No, this is not a shot from “The Crypt Keepers.” This is the Red Shiso cut, bundled, and hanging to dry. Looking nice and PURPLE too! The remaining empty loops of twine will get used as I bring in the rest of the harvest.

I still have probably about a quarter to a third of the crop to cut and hang. The building will be completely packed with Red Shiso by the time I finish. Sophie Cardew helped me last Thursday to cut and hang bundles. I hope to snag her for a couple of hours today. She is here on Thursdays, restocking the shipping stations and cheerfully doing a myriad number of weekly jobs.

Here is one of the sections of Red Shiso still standing. The white stuff around the feet of this Shiso is the protective cloth that can be draped on the Red Shiso if we get another frost before I get the rest cut.

Last week Sophie and I cut the southern part of the three Red Shiso rings. Over the weekend I kept cutting. Two nights ago we had another frost. That afternoon, I knew I wasn’t going to get everything cut before this frost hit, so I cut the rings of Red Shiso at the north of the garden and left Shiso in the east and west, hoping that the frost would roll down through this north south corridor and not bother the Red Shiso on either side. This worked!

Frost is a funny thing. In this neighborhood, I will get a frost when others don’t. Cold air is heavier than warm air so frosts roll downhill. We are up at about a thousand feet and we generally have warmer temperatures and an earlier spring than other places in the neighborhood, so you’d expect us to be more protected from frosts than we are. Instead, we get hit by these early frosts ahead of everyone else, even those down below us.

After almost twenty years here, I accept this anomaly with slightly more grace. The main garden where the Red Shiso grew this year is one of those places where the frost settles first. The cold air seems to roll down from Morgan Hill to the north of us and bounce through the gardens to this place and that on its way south towards the bottom of the hayfield. I am not sure I outsmarted the frost this time so much as went with the Flow of it!

Speaking of going with the Flow, Emily’s school has gone paper free. Her first set of senior year mid terms are posted on line. I have just receive a many page email explaining how to access her grades and teacher comments. I now need to go with this paper free flow.

I wonder if I will ever be done with my ambivalence about the technologies of our world. Dragged kicking and screaming to email and the internet a decade ago, I now passionately love my email friends and my blog world. I turn to Google with all my questions. Why even this morning I looked for a recipe I wanted on some recipe site and found it in a nano-second. And then there’s my Amazon.com habit too.

But I don’t want to have to login with a password to read Emily’s teacher’s comments. I don’t want to! Her’s is a small, friendly school and this feels so impersonal. I want a note from the teacher not a login experience!

Maybe my response isn’t just a lingering love for the envelope and paper. Maybe it’s resistance to being washed through an impersonal mechanism of logins and passwords to get to the information I seek. I think it might feel different if I got an email directly from each teacher. It’s funny how there are things that are personal about online life and there are things that just aren’t. Do others feel as strongly about these nuisances of connection?

On the subject of connection, I am always trying to think of ways to get more people connected to our local farmer’s market. As Deb wraps up another season running this market, I suggested an advertising campaign for next year along the lines of “Meet the Farmer who Grew your Spinach.” With the recent spinach problem, there wasn’t a farmer, but a corporation growing the spinach. But the problem was also about the SIZE of the farm.

The farmer’s market is a wonderful thing, not just because we meet the farmers, but because the smaller scale of each farm operations means that the farmers can care deeply about everything they grow. There literally is more love in their produce because of this small scale. And in my experience, more love actually translates into healthier spinach.

As I look at media photos of the spinach fields of California, it feels so off to me. When a corporation grows such vast quantities of one crop in one place, this can so easily create a cycle of every spinach loving pest in creation gathering in those fields, to be met by every pesticide in creation, to be met with every pesticide resistant bug, to be met with a new round of toxic chemicals. And the poor people working in those fields! How they must suffer from this poisonous atmosphere. And how difficult it must be to bring any love to such toxic and monotonous work. We all need a life more permaculture than monoculture, more familiar faces, less faceless bureaucracy.

Small is better. This is how I feel about Green Hope Farm. I don’t want to be the Proctor & Gamble of Flower Essences. I happily make decisions to keep us a place where we have personal relationships with you and with every Flower. Besides my own predilection to stay small, the nature of Flower Essences is that they don’t lend themselves to being Proctor and Gamble-ized. There has to be much love in the process of making and sharing the Essences or they won’t have the high vibrations needed to make them useful, informative Flower Essences.

As part of my continuing efforts to stay small and personal, I promise not to create a login system for talking with me on email or the blog. I also promise to get more help from Ben to deal with my technical difficulties with processing blog comments. They remain unposted in an enormous pool of thousands of spam entries. I keep asking Ben how to wade through this variation of spam. I have some good systems for sorting our email now. I CAN do this with the blog. But I keep forgetting what he says. It’s like logging on for Emily’s grades, I don’t want to process more viagra ads in order to manage this blog. I don’t want to do it! But I do want to support Emily’s senior year process, so I am going to login. And I do want to harvest the lovely comments that I know are there. I get so many helpful, loving, and wise ones on email. I know they await me under the blog spam.

I WILL forge ahead in this new world of technology we all inhabit and I thank you for your patience with me and the blog spam. Wish me luck! And Luck to you too as you face the spam in your twenty first century lives!

Last week, there were many common strands in the stories you told us about the people and animals in your lives. Animals were unusually restless and showed some out of character aggressive behaviors. People were having lots of difficulty with bullies and their controlling behaviors. It seemed some energy change was afoot on the planet and we were all scrambling a bit to figure out how to accommodate the change.

The Angels offered Flower Essence ideas. They suggested more Anxiety, Grounding, and Golden Armor Flower Essences than usual. They also suggested various Venus Garden mixes since these are so helpful with adapting to change. Of course, I continued to suggest my friend Flow Free and the Angels suggested that one as well. I usually had my quart jar of Flow Free water at my side to toast this suggestion whenever it was made. In fact, I can pause right now to take a sip!

The Angels last general comment went in another direction than Flower Essences. They suggested again and again, that everyone, four footed and two footed, spend more time outside in Nature.

As I heard a lot of stories about bullies and bullying behavior, I saw in this behavior attempts to feel “in control” in the face of change. Much as I could vaguely understand the behavior, I still found myself reactive to the bullying. The primary person in my childhood, my mother, was a terrible bully to me and others. Last week left me looking long and hard at how I coped with this then and how I cope with this now.

As a child, I fell into line when bullied. I was a poster child for good behavior. And I took my inner life far, far away from the bully’s realm. Nature was my solace and my safe retreat, as was the world of my imagination, my dollhouse, and my beloved books.

As an adult, I am still in a learning curve about bullying. As I listened to stories of bullying bosses, bullying in-laws, bullying friends and co-workers, children bullying parents, parents bullying children, doctors bullying patients, I realized my strong reactions were probably not very helpful to the person being bullied, given that they came from remembered childhood feelings of powerlessness and not from an adult perspective of acknowledging the gifts I have harvested from my encounters with bullies. I took comfort in the fact that in addition to my intense personal reactions to your stories, I also called in the Angels to offer their guidance and Essence suggestions, suggestions offered from a much more balanced place. I also tried to be accepting of my own process here and gently acknowledge to myself that there are good reasons why bullying is a particular challenge for me.

By the end of the week, I realized I wanted to really sort out what I had learned from a childhood of being bullied and think more about how I process this dynamic now. So I thought about this a lot over the weekend and arrived at a clearer understanding of what I had learned.

My experiences of being bullied earned me an acute awareness of bullying energy. I recognize it in the nuances of entitlement, snobbism, ideas of intellectual and cultural superiority, as well as outright physical bullying of a weaker, less socially powerful person. I saw it all and heard the justifications. This makes me a good sounding board for people who wonder if they really are being bullied.

Having experienced so much bullying, I try not to be a bully myself. I am glad I have this intention in life, even as I probably fall short in ways I don’t recognize. I made this choice because of my experiences being bullied. That was a gift of my childhood experiences. However, my thinking this weekend made me realize more clearly than before how I internalized the bullying I received into a heavy handedness with myself. Breaking habits of self bullying has been a focus of my adult life, but this work is not done.

Here are some hopes I have after thinking about this issue more. When I hear about other people being bullied, I need to be kinder to myself about my strong reactions. I have unrealistic and unkind expectations about achieving some sort of detached emotional state that might be more empowering to them. Right now I can’t do this when I hear stories that remain so highly charged for me. I need to accept that it is enough that I own my reaction as mine and offer the perspective of the Angels who actually can be detached.

I also need to remind myself during my own confrontations with bullies that I am not in the same powerless place I was in as a child. I need to reassure the little Molly that lives within me that she is now safe from this kind of bullying and that the adult part of me can and will protect her from these kind of situations and people. It seems like I actually need to have this conversation with little Molly. If I don’t tell her that adult Molly is going to protect her, she thinks she has to go into super good behavior mode, like with the Sears man last week. As someone pointed out to me in an email, maybe my treatment of my stovetop warranted some complaint from Sears about my appliance maintenance, however, nothing warranted the Sears man’s bullying behavior.

I also thought about the Angels suggestion to handle this bullying dynamic and general feeling of disequilibrium by spending more time in Nature. It occurred to me that the natural world is a good model of flowing with change. Nature is all about change. And Nature processes change without bullying. Nature is a sanctuary from bullying. This feels like a rather bold statement, but it feels true to me. Yes, animals eat other animals, but this is a natural law not motivated by a bullying energy. When household animals are bullying, perhaps it is an expression of living in a dynamic more like the human community than how they would live in the wilds. The ” I am better than you” ideas behind bullying are ideas of the human community not the natural world. Nature operates from a model of oneness and this eliminates any dynamic of bullying. Balance, whether in the form of weather extremes, or my favorite, slug infestations, is about balance. It is not about bullying. Acknowledging all this helped me to see why Nature was a solace for me as a child and why Nature remains a solace for me as an adult. It always helped me find balance and still does. It has been and continues to be a sanctuary from bullying and also a sanctuary from my confusions about bullying!

So that said, I am off to cut Red Shiso for a couple of hours. I have cut about half the crop since the end of last week. It is hanging in the little building where we dry the Red Shiso and so far, the crop is drying very purple. Such a good moment to have navigated the frost dangers long enough for the crop to get good and purple. A good moment. One I will savor.

As Vicki and I were assembling all the ingredients for Golden Armor on Monday, we noticed a few more Essences we needed to make before winter.

Whenever I take a walk, I visit with the Flowers I find along the way. over time I come to look for specific Flower friends in specific places. So when we noticed our low inventory on a couple of seriously in demand Flower Essences including White Yarrow and Self Heal, I was pretty sure I could find some of these Flowers still in bloom.

May May, Riley and I did find them, here in this meadow. What a glorious day it was!

I took a photo of Pearly Everlasting, still blooming strong in this meadow. It’s one of the new research Essences from this summer. I thought you might be interested to see how this Flower keeps looking absolutely fabulous week after week after week. You can imagine the strengths this brings to the Essence!

As the dogs and I turned for home with all the Flowers we were looking for, I found the surprise gift of Nodding Ladies Tresses blossoming in the bottom of this meadow.

This is a lovely late summer orchid that we had as a Flower Essence awhile ago, kindness of former staffer Catherine Barritt. I am very glad to welcome Nodding Ladies Tresses back to the collection. The Flower is much prettier than this photo. It has lovely fringed blossoms that dip and curve in a very sassy manner. I recall that it was an excellent Essence for de-tangling knotty situations. I will sit with this Flower again before posting a definition on the research list.

I also took two photos of Purple Flowering Raspberry. I thought you might like to see what its fruits look like as they ripen in the fall. On the left you see the Flower and some unripe fruit and on the right, some riper fruits. The berries have a strange dry consistency, but are strikingly lovely in the woods this time of year.

Jane has seen a bear twice on our road in the last month. Perhaps he was snacking on these berries as well as the blackberries that have been so abundant.

Yesterday, we had a baby shower lunch out with Vicki who is due with her first baby in a week or so. Yessenia, who left us to have her second baby in the spring, came to the shower with Svia, who is a charming baby of nearly five months old.

Svia was extremely well mannered throughout the whole long lunch. None of us could remember one of our babies behaving as well in similar circumstances.

In the photo, Vicki is holding up the sweater I knit for baby Ramos-Glew with Svia looking rather bored. Who can blame her. She already got her sweater. With this sweater, I officially swore off #1 knitting needles, but no one believed me. Next baby is getting something made with super chunky yarn on #15 needles. Really!

Here’s the crew out in the restaurant parking lot on a post shower sugar buzz. From left to right, Deb, Jane, Lynn, Yessenia, Vicki, and Patricia, with Svia peeking out from her blanket. What a great crew of fairy godmothers for Vicki’s baby! We can’t wait!

Besides uncanny bee sting placements, there was another strange event of note the last few days.

Rhino took off on a much anticipated trip to another hemisphere AT THE VERY SAME TIME that the dishwasher died. Coincidence? I think not.

While Rhino was AWOL, the Sears man was here citing me for “customer abuse” for not rinsing our dishes properly before putting them in our “No Rinse” dishwasher. Without judge or jury, the Sears man made his ruling. Our dishwasher was reported as dead from “customer abuse.”

I have never been cited for “customer abuse” with an appliance. It’s not a nice experience. The Sears man must have already had a bad day of too many dust bunnies under too many refrigerators before he got to us, because he had a multitude of complaints about his visit to our house. He used the words “customer abuse” so frequently both out loud and as typed into his computer that I expected to see myself blacklisted on the internet or subpoenaed to appear in front of a senate subcommittee before the afternoon was over.

He did not like the placement of our 911 emergency numbers on the road. He did not like our water pressure. He did not like our lukewarm mid afternoon water temperature. He did not want to hear about our energy saving technique of turning the water heater off during the daytime hours when there are no teenagers in the building needing their first second eighth shower of the day. He did not like my choice of ecological dishwasher soap or the way I put the soap in the built in soap dishes. According to the Sears man, you should never put additional soap in the secondary soap container next to the one with a lid. Forget the notion that a soap dish is placed there to receive soap, because according to the Sears man, this is not true. Most of all, he did not like the fact that I had not been cleaning my dishes before putting them in the dishwasher.

The Sears man claimed that putting dirty dishes into my machine had violated the warranty. The engine did seem to have seized up due to something resembling bubble gum. It would be just our luck that with Rhino AWOL, a rogue child would put his or first dish EVER into the dishwasher and it would have bubble gum on it.

Oh well. No use crying over spilt gum. We hope Rhino will send us a email photo while on his journey abroad. In the meantime, we are enjoying washing dishes the good old fashioned way, with soap and water and without the possibility of further criticism from the Sears man.

It is an art to welcome the stranger to a new endeavor, to help the neophyte chef make a meringue without communicating some paralyzing worry about salmonella, to give cheer to the new mother without unhinging her from her instincts, or to encourage the uninformed beekeeper without giving her nightmares about American Foulbrood.

Yesterday, I took a moment to sit down in the garden and pick up yet another of my new cache of bee books. This one, which we will call Volume X, was well written by an apparently sympathetic narrator with fifteen years as a professional beekeeper of several hundred hives. As I began to read with my cup of tea at my side, one of my bee friends came over and stung me on the END OF MY NOSE. Since I had been messing around in the hives just moments before without the bees giving me any bother, I considered this a sting of great portent, but not as a message I could quite grasp. What was right at the end of my nose except an swelling red spot? I did not know.

The book got put down as I rubbed my nose and then life swept in with various other tasks calling to me. It was not until this afternoon that I sat down again to read on in Volume X. I didn’t really listen to my restlessness as I read. I didn’t really quite identify the show-offy patriarchal tone of the author until a bit too late. You know those TV shows or movies that you really know it’s best not to watch because they are going to scare the shit out of you? Well Volume X is like that. I don’t think I can in good conscience recycle this book anywhere but with my newspapers and magazines. I don’t want to snuff out the high hopes of another would be beekeeper and sharing Volume X might do this. After my renewed acquaintance with Volume X for a couple hours today, I was deflated, stripped of my usual enthusiasm, and just about ready to throw in the bee gloves. I was filled with existential questions like “Is it arrogant of me to think any bee could survive on my watch?” Things were not good.

Hmmmmm. Could that bee have stung me yesterday to say NO to that book? That sting did get me to drop the book for a few hours. I really don’t no nose know. And now, because of my determined reading of the first half this book, I will have to try and forget all the pessimistic, chilling things I have absorbed about how poorly an amateur can care for bees and the 549 reasons why I don’t deserve to even eat store bought honey because of all the things I have already done wrong and no doubt will do wrong again even when I try to do better.

I love books. I don’t think I could have gotten through my childhood without “The Secret Garden” or “A Little Princess” by Sarah Burnett Hodges. Books have often been my main comfort. But I am sort of a gullible person when it comes to books. If I read it, I have a hard time not believing something to be true. This could be part of the reason why I eventually chose to generally wander in a book free world about so many things in my life like cooking and gardening and talking to Angels, instead of reading what the experts had to say. It seems too often when I read directions, I count myself out.

Bushwhacking without directions has caused me to make some mistakes, like with the first quilt I made when I was fifteen. Having never read anything about sewing, I didn’t know I needed to pre-wash the fabric. The quilt has some problems as a consequence. The materials all shrunk differently when I finally did wash the pieced quilt so the quilt is all puckered, but it’s still much loved. One of the girls has it on her bed right now. She probably thinks the puckering was fashionable back in the seventies when I made the quilt. After all, we liked big hair and bell bottoms back then.

My bushwhacking without the guidance of experts has given me confidence and trust in myself, often a lot more than when I read an expert’s book like Volume X and try to follow directions. Perhaps this is why I try to make “Guide To Green Hope Farm Flower Essences” short on specific directions and long on pep talks. I know you can find an incredibly meaningful and healing relationship with the Flower Essences without any of my ideas. I don’t want you to think you need my directions, because you don’t. I want to get out of the way and let you enjoy the Flowers and their Essences directly. Okay, so I do go on and on about every Flower and its Essence, but that is mostly because I am so grateful to the Flowers. I want to write descriptions of their vibrational gifts that begin to do them justice. Same goes with you all. I am so grateful for your love and wisdom and kindness that I want to share what you have shared with me.

So back to this Saturday afternoon. I sit here with my red nose, knowing that it is already time for me to put down my bee books and start bushwhacking my own path again. Its time to trust the deepening relationship the bees are calling me to. For all the fact that I have made mistakes with them according to all the books, there is love between us. I love those bees and somehow I know they love me too. It’s time to trust that love the same way I trusted that love when I first held one of my babies or started my first garden here or assembled that first unusual tuna noodle casserole for my husband the week after we were married. Learned a lot from the mistakes, had to throw that casserole out, but the love survived.

Does anything else matter?