Way back in snowy January, one of our ideas for this summer was to begin work on a Green Hope Farm cookbook, taking photos of every meal we cooked with produce from the gardens. This would be a bizarre and supremely dull cookbook if based on this summer because…… yes…….the stove is still broken. I now know where Mark, the lovely Sears man, grew up, who his high school friends were and what he did on the fourth of July, but none of this has helped with the F5 error on the stove.

So as we enter day 37 of our stove free life, we eat a lot of fruit and vegetable salads and grill everything else. Then at least once a week when the Sears man has come and we have convinced ourselves the stove is finally fixed, I celebrate by trying to bake something- This week it was a big blueberry cake from our blueberry patch. Ten minutes into its cooking time when the F5 error began again, I had to take the cake out of the beeping, rapidly cooling, still broken oven and drive it to town to someone else’s oven.

It’s been a hot summer so who am I kidding that if the oven had been working I would have been slaving over a hot stove to prepare fancy dishes for photo shoots? There would not have been enough time for this project anyways as we have to spend so much time carting our fans from room to room.

I have come to think of the end of the work day as the “Migration of the Fans” as we all leave the office in a herd, each one of us trailing the cord of our favorite fan to our next location.

For the under thirty set this means moving the fan to their location for yoga, “Zumba” (a cardio workout that seems to mix Cambodian hip hop with salsa dancing) or some other insanely hot activity while for me it means dragging my fan to the kitchen for a serious bout of head scratching about a new way to eat raw broccoli.

Then when the raw bar is ready, our fans come together to keep us cool while we chew and chew and chew. Last night was a small moment of victory when William admitted he had grown fond of tomatoes. Funny how a steady diet of raw broccoli stalks can make a formerly loathed vegetable into a new friend.

Outside there is no break from dragging things around since we now need to move sprinklers from garden to garden to keep things from wilting away in this heat. But as you can see from the photos, many Flowers are loving this heat and they cheer us on to just sit back with our fans blowing and enjoy this unusually hot New Hampshire summer. So with a raw fennel stalk in one hand and a raw carrot in the other, I am doing my best to let go and think how impressive my carbon footprint is this summer.

Yesterday was a beautiful clear summer day so the Angels had me busy making Flower Essences.

So many Flowers bloom for a relatively short window of time. This means I keep my lists of what needs to be made for our various collections right here at my desk to check frequently. There are some Flowers like yesterday’s Zucchini Flowers that bloom for many weeks and that was a good thing because yesterday after leaving the most gorgeous big saucy orange Zucchini blossoms in a bowl of water out in the sun, I returned at dusk to find the bowl of water tipped over, the Essence drunk and the Flowers eaten.

This reminded me of the first time I learned Flower Essences were a special gift for animals.

It was at the beginning of the 90’s and several friends and I were out in the first Venus Garden. Suddenly a strange black dog charged into the yard and began to run circles around the garden where we sat. As the dog got moving faster and faster his mouth began to foam. Perhaps we should have been afraid of rabies or something like that but instead, a friend named Anita got up and prepared a big bowl of water for this dog with the first Essence she could find. It happened to be Zucchini Flower Essence.

As she set the bowl on the ground, the big black dog raced to the bowl, drank the whole thing then flopped down in a relaxed heap in the grass where he spent a happy couple of hours watching us peacefully. After a few hours of perfect calm, he leisurely strolled out of the yard a changed animal. While we never saw this dog again, he REALLY GOT MY ATTENTION about how much a Flower Essence could help an animal. He was one of the many precious animals who sometimes dramatically and sometimes patiently ushered us into our calling to create Flower Essences for animals. For that I will always be grateful.

I don’t know who dropped by to drink the bowl of Zucchini Flower Essence yesterday, but I am grateful for this visit because it reminded me of that first eye opening moment with a dog and this Essence. And now without further ado I am off to the Zucchini plants again in search of more blossoms just waiting to become a Flower Essence.

Hmmmmmmmm. Let’s read the blog I started last Friday BEFORE the Sears man arrived for our appointment with destiny,

“We have many people living at the farm this summer- I have referenced our big dinners gathered around the electric fry pan but not really explained that we have a number of young people coming and going, sleeping in the outdoor sleeping porch that we call, “the Pelaton,” working in the gardens and in the office. When the stove broke, I felt completely harassed by the idea of cooking for all these young people with limited facilities, but what happened in the last two weeks was everyone pitched in with a sense of humor and adventure and our nights became times of singing, strangely effective food improvisations and a surprising amount of FUN. The broken stove freed me up to let go and truly let others riff with the food.”

Okay, that was as far as I got before the Sears man arrived to tell me when he could get the repair part for our stove.

July 14th.

And so we riff on……….. and I try to see it as STILL fun and funny that as our numbers bounce towards a dozen, we are all still sharing one well loved electric fry pan.

(And for those of you on the staff reading this blog, I HAVE noticed you all leaving the office on extra long mid morning “bathroom breaks” just so you can whip up a little something in the electric fry pan before lunch when the scene is like rush hour in Manhattan)

All I can say is thank goodness for July Flowers. When I am not scanning the inside of the refrigerator for anything that requires no cooking and can feed ten hungry twenty somethings, I can be found down amongst the Sweet Peas and Pom Pom Poppies with my friends the honeybees who mercifully never need to use the stove.

It’s Canada day and we have one of the friends Lizzy made on her second Camino, Solanna Anderson from Vancouver, BC here to celebrate with us. We believe that our celebration of Canada will not be too shabby for Solanna as our neighbors are Canadian, and they always shoot off a lot of fireworks in our hay field on Canada day- Even the animals, well acquainted with our Anxiety remedy, enjoy the local show. Not a bad gig to sit in the garden on a summer night and watch fireworks!

We are in day thirteen of “Camp Kitchen 2010” and the strange meals coming from our “kitchen” have surprised us with their wit and style. Culinary achievements included a Camino flashback meal for Camino pilgrims Lizzy, Ben and Solanna that included lots of gazpacho, grilled meats and a rather bizarre looking but very delicious spanish tortilla ( we had some charring issues because of our makeshift heat source). Does it sound like we are about to burn down our house??????? Let’s just hope the Sears man has the right part tomorrow.

During our stint sans stove, we have discovered pizza made on the grill is particularly good and that an electric fry pan needs to be cleaned well between stir fry and french toast. Culinary disasters included a strange loaf of cake broiled in a makeshift oven. Also, one day I made a big rhubarb crumble for the crowd and even as six or eight people stood around watching me prepare the gigantic pan of crumble, no one said the obvious, “Where are you planning to cook this?” We had all forgotten our problem until I went to preheat…… Thank God for the kindness of neighbors and their working stoves!

Out in the gardens, the Roses are beginning to give way to midsummer beauties like Day Lilies, Delphiniums and Bee Balms. We bid them adieu with a few more shout outs.

The incomparable Lauriana Rose, so good for mental acumen and well, just plain thinking straight.

Here’s Great Maiden’s Blush known as Cuisse de Nymph in France ( leave it to the French to have a sexy name, nymph’s thigh and the English to have the unsexiest name possible) This Rose from our additional Flower Essence list puts on the most enormous show. I love how it describes itself, “I AM the irrepressible expression of myself.”

One more gorgeous Rose from that same additional Essence list, Sissinghurst Castle Rose with its affirmation, “ I AM imperishable beauty and strength of purpose.” This Rose helps us know our own strength to handle life’s challenges, as well as feel more clearly the spiritual support available to us to deal with our life situation.

Out in the gardens, William, Jim, and Ben have been harvesting rocks from our hedgerow for Ben to assemble into walled terrace overlooking the perennial gardens. This dream to have a stone terrace on the south side of the house has been with me for twenty years…….. since Ben was eight. The wait was worth it. Ben’s years working with rocks really shows in his crafting of this new wall.

After his coffee break with May May and a few more days work on the wall, Ben is going to Ireland to visit the relatives, make some Flower Essences for the farm, and play some golf. Yahooo for Ben!!!!!!

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!