RootsUp Creative

05/30/2026

The "Tree of Life" isn’t just a title based on age—it’s a testament to what these incredible plants do for us. 🌟
​Pomegranates are health-boosting powerhouses. Packed with antioxidants that protect brain cells, preserve memory, and support heart health, their fruit quite literally supports healthy human life.
​But long before the harvest, there is the artistry of the growth. 🌿✨
​Tiffany has been practicing a branch of hoardiculture artistry on this 'Wonderful' pomegranate for about 3 years now. While her variety naturally prefers to bush out into a dense shrub, I’ve always had a vision of a beautiful, structural, curved tree.
​To achieve this, it takes patience and deliberate training. For 3 years, I’ve been cutting back her suckers, trimming branches, wrapping them together, and staking her at different levels as she grows.
​Today’s training session was a big one! After about a month of being settled into the ground, this girl (affectionately named "Pom") had shot out so much new base growth you could hardly tell she’d ever been trained

​I got to work:
​The Base: Cleared away the flush of suckers, leaving just the 3 main stocks I used to start her signature twist and curve.
​The Silhouette: Gave her a haircut to style the canopy into that desired arch.
​The Structure: Removed her old training wire and re-wrapped it higher up, pulling her elegant curve securely toward the bamboo stake.
​Starting that bend early is essential before the bark hardens down the road.

By choosing to train her into a tree, we are building a massive ecological map right beneath her feet. Instead of just being a feature in a garden bed, Pom is becoming the Mother of this space—a protector offering shade, holding the ground tightly with thick roots to prevent animal digging, and creating a living oasis for the soil life below.
​The vision is manifesting right before our eyes. Can you see it? 👁️🌱

​💬 Want to establish an edible mini-oasis spot of your own? Comment a green emoji below or drop us a DM to chat about custom garden designs!

05/29/2026

🌿 Harvesting Medicine: Our First Garden-Grown Fire Cider 🌶️✨
​Fire cider has been a daily staple in our home for a long time. Gavin and I take it almost every morning as a powerful immune booster, and our little guy gets a small dose bi-weekly to keep his system strong. Up until now, we’ve always supported and bought our blends from a wonderful local apothecary.
​But this year? Year one in our new garden space gave us the ultimate gift: enough abundance to harvest and brew a batch completely from our own cultivations!
​From Garden Beds to Medicine Jar
​Yesterday, the pull to create was too strong to ignore. Tiffany Mitchell took a basket and went for a walk through our home plots to see what was ready. RootsUp Creative is truly a family team effort, and this garden-blend lineup is a reflection of the sustainable, functional garden design we love to build:
​Jalapeños & Habañeros (At least 9 habañeros made the cut—nothing in this batch was officially counted, we just let intuition guide the amounts!)
​A fresh Roma tomato
​Cilantro & Green onions
​Lemon balm, Oregano, & German thyme
​⚠️ Pro-tip/Lesson learned: Chopping that many fresh peppers without gloves proved to me very quickly that this batch is going to live up to the name FIRE! 😋✨
​The Magic in the Making
​To weave the old into the new, I used the cider mother left over from our very last purchased apothecary batch, poured in the apple cider vinegar, closed the jar, and gave it a good shake.
​It was absolute magic. Watching the vibrant, fresh-cut colors of our harvest cascade through the liquid like an earthy snowglobe was incredible—literally seeing food transform into medicine right before my eyes. Taking off the lid to smell the initial blend was next level; it was so potent it practically watered your eyes on impact, but it left this amazingly tasty, aromatic afterscent right behind the heat.
​Now, we let it sit and cure for a few weeks. I already know it’s going to be an incredibly potent, beautiful medicine for our family this coming season.
​RootsUp Garden Design & Community Outreach 🪴
​There is nothing quite like having this level of self-reliance and wellness right at your fingertips. Traditional plant medicine and ecological sustainability are at the heart of our family values, and a massive part of our mission at RootsUp Creative is community outreach—sharing this knowledge to help you thrive.
​Tiffany & Gavin specialize in functional garden design and consultations. Whether you want to grow a dedicated medicinal tea bed, a kitchen herb plot, or a full backyard homestead, we are here to help you map out, build, and set up the exact crops your family needs to stay healthy and resilient.
​Let's design your dream growing space together!
​Comment with a green emoji (🌱, 🥦, 🏡) if you’re ready to grow with us! 👇
​

05/29/2026

When we supply a mother plant, we aren't just selling a starter—we are delivering a foundational asset engineered to give back to the ecosystem.
This oregano plug found a perfect home with The Spiritual Loft 11...
and she’s already producing heavy. If you've been waiting to add this resilience to your backyard setup, we are down to our final oregano mother plant plug of this growing season.
Come see us at our next market or secure your design, build, and teach framework via the consultation link in our bio today.

On today’s episode of
Harvesting Resources from Mother Gaia 🌿

This beauty right here is fresh oregano, grown with love right here at TSL11. The mother plant was gifted to me by our sweet friend Gavin over at RootsUp Creative. Let me just say, she didn’t come to play. She came to give. ✨

There is something so humbling about receiving a gifted plant, nurturing it, and then watching it turn right back around and offer itself as medicine. That’s the cycle. That’s the trust. That’s the relationship.

Oregano is more than a kitchen herb, she’s a warrior plant.
🌿 Supports immune health
🌿 Naturally antibacterial & antifungal
🌿 A powerful ally for respiratory support

And now she’s on her way to becoming something magickal inside TSL11. 💫

I am endlessly grateful for the abundance of this Earth! For the hands that tent it, love it, and share it. So greatful for the opportunity to turn these living plants into medicine for our community.
Keep your eyes open, Tribe new creations are always on the way. 🌱✨

05/28/2026

The Lawn and Garden Guild
A lawn is a tax on your time; a guild is a testament to the terrain.
Instead of fighting the soil to force compliance with a flat green rug, we stack our functions upward. We invite a harmonious ecosystem into a single, mindful footprint.
The Living Web in Practice
This is our established pomegranate guild—a living proof of concept thriving right in the mound:
The Mother Tree: Notice the pomegranate being trained into a strong, single-stemmed tree, holding space to cradle the canopy.
The Dynamic Accumulator: See the chicory taking firm root directly in the mound, piercing the crust to pull hidden mineral assets to the surface.
The Interwoven Surface: Watch the vibrant mint twining with the creeping watermelon, cooling the earth and locking down moisture as a unified living shield.
Take the Blueprint Home: The Modular Unveiling
You don’t have to transform your entire property overnight to step into the continuous song of the earth. We have broken this system down into portable, turnkey components.
We are unveiling The Lawn and Garden Guild in modular form at the Mud Creek Mercantile Market on June 6th from 9:00 AM to 2:00 PM. Come see us in person in Jacksonville, Texas, to pick up the exact living layers you need to start your own island of permanence:
The Anchors: Modular Crepe Myrtle and Fig Mother Trees.
The Miners: Mullein and Chicory Accumulators to heal and feed your soil.
The Yields: Sweet Potato modules for dense, vertical ground production.
Grower's Note: For the ultimate abundance, we recommend planting your sweet potatoes in dedicated mulch rings to provide the deep, loose, organic shelter they need for the best harvest.
Invite the Harmony Home
The Suburban Front: Plug these modules into your yard to cultivate a quiet, thriving, HOA-approved production zone right by your driveway.
The Garden Framework: Drop them in your soil to establish a miniature food forest island that thrives on its own internal magic.
Stop feeding a lawn that depletes your soul and offers nothing in return. Weave resilience right into the soil, listen to the rhythm, and watch the cycles take over.
Slots are filling fast for our 2026 ecological design consultations. Click the link to join our calendar, or come see us at Mud Creek on June 6th to select your modules straight from the booth.

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1S4sTYP3gFhGWo7wvfrJcxR6zNIvp0XLisUWrDHtcRzE/

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Texas permaculture design, yard to food forest, companion planting guilds, living soil yard transformation, Jacksonville TX market, edible landscaping ideas, organic fruit tree guild, zero input gardening, HOA approved vegetable garden, sustainable plant starts East Texas.

05/26/2026

A true garden isn’t a collection of external inputs; it is a web of living loops. When you shift your perspective from managing waste to honoring momentum, the concept of a "footprint" disappears entirely. If you want to maximize fertility when space is a premium, you don’t expand outward—you gently stack your functions upward, letting nature work in layers.
Our new 3-stage vermicompost sanctuary is officially online, crafted 100% from repurposed, reclaimed materials to turn local organic cycles into rich, living soil life without disrupting a single square inch of ground.
The Anatomy of the Tower
True stewardship means listening to the land and creating the perfect cradle for life to thrive. To build a continuous, vertical processing loop without a single piece of new store-bought plastic, we gathered salvaged elements and shaped a vertical forest floor:
The Cradle: Three reclaimed 35-gallon agricultural bins, nestled together to create an abundance of processing space on a minimal, mindful footprint.
The Earthworm Highway: Wide passageways cut into the upper bases, secured with fine tool mesh. This allows our subterranean helpers to journey freely upward as they transform the layers below.
Air & Flow Mechanics: Four hand-cut fence wood feet placed at the base of each internal tier. These simple wooden blocks lift the upper bins just enough to keep the bedding light, fluffy, and full of fresh air. Companion drainage holes around the rim keep the moisture sweet and moving, preventing any stagnant pools.
The Liquid Gold Catch: A bottom-tier reservoir collects every drop of nutrient-dense leachate, cradling the essence of the garden's vitality so it can be poured back over the roots.
The Lasagna Layering
Because our worm colony is resting and stabilizing before they move into their new home, we initialized a warm, cozy lasagna-style bedding to invite the first microscopic life to the table. We gathered natural treasures right from the property:
A soft base of damp, reclaimed corrugated cardboard
Nutrient-rich chicken litter to bring the heat
Forest-floor leaf litter
Fresh, green turf scuttlings
The Magic of the Cycle
There is a deep, quiet joy in watching weathered agricultural bins and scraps of old fence wood lock together to form a sanctuary for life. In a vibrant garden ecosystem, nothing is ever truly lost. The cardboard box that held tools, the fallen leaves danced in by the autumn wind, and the gifts from our livestock are not separate things—they are simply different verses of the same continuous song.
When we nurture these cycles, we step away from synthetic interventions and hand the magic back to the earth. We weave resilience right into the soil, remembering that caring for the land means listening to its rhythm rather than forcing compliance with a quick fix.
Slots are filling fast for our 2026 ecological design consultations. If you are ready to invite this natural harmony onto your property and cultivate your own closed loops, click the link to join our calendar.
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1S4sTYP3gFhGWo7wvfrJcxR6zNIvp0XLisUWrDHtcRzE/

vermicomposting systems, vertical composting tower, closed loop gardening, living soil consultations, organic soil fertility, Texas ecological landscaping, Reclaimed material garden, worm farm setup, zero waste backyard, soil food web, natural fertilizer tea, Ben Wheeler garden design.

05/26/2026

Gavin saw the first firefly of the season. It approached him in the garden this memorial day weekend.
We were so excited it was beyond words.
He and Winter watched it egress into the eastern woods for 20 minutes.
Ever thankful for the blessings nature brings through our garden on the summer breeze.
If you're looking at how to turn your garden from simply an ornamental or productive zone into an ecological safe space click this link to get on our 2026 consultation calendar.
The summer sun is peaking in the next 2 months and slots are filling up quickly. We look forward to helping you germinate your green thumb.

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1S4sTYP3gFhGWo7wvfrJcxR6zNIvp0XLisUWrDHtcRzE/

Want to attract more fireflies to your yard? Start by leaving the leaves. 🍂✨

Fireflies spend much of their life cycle in moist soil and leaf litter, so cleaning up every leaf and stick can remove the shelter they need to survive. Turning off unnecessary outdoor lights at night, avoiding pesticides, and planting native plants can also help create a safe habitat for these magical little insects.

Sometimes the best thing we can do for nature is simply leave a little wildness behind. 🌎💚

05/23/2026

The dog days of summer are in full swing, training displays and new family members are already in motion

Come out and see us: event is over at 3 we will be cutting out around 2 to take Winter to the zoo

Happy dog days everyone 💚

05/22/2026

Come see us tomorrow for the Dog Days of Summer at Bergfield Park in Tyler from 9a-3p!

🌱Get garden advice
🌿Grab some garden starters
🪴Find your next houseplant
📿Browse nature-inspired jewelry
🧶Meet your next crafted cuddly companion
✨️and more!

See you there!

05/15/2026

Transforming sand to a native ecosystem: why you should let native plants grow instead of grass.

A year ago this month, we began working this soil. At the time, the soil was mostly sand or dirt. Not really living, just there.
But under that quiet dry surface, a whole bank of native seeds waited for the right conditions. This year, a piece of the yard our toddler used to make sandcastles out of is attracting pollinators.

We've found one naturalized species so far, the rest native. And even the one non-native species (Bristlemallow) is doing the hard quiet work of finding moisture and locking down loose pockets of sand.
These native wood sorrels are breaking the initial hard exterior while building a new foundation of organic matter.

These plants are working to REBUILD the ecosystem around them🌱 Actively.
And they put out flowers for pollinators while they're at it✨️

What does grass do? It eats nitrogen. Depletes your soil of its nutrients. Depletes moisture. Will choke out nearly all native life. Offering nothing in return for the environment it inhabits.
Essentially? Turns your yard into a dust bowl with no chance of productivity for years to come without the input that you provide.

These native plants are finding what they need deep within the earth. All they needed to heal their environment was to have some organic life around them. 🌱✨️

We could have planted grass. We could have looked at the dead spots and said, "well, we know what will grow fast and look nice."

*BUT*

Taking care of where you live means ALL of it. The soil matters. The sustainability matters.

What are you feeding your butterflies?
✨️💚