I started this hermit journal entry on Monday, but will add more throughout the week until I decide enough is enough and go on and hit publish.

Monday I felt like myself again and renewed my morning walk program. Then I found a maybe fossil, checked on the garden, checked on the ginseng garden too, hung the first of my ceiling insulation strips. The day’s activity ended when I dropped a board on my forehead (which did leave a mark).

Tuesday morning I started some spicebush and ginseng seeds stratifying, and then suddenly decided to begin a podcast using my past blog posts.

On Wednesdays, it’s office day at the realty. This is sometimes the only day of the week that either of us goes away from here. That’s the goal, anyway. I get the groceries and run any other errands while I’m out. But sometimes we do have to go out more often.

Thursday I hurt my shoulder in the garden being angry about an armadillo raid and pillage that happened Wednesday night.

Friday I had a delightful appointment with an almost 11-year old red-headed grandchild.

And today is Saturday, my shoulder is better, and I went back to work on the insulation in my studio. After that, I became the heroine to a hummingbird – read about that in a separate post linked here.

Like Myself Again

In case you missed it, I spent last week Wednesday at the emergency room, after spending the day Tuesday in bed trying to not move or disturb my bloated stomach. CT showed diverticulitis. Super sized antibiotic horse pills had me feeling like myself again over the weekend, but completely myself again by Monday. Whew. Glad to get that out of the way.

Morning Walk Routine

So, this used to be called my morning MILE. However, I’ve neglected to even walk to and from the horses’ gate over the past year. When I got the CT scan at the ER that day, it showed I also have the beginnings of a fatty liver. Well. Sugar/carb reduction, exercise and weight loss is the prescription for that (according to me, at least), and so I set my commitment to that three-pronged approach. My morning walk routine will be back to the Morning Mile by the end of the year, and it’ll also include the jogging that has long been put to the wayside, too.

But it’s not ‘just’ exercise.

It’s time set aside to immerse in nature. Our driveway runs down the hill and through the creek, with forests and bluffs and potential for wildlife spotting all the way. But I rarely stay strictly on the path. While I may stay focused on getting exercise in on the first half, on the way back to the house I wander. Often I find fossils, like this one that might not be a fossil but sure looks like it could be an imprint of seed pods:

And I’m always looking at the plants that might be in seed or blooming along the way. There are usually frogs in the little pool at the base of our wet-weather waterfall. It’s on the right where the creek flows into the driveway a little bit. Well, then there’s the creek to explore. But I save all of that exploring until I’m walking back.

The Ginseng Nursery & Habitat Garden

At the far end of our driveway and across the creek, there is the ginseng nursery. “Nursery” may look like a misnomer, because it’s not the sort of plant nursery you’ll expect. There are some pots, but they’re in retaining beds against the base of the hill. The hill itself is the Habitat Garden.

So I stopped in to see how the plants are doing with the drought. As expected, not too good. The ones in pots are fine, because they’re well mulched and I use a moisture retaining potting mix. The wild-simulated ginseng plants are displaying various signs of stress and decline, but it’s the way they usually look at the end of season.

Hung a Little Insulation

This is where the day took a downturn, after such a good start. Last week I’d left a strip of insulation hanging on the pole jack so it would be ready and waiting when I returned to the job. Today seemed like a good day to finish that and possibly get another one hung. So I put the ladder in position and started stapling to the rafters. So far so good. Time to move the pole jack. Climb down the ladder and began the move.

I should have stopped while I was ahead.

The board fell off of the top of the pole when I pressed too hard while it was facing wrong. It hit me on edge right in the center of my forehead. Ouch!

I called it done for the day. Tuesday I went back out there and tried that again, did much better and finished half of the ceiling. Went back to the house and started putting up some seeds I’d gathered.

An Aside

Today is Thursday. Tomorrow I have somewhere to go for 2 pm. I’m one of those people who can’t do anything between the time of making the appointment and actually going to the appointment. Which makes life a bit difficult between those two points. It drives me crazy. But I can do things like work on this post. So that’s what I’m doing in the meantime. And once I get busy doing something else, I can forget that there’s ‘something I have to do’ at a certain time and day looming in the future. When I am going to be home, there’s no anxiety about the upcoming schedules of things to do. But if this old hermit has to go out for anything, then it becomes an issue to work my entire life around. At least in this case, it’s an enjoyable birthday dinner date with a grandkid, so I’m not complaining. I wish all of my appointments were such fun.

Back to the Seeds

When the seasons start to give subtle clues of changing, that’s when it’s time to collect seeds. Today I gathered spicebush and ginseng berries. We have one of the only American ginseng nurseries in Arkansas. There might be two of us out there now. The way I grow ginseng is called wild-simulated. This means it’s not planted in rows and all I really do is put in a seed. The rest is up to nature. While I also have nursery retaining beds for those plants I intend to put into pots and sell, I also have a small area set aside as an educational habitat garden. People come to see what ginseng looks like growing in a natural way, side by side sometimes with the most commonly mistaken plants… virginia creeper, buckeye, poison ivy, and hickory saplings.

In the nursery I also sell the companion plants, those plants that also grow in the same habitat as ginseng. Habitat restoration is a thing that interests me. While people worry about the plants that have commercial value, they often overlook the rest of the ecosystem that supported those plants. I don’t know whether or not it’s important to the ginseng to have its companions around. But it’s important to me when I’m working on a habitat restoration. And so I offer some of those in my nursery too.

And today is Saturday

This morning after breakfast I walked down the hill with buckets of feed as I’ve done every morning except Wednesday this week. It’s my warmup to ‘getting back on my morning mile’ routine.

I’d been opting to use the side x side instead of walking for the past six months or so, and my subsequent lack of exercise is showing. This morning was the first one that didn’t leave me winded after the uphill climb back to the house. So tomorrow kicks off another little chunk of distance I need to add to that walk. After the feeding, from there I’ll do some warm-ups and jog myself down to the waterfall. Then it’ll be a slow and laborious walk back uphill. The waterfall is the low point. From there, any direction is uphill. But the biggest hill is actually two hills on the way back to the house.

That’s it for this week’s Hermit Journal

Join me next week! I hope I can manage to continue the little daily entries like this, because it makes putting a blog post together easier for me.

This post will become the next episode of my podcast, too. So if you’d like to listen to my voice tell these weekly updates, subscribe to the Wild Ozark Hermit Journal at Apple podcasts and eventually also at Spotify. They’re available at some other outlets, too. Links are all over here on this page:

Podcast

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Author/Artist Info
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In the summer of 2018 I began making watercolor paints from the rocks, clay, and other resources of our land here in the Ozarks. In 2023 I began experimenting with the same pigments in oils. I call them Wild Ozark Paleo Paints, because they’re made in a way very close to the same way paints were made when man (or woman) first put a hand-print on the wall of a cave. I use very small amounts of outsourced pigment for blue, white, and sometimes yellow to offer a greater range of hues built upon the earthy local pigments. My specialty is painting nature, specifically the nature that surrounds me here in the remote hills of northwest Arkansas.

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Madison Woods
@wildozark (Instagram, Twitter, Threads and FB)
madison@wildozark.com

Want to join me for workshops or see my art?

Coming soon! I have a new Studio in the Works 🙂
The building is here and I’m finishing out the interior. I hope to begin offering classes/workshops by the end of September 2026 and host Open Studio days regularly right here at Wild Ozark, where the possibilities for nature experiences (including nature art) run rampant.

The best way to stay informed is to sign up for my newsletter and check off the box ‘Studio News’ (or whatever is closest to that description). I’m updating there as I meet the goalposts and will announce anything planned as soon as I get firm dates.