It’s one of the good things about having gardens and lots of ’em. Everyone can indulge in their obsessions and sometimes no one else notices for quite awhile.
For example, it took Reina’s obsession with the enormous frog in the koi pond for us to notice the frog had an obsession of his own, this lovely Pink Water Lily.

The clock is ticking (quite literally) on Ben noticing my obsession with petite vegetables. Just back from Ireland with dozens of Flower Essences and a good many funny stories, he has taken up the helm of the GHF kitchen. This afternoon, he wanted me to bring in all the tomatoes so he could make a pasta sauce for tonight.

Do you think he will notice my obsession with miniature vegetables when he learns that my description of having found a couple dozen tomatoes for him was sort of misleading?

My obsession with different varieties of Flower Tobacco is bringing more pleasure. At least to me. And this may be good since I might be banished out to this garden to eat worms. Soon.

But really, the obsession I wanted to discuss today is Jim’s. He disappeared about two days ago down to the compost structure we use for kitchen scraps. Its been a losing battle to keep every animal in a five mile radius out of this bin. Riley in particular has a penchant for disappearing right after someone has taken a juicy compost pail down to the bin, only to return a few hours later with bad breath and a serious need for Digestive Woes.

I believe I have documented Jim’s previous obsessive attempts to fortify and protect this compost bin from Riley and every other animal known to man. And of course, Jim’s most recent noble effort deserves a nod of recognition because tonight, I have no doubt, this Bastille of compost prisons is going to be stormed. In fact I know it, because Riley just walked by and when he belched, I am sure I heard him say, “Vive le jardin! Vive les chiens! Vive le COMPOST!”

Unmodified structure on left. Bastille prison on right. Good luck to all garden patriots. I will be up at the house sharing a festive meal of an 1/8 cup of pasta sauce with Ben and the rest of the fam. If they’ll have me.

Where there are young adults, there is Facebook . And where there is Facebook, there is Facebook Deflation Syndrome wherein teeth are gnashed and hair is pulled when it appears that everyone else on Facebook is having a much better life with better hair, better shoes and better destination vacations.

Today, I thought I would take the edge off Facebook Deflation Syndrome’s kissing cousin, Blog Deflation Syndrome by showing you my choice of tomato varieties for this growing season.

Last year, 83 of my 84 Tomato plants packed up from the combined effects of three months of daily rain, the Irish potato virus and a sum total of five minutes of sunshine. Being somewhat irritated at my partners in the garden who suggested I grow 84 tomato plants, I didn’t pay ANY attention to their suggestions of tomato varieties for this season and didn’t listen to their suggestions about numbers of tomato plants to grow either. I wasn’t about to believe we could have a hot summer of lots of sun. No sirrreee! I was planning on RAIN.

Think adult gardener sticking her fingers in her ears, singing at the top of her lungs and simultaneously saying, ‘I’m not listening to you.” A mature moment.

Making decisions on my very own, I decided to grow only small tomatoes like cherry tomatoes because they were the only ones to survive last year’s wet conditions.

Only I couldn’t be satisfied with CHERRY sized tomatoes or even GRAPE sized tomatoes, I had to go with a variety of CURRANT sized tomatoes. And I didn’t hedge my bets with much of anything else. Yes, there is the occasional rogue normal sized tomato out there in the garden, but mostly there are 25 plants of CURRANT SIZED TOMATOES.

Do you know how small a currant is? Or a currant tomato?

Let me show you.

No, they look too normal in this artsy shot. Let me try again.

And those shots on other people’s blogs of enormous tomatoes? Those really ARE redder, riper, juicier, bigger, better tasting tomatoes, because frankly, how could they be smaller? I have cornered the market on that!

PS If this is not enough to finish off your case of blog deflation syndrome, let me give you a stove update. Still broken. some burners functioning now but 50% of the time the oven shuts off during preheating with an F5 error message and Sears has stopped returning our calls……..

The Day Lilies continue to make a wonderful midsummer splash.

So too this Rose Bon Bon Cosmos, blossoming in this year’s Venus Garden.

Just when I thought I had bid adieu to the Rose season, this new one, Westerland Rose bloomed for the first time here at the farm. Of course I ‘m making it into an Essence. Its out there today in the beautiful clear air and bright sunshine. Can’t wait to find out what its gifts are. It was very particular about how it wanted to be made into an Essence, In my experience, when a Flower is so clear about how it wants things done, it indicates the Flower Essence will be a strong one.

And speaking of strong Flowers with strong purposes, it is always lovely to welcome back the Echinacea family which bloom in late summer; Echinacea is such a key Flower Essence in our Immune Support mix!

Here it mingles with Sweet Pepper Bush Clethra alnifolia, a very old fashioned flowering shrub that also asked to become a Flower Essence today. I look forward to catching up with all these lovelies when the dust settles out in the gardens. Maybe October????? Right now things are full tilt with many hands out in the gardens harvesting, weeding, pruning, and yes, enjoying all the glories of July.

Way back in snowy January, one of our ideas for this summer was to begin work on a Green Hope Farm cookbook, taking photos of every meal we cooked with produce from the gardens. This would be a bizarre and supremely dull cookbook if based on this summer because…… yes…….the stove is still broken. I now know where Mark, the lovely Sears man, grew up, who his high school friends were and what he did on the fourth of July, but none of this has helped with the F5 error on the stove.

So as we enter day 37 of our stove free life, we eat a lot of fruit and vegetable salads and grill everything else. Then at least once a week when the Sears man has come and we have convinced ourselves the stove is finally fixed, I celebrate by trying to bake something- This week it was a big blueberry cake from our blueberry patch. Ten minutes into its cooking time when the F5 error began again, I had to take the cake out of the beeping, rapidly cooling, still broken oven and drive it to town to someone else’s oven.

It’s been a hot summer so who am I kidding that if the oven had been working I would have been slaving over a hot stove to prepare fancy dishes for photo shoots? There would not have been enough time for this project anyways as we have to spend so much time carting our fans from room to room.

I have come to think of the end of the work day as the “Migration of the Fans” as we all leave the office in a herd, each one of us trailing the cord of our favorite fan to our next location.

For the under thirty set this means moving the fan to their location for yoga, “Zumba” (a cardio workout that seems to mix Cambodian hip hop with salsa dancing) or some other insanely hot activity while for me it means dragging my fan to the kitchen for a serious bout of head scratching about a new way to eat raw broccoli.

Then when the raw bar is ready, our fans come together to keep us cool while we chew and chew and chew. Last night was a small moment of victory when William admitted he had grown fond of tomatoes. Funny how a steady diet of raw broccoli stalks can make a formerly loathed vegetable into a new friend.

Outside there is no break from dragging things around since we now need to move sprinklers from garden to garden to keep things from wilting away in this heat. But as you can see from the photos, many Flowers are loving this heat and they cheer us on to just sit back with our fans blowing and enjoy this unusually hot New Hampshire summer. So with a raw fennel stalk in one hand and a raw carrot in the other, I am doing my best to let go and think how impressive my carbon footprint is this summer.

Yesterday was a beautiful clear summer day so the Angels had me busy making Flower Essences.

So many Flowers bloom for a relatively short window of time. This means I keep my lists of what needs to be made for our various collections right here at my desk to check frequently. There are some Flowers like yesterday’s Zucchini Flowers that bloom for many weeks and that was a good thing because yesterday after leaving the most gorgeous big saucy orange Zucchini blossoms in a bowl of water out in the sun, I returned at dusk to find the bowl of water tipped over, the Essence drunk and the Flowers eaten.

This reminded me of the first time I learned Flower Essences were a special gift for animals.

It was at the beginning of the 90’s and several friends and I were out in the first Venus Garden. Suddenly a strange black dog charged into the yard and began to run circles around the garden where we sat. As the dog got moving faster and faster his mouth began to foam. Perhaps we should have been afraid of rabies or something like that but instead, a friend named Anita got up and prepared a big bowl of water for this dog with the first Essence she could find. It happened to be Zucchini Flower Essence.

As she set the bowl on the ground, the big black dog raced to the bowl, drank the whole thing then flopped down in a relaxed heap in the grass where he spent a happy couple of hours watching us peacefully. After a few hours of perfect calm, he leisurely strolled out of the yard a changed animal. While we never saw this dog again, he REALLY GOT MY ATTENTION about how much a Flower Essence could help an animal. He was one of the many precious animals who sometimes dramatically and sometimes patiently ushered us into our calling to create Flower Essences for animals. For that I will always be grateful.

I don’t know who dropped by to drink the bowl of Zucchini Flower Essence yesterday, but I am grateful for this visit because it reminded me of that first eye opening moment with a dog and this Essence. And now without further ado I am off to the Zucchini plants again in search of more blossoms just waiting to become a Flower Essence.