One thing which keeps me busy in the days surrounding the Fourth of July is working with the air Elementals, aka the Sylphs, to repair the damage done to the air element by fireworks.

Yes, its not just your dogs that don’t like fireworks- The Elementals loathe them!

New Hampshire has the most complicated regulations for say getting septic tank approval to build a new home but pretty much a five year old can walk into a store and pick up a truck load of fireworks.  This means that on the days before the Fourth and even after, there are fireworks everywhere. Firework season has become Memorial Day to Labor Day! And this has been very hard on the Air Element and the hear working Air Elementals who are already swamped dealing with our pollution.

If you would like to work with the Sylphs to repair the damage done on land near you, ask the Sylphs over the property where the fireworks took place to cleanse, clear illuminate and rebalance the air of this place.  Our request is necessary due to humanity’s free will. The Elementals will assume we want the air Element looking like swiss cheese if we don’t ask for this repair.

If you would like to work the whole piece of land, call in Pan (head of all Elementals), and all the Elementals (which includes Sylphs for the air element, Undines for the water element, Salamanders for the fire element, Gnomes for the earth Elemental and Ether Elementals for the Ether element. and ask that all the Elements of the property be cleansed, cleared, illuminated and rebalanced.  There is a much longer description of land clearing on our website’s resources page in the section under Angels & Elementals.

ANY land clearing work you do right now matters so much to Earth!  Consider making this a part of your daily routine! BLESS YOU!

Now I am off to the potato patch to check in on a Potato Flower Essence I am making with the dozen gorgeous potato varieties we are growing right now- I have never had such a radiant group of potato plants here, much as we grow them every year- I credit my son in law, Charlie who is in charge of the potatoes this year.  He has a real touch with potatoes!

This spring, like every spring, the weather was odd.  It was way too cold with snow lingering well into the season.  It was also very, very wet.

Did I mention how wet it was?

Somehow with all this dreary weather, the month of April in which I usually weed like crazy, saw me inside observing the rain from a comfortable chair by the fire.  All chores that I thought could be pushed back, got pushed back.  This is why I am now weeding with enormous ratchet pruners instead of regular sized clippers. This is why I need one of the resident chain saw gentlemen to cut down something that was formerly a shrub but now would best be described as an impenetrable thicket.  This is why April’s polite little whispers of weeds became scratchy behemoths. This is why I am writing a blog about Alika Rose.

Oh Alika!

Yes, you ARE beautiful and I love you BUT…….The arrival of June sunshine meant that my moment of reckoning  with you had come after my long, cold, wet April by the fire with a lot of good books.

YOU were my last hurdle this garden season.  Well frankly, you are STILL my last hurdle even though we have now tangled with each other.

To back up a bit……Missing the month of April and all those April tasks put me behind the garden eight ball, so in May, even when it continued cold and wet,  I went out in the rain and tried to catch up.   All the many flats of annuals from the greenhouse and cold frames got planted in cold and wet May.  Along with the baby plants, the vegetable seeds got planted in cold and wet May in the cold and wet ground.  Some of them are complaining about this still.   The Red Shiso went in the ground at the tail end of cold and wet May and rolled with the punches to germinate in the last few days. When everything was planted, I grabbed my clippers and tackled the weeds in the perennial beds in cold and wet May.  I was a whirling dervish of soggy gardening.  Except I just couldn’t bring myself to tackle the Rose Garden ESPECIALLY ALIKA-  It’s the very first garden I always work in during April and well, it had been looking more and more unkempt ESPECIALLY ALIKA.

June arrived.  I could delay no more.  It was time to weed this garden AND DEAL WITH ALIKA.

Weeds are often well loved plants surfacing in the wrong places. This is never more true than in the Rose garden where Rose suckers are often just another name for Rose weeds.  And a well loved plant in the wrong place is still a weed even when it is gorgeous Alika Rose.  It’s the truth. SORRY ALIKA!

It’s not like the Roses (ESPECIALLY ALIKA)  were quaking at the thought of me finally weeding their territory.  It’s not like I put my money where my mouth is and cut back all these Rose weeds. Especially if they are in bud, I walk away and let them bloom before I cut them down.  To sum up,  I am a notorious wimp when it comes to weeding out Rose suckers.  I am sure the Roses know it (ESPECIALLY ALIKA), and so do I.

Things went particularly poorly this year as I battled in the Rose garden. Enough that I will weed the Rose garden IN APRIL NOT JUNE even if I have to shovel snow off the ground to do it.

My struggles with the Alika Rose were classic examples of me wimping out on benevolent ruthlessness in the garden. ( I BET YOU ARE NOT SURPRISED TO HAVE ME WRITE THIS).

The problem with Alika Rose is that she sends out suckers in all directions. Hundreds of them. Maybe thousands.  I would not be surprised if there was a sucker from our Alika Rose in your garden. And every one of these suckers is determined to throw an immense spray of blossoms. FAST! And I am sure Alika does this so I don’t cut any of these suckers back but feel compelled to wait until they have blossomed AND TAKEN A FOOT OR SIX MORE FEET OF GROUND IN THE GARDEN.

Why can’t some of the other Roses behave like this and give Alika a bit of a run for her money? I don’t know.  Other Roses seem to fade away when Alika steamrolls over their turf.  Other Roses need me to wield my clippers for them- And I try.  I really do.

Alika Rose suckers that I missed clipping or wimped out on dealing with forcefully in seasons past have turned an entire stretch of the Rose garden into ALIKA ROSE VILLAGE.  As a Flower Essence, its I AM affirmation is, “I AM the beacon that knows no limit. I AM one with my source.”  Alika certainly DOESN’T know any limits OR MANNERS!

When I went to tackle Alika this weekend, I cleaned out under the Alika giants pictured above, but then I began to waffle.  There were just so many buds in so many places.  After a Sunday afternoon hemming and hawing about cutting these buds back, surprise surprise, Monday dawned and every last bud had become a blaze of blossoming glory.

Now, even though Alika has infiltrated the Chives, the Comfrey, the Rhubarb, the Therese Bugnet Roses, the Asparagus AND the Echinacea-  I feel like I HAVE to let her blossom before I hack her back.

Alika Rose in the Chives

Alika Rose in the Therese Bugnet Roses

Oh Alika! You remind me how much I still have to learn about gardening! and pruning! and life!

A thunderstorm blew through yesterday bringing hail

and a lightning strike that took down a pine tree in the hedgerow between the two main hayfields of the farm.

Both Jim and Will saw the lightning strike the tree.  It was a dramatic moment of orange fire and and exploding tree parts.

After the storm had passed we went down into the fields to inspect the damage.

The Pine broke in two about half way up.

The top of the tree was thrown to the south east of the trunk.

Limbs were buried deep into the ground.

Slivers of barrels branches like this one encircled the tree. I love the pines down in this part of the farm and was sad to see it go.

Here Will beats a retreat back up the hedgerow before another thunderstorm arrives.  Will graduated from college on Sunday.  It is amazing to realize that the baby who inspired Meatballs for Breakfast and so many Babies of Light Flower Essences is now sailing out into the world! Congrats Will!

We receive a fair number of questions about our shipping practices, and I thought it might be helpful to know why we do what we do. Like all protocols here, our shipping processes came from guidance from the Angels and Elementals to help us solve problems we were having.

Our basic process for problem solving is this: When something is not working well, we have a group meeting in which us humans discuss the problem and then meditate to ask for guidance about how to solve the problem. In a jam, I will do this alone, but it is much more fun and productive to do this as a group. When we problem solve as a group, it is awesome to witness how different staff receive different pieces of information with all the ideas dovetailing together to move us forward in how we do things.

When we have a new staff person, there are quite a lot of different protocols in place that have sprung from us taking the problems we encountered to the Angels and Elementals to solve in these meetings.

For example, at this point we close out the day with four clipboards/notebooks with which we double cross off each package. We call this our end of day cross check and to someone new here it must look like we are seriously gilding the lily – but there REALLY ARE GOOD REASONS WE CROSS CHECK LIKE THIS!

Like the time I sent an entire set to the wrong person……

Staff Goddess Sam Heaton with the four sheets for check off.

In regards to the packing and shipping of your orders, we specifically look to and lean on our shipping Angel Nathan who has helped us with creating all our shipping systems (INCLUDING THE END OF DAY CROSS CHECK). Nathan also protects all the packages energetically on their way to you.

THANK YOU NATHAN!

So here are some of the questions we get from you all frequently-

QUESTION: Why do you send priority mail instead of the less expensive first class mail?

MY THOUGHTS: While Nathan and his crew energetically protect our Flower Essences on their way to you, it is still energetically better for the Flower Essences to get from the farm to you as swiftly as possible. Our experience with first class mail is that the timeframe for delivery is wildly variable , while priority mail is consistently much faster.

QUESTION: Why do you package your Flower Essences in so many layers of boxes?

MY THOUGHTS: Yes, I know it can feel like breaking into Fort Knox when you open a package from us! But shipping problems led us to this wrap job! Basically, we pack each bottle in its own colored box then in USPS boxes to prevent the Essences from being broken on the way to you and also to help Nathan with his protective efforts.

This week one of you sent us samples of packaging materials used by another FE company which wraps its 1/4^th ounce bottles in a sort of napkin material. I salute the simplicity of this packaging and I am truly glad it is working for this company. Perhaps because this company’s bottles are half the size of our ½ ounce bottles, they are less likely to break than our bottles. In our experience, wrapping 1/2 oz. bottles of our Flower Essences in napkins doesn’t get it done.

From the beginning we have had cardboard boxes for ½ ounce bottles to protect them (and also help you keep them organized in your home), but the boxes for 2 oz. bottles are new in the last year. The reason we finally got organized to have these 2 ounce bottle boxes made is because of breakages from 2 oz. bottles wrapped in cardboard. No matter how we padded these 2 oz. bottles wrapped in cardboard, we had breakages. Now that we are using these 2 oz. bottle boxes, this problem has stopped. (WHEW!)

This does not mean we never have any shipping problems. Take for example the mystery of this box. This was the correct address and the person was home, yet the box was returned to us. Hmmmmmm.

COMMENT: Your shipping costs are more than many mail order companies.

MY THOUGHTS: If you are in my generation, you may remember that when you filled out the info for your high school yearbook, you were asked what your pet peeve was. I really hated that phrase “pet peeve” though, of course, I poured over my yearbook to see what everyone said was their pet peeve. Little did I know as an adult (?) I would sink to the most boring of pet peeves: shipping cost hidden in the price of the purchased item.

Yes, hiding our shipping costs in the cost of the Flower Essences WOULD mean we could offer a low shipping fee, AND I am sure this would end this whole discussion about shipping costs, but I seem to be determined to have our shipping costs reflect the actual cost of shipping EVEN WHEN IT ANNOYS PEOPLE! Sorry! Had to get this off my chest!

Now I will help with the end of day cross check then go out to the garden and battle the black flies ( pet peeve #2).

Staff Goddess Emily Malnati with some of the day’s packages.