

And my grandmother has been growing Chia for some time.

So that's that's an ancestral herb.

These are seeds that we've had for generations.

We are in our spirit, essence therapy bed.

And in this particular bed that we have here, we cater a lot towards the teenage spirit.

And so we have medicine here that really supports the essence and the connection of spirit of healing for the teenager who has been broken hearted.

And we also have quite a few edible flowers that we can make teas and different tonics for the child's spirit, especially when the teenager is going through some trauma or going through some difficulty that they can't explain to the adults.

This is their safe haven.

This is their protection.

We're so afraid to connect with the feminine spirit.

And I have teen boys that come here after class and really just let a lot of emotion out.

And we need we need that divinity within us.

My friends, we are here in our rose row and we plant roses for softening the spiritual self.

And this connection actually came from my grandmother.

We planted roses since we were young to really bring upon our boundary space to protect ourselves with the rose root, but also bring healing with the color yellow.

The yellow is very much identified for spirit healing and opening up our softness and figuring out our boundaries within others and other things in the world that probably should just keep a little bit away from us.

This is a position where we not only use it as medicine because rose is an astringent, medicine brings us back to our core, to our roots, and helps us to protect our space emotionally, physically and spiritually.

The yellow roses are considered to be also heart healing, so the color of the yellow brings softness and really opens up our emotions to move out any particular stagnant energy that does not need to be in the heart.

We are in our funeral service and death supportive garden, and in this garden we have a guild where we grow a lot of flowers for funeral services and also altars.

We create altars in the Latin and Mexican community, and part of that is to really share the grief of connecting a little bit more to the ethereal side of spirits and how we want to treat our spirits moving forward into the next life.

All of this that we're growing here is not only a beautiful cat cemetery, but it's a beautiful connection to how life wants to bring us to death.

We can make a lot of possibilities with these beautiful bouquets, but one thing that's very particular and kind is serving the land while someone is also leaving the land.

So as a preschool teacher, my initiative started to really bring this education to not only the fundamentals of the schools, but to also bring this at home wherever you are, whether you're in apartments, whether you're in a small space, anybody can cultivate and learn from each other as far as community on how to grow plants, how to really apply them into our kitchen, and how to really gravitate towards them as spiritual and medicinal medicine.