Yesterday, the Angels gave us the thumbs up. It was time to tap the maple trees for maple sugaring.

We greeted each tree as a beloved friend.

Our support staff for tapping was a bit thin on the ground. The Sheehan sugaring crew of yore is scattered to the four winds.

Just when the kids get big enough to haul the sap buckets, they get big enough to spend March in their own lives! Can you imagine?

Ben is off on a golf junket to Alabama for his spring break away from his teaching post. Lizzy is rock climbing in California for her spring break away from her teaching post. Emily’s spring break has come and gone and she is back in Maine, searching through snowdrifts for her lost cell phone.

William holds up the rear guard. Yesterday however, nothing could tempt him to join us in hauling sap buckets through snow drifts.

He noted that once we had trampled out paths to each tree, he would be happy to go on collecting runs with me. He will be as good as his word on this, because he actually does like the collecting runs.

But for tapping, it was just me and Jim.

And it was a lovely couple of hours.

If a staff goddess ships on Monday, I try to organize it so she invoices on Tuesday and does email on yet another day. From day to day, even hour to hour, we take turns with these jobs and others like bottle labeling, red shiso tincture making, mail runs, and door service for dogs and cats.

Jim’s brother, Stephen, calls this cross training. As a manager of a large company, he has given me many good reasons for doing this. For example, if someone is on vacation or out for some reason, the rest of us know how to fill in.

It takes awhile to cross train someone in all the things we do here. When a new goddess arrives to work here, she usually spends a couple of months primarily at the shipping desk before she is plunged into the arcane and mysterious world of Green Hope Farm invoicing.

As a mother in “Love Actually” remarks about sewing an octopus costume, “Eight is a lot of Legs, Davey.” So too I say, “Six zillion Flower Essences is a lot of Essences to keep track of, especially when it was my right brain that organized our systems.”

Right now, Masaki is at the computer seeking the codes for all the Flower Essences on our line up. May she finish her quest before dawn tomorrow.

Here she is at the keyboard. Jane is on her right available for moral support and strong doses of green tea with pink Flower Essences in it.

Masaki also began to learn the ropes on email this morning. In one of those wonderful Angel synchronicities, when I went on email with Masaki, after we had cleared out the 437 viagra ads, the second email Masaki opened was from an animal practitioner in Japan. How thrilled we were to have Masaki answer the email in Japanese!
The reason for all this flurry of cross training is that a few weeks ago long time staff goddess Patricia departed from the farm as part of the sea changes of her retirement. Sophie and Masaki wanted to take Patricia’s hours which was terrific good news for the farm. Losing someone who has worked with the Flower Essences as long as Patricia leaves a gap in our collective skill set. It was great to have Sophie and Masaki expand their hours because they are already well into the process of learning their way around our Flower Essence collection.

This week saw me sipping big tall glasses of Showcats water so that I could somewhat coherently begin to explain email and invoicing to Sophie and Masaki. We have so many systems born to prevent routine goofs and again there are all those quirks like Wild Physic Nut was made on St John but is listed in the Bermuda collection. It is a lot to explain, let alone absorb. Fortunately, office supervisor May May was there to help.

We had a particular and unusual treat on this day of training, when a saw whet owl landed on a peach tree branch right outside the office. This tiny owl of about six inches is described in Peterson’s Guide to the Birds as an absurdly tame little owl.

A short eared owl, saw whets hunt during day and night and migrate from here to Louisiana, leading us to wonder why this fluff ball was back here so early. Saw Whets are considered courageous, playful, curious, and extremely strong and fast when in flight. They can best hawks and crows in aerobatics and have an uncanny knack of being in the right field at the right time to find the juiciest mice.

We hope he finds a good dinner soon. We wish him well and thank him for giving us such a delightful day of owl medicine.

At this point, cabin fever rages. No craft activity has any allure. My frequent short walks, too long curtailed by icy roads and bitter winds, take on the qualities of a rant in motion. It’s time for the big thaw.

After thirty years in New Hampsha, its hard to avoid the truth that we have a lot more winter weather ahead of us. The big thaw is unlikely for another three four five weeks. I pretend otherwise. I grasp at straws. Look! There’s a muddy puddle! See! It was not the act of a deranged person to buy all those seeds.

This time of year, you give us hope with your descriptions of all things thawing, green, and flowering once more. Emails from the south and far west tell of Flowering Quince, Crab Apples and Daffodils. Just as we look for the robins’ return, we also await your annual report of the Yellow Lady Banksia Rose blooming in your California garden once again or the first mow of your North Carolina backyard. As we hang on by a thread of black humor and salty snacks, your descriptions of scent and color and warmth keep us going.

Because frankly, the view here of snow melting between storms is rather uninspiring.

And also unlikely to last. This has been a winter of nonstop sleeze ( snow mixed with freezing rain for those of you whose minds went elsewhere) with more expected ad nauseum.

And I am tired of sleeze, ready to rest on my laurels of sleeze management NOW without any further sleeze to attend to. Why, only last week I had what I hoped would be my peak moment of sleeze management.

Just after everyone else had rolled out into an ongoing ice storm, the UPS guy blew into the office. In a lather, he reported that his truck was off the road half way down the hill. I offered him a bucket of sand and a shovel and then followed him down the hill with the days’ packages piled high in a wheelbarrow and wrapped in an enormous blue tarp to protect them from the ongoing sleeze.

By dragging the runners of the wheelbarrow in the icy road, I managed to stop the wheelbarrow before it crashed into the derailed truck. The driver was in a frenzy of useless engine gunning. I suggested we put sand or a board under the back wheels which were spinning inches above the icy ground. I suggested we load the packages BEFORE I tried to push him out so that he would not have to stop the truck again should he get free. To both suggestions he gunned the truck engine.

So, I shoveled sand under the truck wheels myself and then leaned in and gave the UPS truck a couple of big pushes. Shortly, the truck was free and moving. Sliding in fact, further and further down the road away from me, my wheelbarrow and the day’s packages.

As predicted, this required me to chase the truck down the icy hill with my cargo.

Another hundred yards and the truck came to somewhat of a halt. The driver came to the back of the truck to load the packages. Since he was still on an icy incline, I suggested I load the packages while he keep his foot on the brake. My comment, “This is not worth dying for.” fell on deaf ears. He loaded the packages as the truck drove itself an inch at a time down the hill.

Just as the last package was aboard, the truck picked up momentum. The driver raced to take the wheel for a sassy slide to the bottom of the hill.

I turned to push the wheelbarrow up the long, long hill to home.

Ahh memories.

And isn’t it great? The weatherman tells us we are in for a humdinger of six to twelve inches of “mixed precipitation” today and tomorrow. In otherwords, more sleeze. William thinks SNOWDAY. I think WHEELBARROW RUN.

Well I am off. I need to go look at that patch of brown grass before its gone again. As we prepare to kiss all brown earth goodbye for another winter go round, it’s become a beautiful sight.

But it might not be enough.

If you go out to your backyard to savor your Redbud in blossom, the one you have been telling me about every spring for the last decade and find me there, you’ll know why. I was onbpard when the UPS truck just couldn’t stop sliding between my house and yours.

After much effort, my hero, Ben, figured out the problem with the blog. Thanks to Ben, we are able to upload photos once again. Here are the missing photos of the new St John Flower Essences. The full descriptions of these Essences can be found in a recent post and are also available as a printed document ( just call us 603-469-3662 or email us at green.hope.farm@valley.net) This is a Calabash tree.Here the ripening Calabash gourds hang off the main branches of the tree. These gourds, growing to the size of basketballs are part of the signature of this plant. They are almost unbreakable. So too, this Essence, among other things, is all about containing, protecting, sustaining, and supporting our inner creations.Cat’s Claw. Not the best photo but its all in the Essence and this one has already come in very handy. We talk to so many people with animals that have difficulty remembering the rules of their household. While Spiderwort continues to help animals sort out the directions from their people and discern what’s expected of them, Cat’s Claw has already helped a lot of animals to remember to disengage when they have temporarily forgotten that they aren’t supposed to climb the curtains or engage in endless fighting with the other household animals or use their claws on the new couch or…… People have taken a shine to it too, since it offers great support for de-escalating and disengaging for any sort of tangle. This is Christmas Bush, the new one for wound healing. We have been interested to see how often this one has called to you and been suggested by the Angels for wounds beyond the physical dimension, particularly relationship wounds. Coco Plum. Its tiny green Flowers so beautifully echo its gifts for soothing our way through the small discomforts of lifeHere’s Inkberry, its blossoms reflecting its Flower Essence support to bring ashore your ideas into stable manifestation. I am sorry I am always using the rather technical word manifestation. Happy to receive your suggestions for a phrase less stuffy.Inkberry again, with a Sea Grape already using its sheltering roots to plant itself. That is one of the great gifts of this plant. It forms such a solid root structure that other plants can thrive once it has rooted itself. This of course has implications in terms of the kind of support it offers those looking for support to manifest their own creation.Anyways, I took this photo because I thought these Inkberry’s were growing in such an extraordinarily beautiful spot. This plant looks out across the channel from St. John to Tortola in the British Virgin Islands.My overexposed shot of Madagascar Periwinkle. The color is more like the one Flower in shadows in the upper left hand corner of the photo. This one is proving a star! Nicker Nut. I have certainly noticed that many yellow Flowers offer vibrational wisdom about well, some sort of wisdom. And its hard to miss the fact that Flowers growing on the beach are often about bridging the manifest and unmanifest world. We can see both these strands in Nicker Nut which helps us make wise choices about what we create, be it a new life or a new job or a new project. Here are some NIcker Nuts. Aren’t they lovely? These gorgeous but tough, timeless beauties grow inside ridiculously prickly pouches, two other ways that Nicker Nut’s appearance reflects the vibrational strength of its Flower Essence. The seeds are nearly indestructible reflecting the way that Nicker Nut helps us to choose wise manifestations that will go the distance. The prickly pouches reflect the ways Nicker Nut helps us figure out how to properly take care of our new creations, really protect them in their gestation until they are ready to sail the seven seas as this nut does. Last but not least, Spoon Tree for clarity of creative vision.

Friends from Bermuda who live in one of our favorite Bermuda Gardens brought their children to Vermont this week to experience a New England winter and to see snow for the FIRST TIME.

Here was meant to be a photo of 5 year old Zander learning from May May about the pleasures of a snow bath. His sister, 2 year old Annabelle was completely horrified by the amount of clothing she was expected to wear to be outside in the snow. She was just outside the frame of the photograph that failed to post, pulling off her mittens, boots, socks and tossing everything into the snow! An easy image to imagine without a photograph!

It was an inspired week for the Bermuda crew to visit as we have had daily snow squalls, three days of all day snow, a two day ice storm, high winds creating white outs and more storms predicted for this weekend. Jim and Will have now had four snow days and four two hour delay days since the first of the year and are looking forward to going to school in July.

This morning will be another wonderland for Zander and family as the sun has come out to illuminate the ice on the landscape. It’s a pretty magnificent sight, even for those of us with many a New England winters under our belts.

Only sadly, I am STILL having technical difficulties with the blog and my efforts to post photos of the ice storm and also of Riley looking like ice storm Valentine’s Day cheesecake have failed to load.

BEN!!!!!!! I need your help!