Reginald Montgomery “Chuckie” Hogbottom, Order of the Woodchuck, Recipient of the medal of honor “Marmota Monax” September 2019, Groundhog Knight of the Realm, May 2022, and Recipient of the Order of the Garter July 2023 here. Sending my greetings to all of you groundhog kin who attended the great Tomatopalooza of July 31st.

Wasn’t that a night to remember?

To recap for those of you who missed the Love Fest. After taking down the vegetable gardens to the point where there was nothing but some sad little tufts of shredded lettuce, it was time to find better pastures. And boy did we find one! Once again all credit to the deluded human with her ridiculously lavish care of her hoop house of tomato plants. Didn’t she know we can break into anything? Didn’t she remember we LOVE green tomatoes?

Some highlights from Tomatopalooza2025 (registered trademark). ( Note to cousin Millicent: Can’t you get on it and get us some t-shirts? This event was t-shirt worthy).

First, I would like to pat myself on my plump and furry back about my media posts on FB, insta, tik tok and X. What a lively crowd these posts brought to the farm. It was a delight to see so many of you gathered for the assault.

Second, a little more congratulations are in order. We did a sublime job clearing the entire hoop house of every single tomato. I checked back the night after the festivities, and there was nary a red, orange or green tomato left. I am confident we took down at least a couple hundred tomatoes! Good work!

Third, I would like to address a delicate matter concerning groundhog manners. Some of you did not live up to our clean plate club standards but left half eaten tomatoes in a trail out of the hoop house. Please next time, remember that there are plenty of us to eat every last tomato and no need to waste a morsel of garden goodness.

I also want to reassure you that talk of a serious fence around the vegetable garden seems to be hot air. The person who promised to be there by July? No sign of him or his equipment. We can only hope that he “runs behind” (whatever that is) well into the next season too. In any case, I haven’t met a fence we couldn’t handle.

We do have some dramatic news to report. During Tomatopalooza you may have met one of the farm kingpins, my Uncle Bertram. He lives under the farmhouse deck just a few feet from the farm’s back door.

Last week he had an unfortunate run in with visiting dog Huckleberry, the grandpuppy of the farm humans. Huck got into a bit of a tussle with Bertram in the main perennial bed and took out a good bit of the garden’s Flowers. Not to worry! Bertram escaped and as for the damage to the gardens? We don’t really care that the destruction of so many Flowers leaves less for the deer to eat.

So here we are. August 6th and the whole community of us is fat and happy. I raise my glass to our wondrous season of plunder and delight. How we have savored the Swiss Chard, vast collection of Lettuce varieties, Chiogga and Detroit Dark Red Beets and their greens, Celery, Celeriac, many kinds of Shelling and Sugar Snap Peas, Hakurei Turnips, Cucumbers both the pickling and slicing kinds, Zucchini, Summer Squash, Borage, Nasturtiums, Italian Green Beans not to mention yellow, green and purple green beans, baby Pumpkins and most of all the bounty of 64 tomato plants. Such good work team. I am already looking forward to next season!

If I had to pare down the spiritual path to the simplest notion I would say, “Be loving.” Why? Because there is Divinity worth loving in everything and everyone.

Simple to say “Be loving” not so simple to do. People and groundhogs piss us off. We encounter the flotsam and jetsam of other people’s personality crap, and it’s tough to find our way to love. It’s also tough to figure out when other people’s personality crap makes it appropriate to back off and love from afar. We would not embrace a porcupine without being careful, and sometimes people require the same careful approach.

A person who betrayed me in a big way a number of years ago recently seemed to make a slight overture to redress the wrong. I found myself softening and opening my heart once again. Then it turned out the gesture was not genuine, and the person had no intention of following through with making things right. What is it they say? “Fool me once shame on you. Fool me twice shame on me.” That’s a bit harsh, but I felt that I was getting a lesson to be more cautious with my heart. I felt I was being shown that sometimes we have to see and accept the nature of people’s personalities and be careful.

How is this about love? How do I choose love in this circumstance? Well first of all there is need for me to bring forward love for my own tender heart. Maybe it just doesn’t need another stomping from this person. That’s on me to show enough discernment to expect people to be who they are. That’s on me to proceed cautiously or not at all.

Maybe it is an odd kind of love, but accepting where the person is and leaving the person to learn their lessons in their own way is love.

Giving a person the space to learn their own life lessons the way they need to learn them is honoring the person’s own process.

We may wish the pace of their learning was different or that they had wisdom that made our lives better, but sometimes we have to let go to where they are in their spiritual journey and let them learn things in their own way.

What Flower Essences support us in this work?

All Ego Contracts Null & Void clears out our confusions about what we owe others and what they owe us. If we have relationships where we are expected to be there regardless of what the person is doing to us, this Essence helps us release this often unconscious mindset of obligation.

Carry Less helps us remove our filters that have us see things a certain way when maybe it is not that way at all. These filters build up over time so that we don’t always see a situation or person accurately and fall into habitual patterns that do not serve us.

These two Essences help free us from underlying assumptions, unconscious biases, societal and familial expectations. There is freedom in unwinding these from our electrical systems. We are free to take better care of ourselves and free to love others appropriately.

The religious template of my own childhood has been one of the things I have had to modify to find a better balance of love and self care. Raised in a family of selfish people all telling me that good people are always selfless, I came to think it was my duty to fall on the sword for them over and over and over again, taking care of them in their irresponsibility and recklessness. This became the habitual way I handled others outside my family who were similarly self involved.

Flower Essences and my guidance (which always have been more appropriate than my childhood training) have both helped me in this very big project to find balance and a wiser path of love. I have needed to learn to serve the divinity within each person not their personality demands. Sometimes this means love up close and sometimes love from afar. Both of these Flower Essences combined with events in daily life lead me to a different more flexible way to love than the self destructive submission to personality egos that I was raised to pursue.