Tomorrow Jim is officially done with teaching sixth grade for the year and is home for summer “vacation”. This means I plot to have all heavy goods arrive between now and Labor Day so that, at the very least, I get help from him to unload cargo into the barn.

I ordered our cobalt blue bottles a few weeks ago. The lead time is usually ten weeks on these bottles so I assumed ordering in the beginning of June would mean deliver in August with Jim unloading the bottles with the rest of us. Our bottle vendor concurred there was no chance our bottles would get from Taiwan to California to here by anything but a slow boat.

So how surprised was I when this truck pulled into our yard this morning?

Not very……….. given my track record of 100% failure at having ANY delivery happen when Jim is here.

Most deliveries occur after the staff has left for the day and before Jim and Will have come home from school, a slim window of time when I am here by myself.

I can’t begin to tell you how often this happens. Like a few weeks ago when I got to unload a year’s worth of dropper tops all by myself while some truck driver yelled at me about the directions for Green Hope Farm being wrong on Map Quest. When I asked if I should tell Map Quest about this problem, he said they wouldn’t care or correct the problem….. leading me to wonder why he was yelling at me about an error that wasn’t of my creation or apparently within my ability to fix.

Anyhow, back to this morning. With Jim out of the loop per usual, I had to activate my fall back plan which was to keep the staff glued to my side so there was no chance I would find myself unloading the truck by myself. The only thing that I could imagine could gum up the works of plan B was a lunchtime truck arrival when all the young women here hit the trails.

Of course, this meant the truck arrived right at noon just as everyone was scattering for their lunchtime workouts. I had to convince them all that unloading boxes of bottles was an ample lunchtime workout and I do think that by the time they were through unloading the truck, they believed me.

Late in the afternoon as tired school teacher Jim rolled in, he had already heard about the bottles unexpected arrival. Apparently this truck driver who was a real sweetheart, had also gotten lost, kindness of Map Quest, and he’d had to ask around town for directions. Being such a small town with not much going on, this had qualified as news and so someone had sought out Jim to tell him that a tractor trailer truck was searching for our farm. Jim knew this meant my plans to include him in heavy goods deliveries had been foiled once again. He walked in the door with a rather big grin on his face.

The only thing is, we had to unload the truck so unexpectedly that I’m not sure Jim is going to like where we placed the boxes of bottles in the barn. He may get to move some heavy goods after all!

Happy Vacation honey!

On Saturday, two people to be identified only as teenager X and young adult Y were tussling over a glass of water and somehow the glass got launched in the air and spilled down the back of the stove, shorting the whole thing out.

After several hours with a hair dryer at the back of the stove, we faced facts. The stove was not going to snap back to life no matter how much drier it got. Flipping the breaker in the basement was also not going to bring new life to the old beast. So, we called the Sears repair people and were told that the first available service person could make a call on July 2nd.

July 2nd. Fourteen days. I will spare you a graphic description of MY reaction to the news that I would be running a kitchen for seven adult sized people for two weeks without benefit of a stove. After my meltdown, I went to my sink and somehow the view from there consoled me a bit.

As did the thought that maybe if there was no stove, there might not be any dishes either.

Three days into seven people sharing a toaster oven, a crock pot and an electric fry pan, I can tell you two things for sure:

#1 There is very little that can’t be cooked in an electric fry pan.

AND

#2 Having no stove makes entirely no difference in the creation of dirty dishes.

We’ve had a string of soggy, overcast days. June is a magic month in the gardens so there were so many Flowers to enjoy in between showers.

Here’s a Sarah Bernhardt peony blossoming amongst the Cranesbill Geranium.

I spent time in the drizzle weeding various gardens. As I finished hauling away my piles of weeds at dusk, the skies cleared. making for a beautiful moment.

As I battled crab grass and bindweed, a staff of experts tried to help Jim with his Facebook account. The verdict? Don’t expect any wall posts from Jim any time soon.

Sarah Van Fleet Rose, a wonderful Flower Essence for soothing frayed nerves.

A honeybee departs from John Cabot Rose, one of the climbing Roses in our Sacred Masculine combination remedy. Speaking of bees, we had a swarm last week- Usually with a swarm we have to suit up and scoop the whole swarm into a box, hoping we manage to move the new Queen into the hive box with our scooping- This swarm made things easy for us. The scout bees sent out to find a new home for their new Queen moved her right into an empty hive box in the potting shed. Once they had settled in, all we had to do was wait until the hive quieted down at dusk then move it next to our three other hives on the south side of the GHF office.

Cardinal de Richelieu Rose whose Flower Essence offers vital support for taking back what is rightfully ours. A key ingredient in All Ego Contracts Null and Void.

The incomparable Madame Hardy Rose which is a pillar of strength in our Grief and Loss combination remedy.

I can’t get enough of the magic of Alchymist Rose.

On another note, here you can see the last of the annuals right before they got planted yesterday morning. Sometimes its almost July when I get all the plants from the greenhouse and cold frames into the ground, so that was a good moment. Now all the gardens are officially planted, and we can turn our attention to weeding and deadheading and, of course, smelling the Roses and the Peonies and the Mock Orange and the Sweet William and the……….

This growing season the women working in the gardens wanted me to take a pledge that I would let them veto any photos I wanted to post on the blog. I am sure this is exactly the kind of shot they are talking about with a nameless someone’s rear in the air and someone else identifiable only by a calf muscle-

I would post something else, but I only remembered to pick up my camera once yesterday. And I only remembered because I thought you might enjoy seeing this year’s Red Shiso spiral begin to appear as we prepared the soil before seeding.

Perhaps I can slip this photo by my censors and face their wrath later. Maybe with all the other rogue photos on places like Facebook, none of them will notice this picture.

Hope springs eternal, especially here.