As the gardens continue to flood with June Flowers, other projects also flourish.

Today’s the big day here in which Ben Sheehan and Katie Carpenter officially begin to rebuild the website.

All Spring, Katie has been working away on a new design while Ben finished up his academic year as a history and English teacher. Today, his first day of his summer vacation, he’ll spend the morning beginning to plan the rebuild with Katie.

I expect assignments to start flowing my way shortly. There will be many sections to bring up to date and many to rewrite for greater clarity. One thing we plan is to make the common concerns list ( a hefty document we share of our Flower Essence suggestions for common concerns) a lot more user friendly and manageable. Right now it is a rather DRY and LONG document! After the web rebuild, we will still have this original version on offer but plan to create pages sharing the information in a way that is a lot more punchy and visual.

With all the gardens planted, the Red Shiso babies up (there they are right above this sentence along with a lone ranger crab grass seedling) and “most” everything weeded, I look forward to pitching in and helping Katie and Ben with the overhaul. We hope to have the big reveal around the time of the fall equinox. Until then, our current website will stay as is.

If you follow us on Facebook, you’ll have noticed that Katie is also posting there. I have really loved having another person’s view of the farm on our Facebook posts. To me, it makes this window into life here more dimensional. Just as looking at the world through two eyes gives us depth of field, looking through two different sets of eyes at the gardens has meant Facebook posts that bring a similar depth of field.

I feel this way about the website rebuild as well. Somehow my way of thinking about the website has often been very two dimensional. I have thought of the website as somewhat like a book i.e. a place to put up pages of information. As Katie has shown me her ideas for the site and also begun to share her vision of the garden on Instagram and Facebook, I have begun to understand that websites can be more multidimensional than I understood.

As we head into the thick of summer Flowers, it will be so fun to see what unfolds in the gardens as well as in the creative hands of all these young people at the farm! While they dream the new dreams, Grace and I will wander with Sheba, examine the Buttercups and sample the berries- and I will remain very happy to leave the creative rethinking of the website in other hands than mine!