I work in the gardens of Fridays. First thing I do in the morning is walk through all the gardens seeing what needs to be done. Then I ask my Elemental and Angelic partners what the priorities should be.

Right now the Arbor Garden remains chock a block full of blossoming Daffodils. This week will probably be the swan song for a lot of them. With this photo I thank them for having made the last few weeks in the gardens so delightful.

One thing I was concerned about this morning was Plum blossom pollination. We lost our two hives of bees late last winter to varoa mites and the replacement bees have not yet arrived from Georgia. I went down to our Plum trees, ready to try some hand pollination if necessary. Happily there were many other pollinators in the Plum blossoms and even some honeybees.

These could be from a group of honeybees that swarmed on us last summer. This swarm took off to the west in an enormous flying icicle of bees before we could get them in a new hive here at the farm. It is wonderful to imagine a nearby hive surviving on its own. Honeybees have suffered from many difficulties in North America in the last decade or two. But that’s another blog. For today, I am just so joyful that somewhere a colony of bees has survived all the difficulties a modern honeybee faces.

May May inspects the Red Currant bushes. We can happily report that these too were full of different pollinators! Now I am off to the asparagus bed to weed. That was the Elementals’ top job for me this morning after I posted these photos! Have a wonderful weekend!

Dear readers, dear readers, I know you aren’t the audience that needs the following blog because you are the very souls that cherish the Earth as it deserves to be cherished, but I have to write this any ways.

I find myself quite charged up about Elemental issues and concerns right now. One reason for this is that my Elemental friends and partners are currently in such distress. So once again, I dive into the topic of the Elementals, their work, their world view, and their relationship with humanity.

When I talk with people about Angels, most have figured out how they feel about these beloved beings. The last twenty years has brought much information about the Angelic kingdom to humanity’s attention. As a consequence, there seem to be fewer questions in people’s minds about Angels and also growing gratitude from the human community for the Angelic community.

This is not the case with the Elementals. They remain misunderstood and under appreciated.

As I mentioned in an earlier blog, Elementals sometimes appear to people in the form of Fairies, Elves, Gnomes, and other creatures, but their function is not decorative.

The big picture is that the Elementals hold Earth reality in form for us. They are the engine that drives the manifest world. Their mental focus holds the vibration of each and every thing in creation in a form we can experience as physically tangible. If you can see something, thank an Elemental, because it would not be in material form without an Elemental holding its form.

Because of humanity’s arrogant attitude towards the Elementals and their work, the fate of much of the material world hangs in the balance. Humanity must move from an attitude of “It’s my planet and I’ll do what I want to.” to an attitude of conscious cooperation, understanding, acknowledgment, and gratitude to the Elementals for their essential work. This will be necessary to restore Earth.

In clarifying the work of the Elementals, it’s important to understand that they do not have to serve humanity the way Angels do.

Angels must support us no matter what we do. They are assigned to individual humans and hold us with love and compassion no matter how we behave. Whether our actions add to the light of the planet or not, we will still have a core group of Angels aiding us. They will steadily support us throughout our lives whether we ever give thanks for this help. If we work consciously with Angels or serve humanity in a way that could benefit from more Angelic assistance, we receive more Angelic support. To sum up, humanity is lucky enough to have Angelic help no matter what we do. This help comes in many forms including guidance, encouragement, energetic gifts of love, hope, compassion, and other positive emotions, and opportunities for spiritual growth.

Elementals do not share the same rules of engagement with the human community as the Angels. The Elementals have much more volition about serving us. They have the free will to stop supporting our misguided ideas and creations.

Until recently the Elementals behaved like the Angels. They cleaned up our energetic and material destructiveness on the planet and basically went along with whatever we decided to do. They were willing to clean up our mistakes as a parent might clean up the mistakes of a very young child.
But these days, the Elementals know we are no longer like young children that do not know any better. The truth is, we have a sophisticated model of cause and effect, but are unwilling to own that we know it.

Unlike Angels, Elementals have a choice about their ongoing work for humanity. The Elementals I talk to seem poised to void the old contract and re-negotiate on much different terms. In fact, this process is underway in many places in the world.

In places where the old contract between the Elementals and humanity is still operating, if you make an atomic bomb in your basement, the Elementals will hold the different materials in form for you while you assemble the bomb. As with the Angels, they have choice about the level of involvement and will probably not send in extra support for this dubious effort.

But unlike Angels, who must continue to participate in our learning lessons to one degree or another, Elementals can completely withdraw their energy from a project, place, or situation if they choose. The thing itself may still stay in manifestation for awhile after the Elementals pull their energies from the situation, but the situation or project will not have the animating life force energy of an Elemental. It will be dead matter. Eventually it will break down and move out of form.

In many places, Elementals have abandoned the old contract with humanity and have begun to pull out all their energies.

Dead matter is exactly what a lot of the Caribbean felt like this winter. There was virtually no life force in the land and very few stalwart Elementals holding the place in form. I don’t know what to make of this except we need to change our attitudes and behaviors if we are going to get the Elementals to re engage in holding this and other places in form.

Why would an Elemental pull their energies from one of our creations or from a place where we inhabit or from some project we are involved in?

Because humanity, both collectively and individually, willfully proceeds with bad ideas that we KNOW hurt our planet home. It is not like we are being destructive because we lack information. We have the information to do better and yet, we refuse to do better.

The Elementals know we know better. They know we know what we are doing to Earth. They know we choose to make other things more important than our stewardship of Earth.

We have hit the end of the road on the Elementals’ willingness to let us keep going with this approach. When I talk to the Elementals nowadays, their emotions are intense. They are deeply sad and deeply angry. They are close to calling it a day and completely withdrawing their energies from vast tracts of land. The Angels hold a steady note because their work is different. They will be here in the same way if half the world is underwater. And if the world is half under water, it will be because we refused to be our best selves.

I have written about this before, but the mood of the Elementals calls me to return to this topic. I have been consciously working with Elementals for about twenty years and over this time they have grown increasingly distraught. They explain logical consequences to me more vehemently. That is, when they are calm enough to talk.

Let me show this shift as it relates to one small incident that arose this week.

A company wanted to use Green Hope Farm Flower Essences in their product, but balked at our request that they list Green Hope Farm Flower Essences on the label for their product.

When they first floated out their project idea, I e-mailed to explain to them that the Elementals that hold the energy of the Flower Essence in form in our bottles want to be acknowledged on the product label for their ongoing work, even when the Essence is transferred into another product. One analogy would be labeling Oreo Cookies and Cream Ice Cream with the Oreo trademark if actual Oreo brand cookies were in the product.

The company representative’s response indicated to me that she didn’t believe in Elementals and thought it was just me demanding something to focus attention on Green Hope Farm. I sensed that because she was dangling a large contract under our noses, she assumed that I would simply cave in to their way of doing things. I didn’t and I won’t.

As far as I am concerned, one of the most important things that happens at Green Hope Farm is that we consciously work with the Elemental and Angelic kingdoms in everything we do. The cooperative work and the human staff’s conscious acknowledgment and gratitude to our Elemental and Angelic partners are the cornerstones of Green Hope Farm.

This is not an abstract partnership. This is not a story I told myself about Fairies and Angels dancing around the yard. Everything that happens here is held in a crucible of all partners. When us humans run into a challenge of any sort, we bring it to our partners to discuss. Sometimes we do this in the format of a group meditation during which we ask for the guidance of our Elemental and Angelic partners. Over the years we have been amazed and awed by the ideas and solutions we have received in this format. We also try and give thanks for everything that happens here because of our partners. There is so much to be thankful for.

So whether the company representative thinks I am telling her a fairy tale or not, it doesn’t change the reality of my partnership with the Elementals.

I honor this partnership by following the Elementals’ guidance. This is for practical as well as emotional reasons. After all, I know from experience that the Elementals hold a superior knowledge about Earth stewardship and Green Hope Farm stewardship than I do!

I also thank them frequently for their willingness to be partners with us humans here. I appreciate their free will decision to be as involved as they are here. Heck, I just love the Elementals! So even as the company spokesperson kept referring to the Elementals’ request as my request, the Elementals are real to me and I will honor and support this labeling request as the very least I can do to acknowledge my steadfast partners.

As I went back to the company representative for yet another round of conversation, I felt the many Elementals I work with charged up about this exchange. I learned some things from the Elementals that I had never actually been told before. It was as if the Elementals patience has worn thin with the politics of such silly negotiations and they wanted me to understand more fully the realities of even this small situation.

The Elementals told me, in no uncertain terms, that if someone uses Green Hope Farm Flower Essences in their product without acknowledging Green Hope Essences as an ingredient, the Elementals pull the energy of the Flower Essences from the product.

They explained that because Green Hope Farm is a place where we are working to create a new paradigm of cooperation and conscious acknowledgment between kingdoms, the Elementals involved here will not move back from this standard of acknowledgment and cooperation to the dark ages of ignoring their role in all creation. NOR WOULD I WANT THEM TO!!

But they reiterated that even the old dying model of humans and Elemental work together in unacknowledged partnership did not allow for such egregious use of their energies. Flower Essences cannot be WalMartized by some greedy corporation.

The Elementals must be asked to participate, acknowledged for their participation, and thanked for their participation to make a Flower Essence or there is no life force in the Essence. If there is no life force in the Essence, the product is worthless.

People are going to feel this deadness because people are making decisions about Essences from an energetic place. If there is no energy in the product, no one is going to buy it. Yes, people might buy it for awhile, because of a snazzy label or marketing campaign, but because a bottle without energy is not going to offer any energetic support, people won’t be fooled for long. No one can fake together a Flower Essence of any value without an Elemental. No one can make a Flower Essence without the help of the Elementals and the Elementals aren’t going to participate in a sham or someone’s greedy game plan.

As I went back to explain again to the company representative that the buck stopped with the Elementals, the Elementals suggested I explain things in terms of FLOW. Lack of integrity impedes flow. Integrity is about wholeness. It is about acknowledging all the parts that create a whole. When participants, including the Elementals, are not acknowledged, energy does not flow from all parts through all parts in the same way as when there is acknowledgment of all parts.

This, of course, has implications in terms of practically everything created on Earth, but for the moment, the Elementals were keeping me thinking about this one small situation.

The example they gave me to share with the company representative was a situation in which someone stole a cache of Pennyroyal Flower Essence from me at a talk I was giving. The Elementals noted the irony of this situation in which someone stole Essences and then expected these Essences to help them to remove negativity from their life. For the first time, they told me that they had pulled the life force from the stolen Essences, but they also said that this was hardly necessary as the act of stealing the Essence compromised the energetic flow almost completely.

We all know this yet, humanity, when it does not honor and thank the Elementals, does not live this flow model on a planetary scale. And this company did not think it needed to live this flow model in its own business practices. For now, under the dying rules of Elemental and human engagement, this may seem to be working for this company in terms of their bottom line, but it never has worked and never will work from an energetic model.

The Elementals mentioned another event that they said was an example of what could happen when all participants were acknowledged.

Recently, the Elementals asked me to recommend that someone using our Flower Essence mention the Elementals participation more clearly on their web site. They asked me to tell the owner of the web based business that she could bring many more things into her life if she acknowledged the Elementals more fully. They explained that such an acknowledgment would vastly increase the flow of good things into her life. This woman was happy to acknowledge the Elementals on her web site in greater detail, because she felt a great kinship with them. Her written thanks to the Elementals was heartfelt and full of gratitude for all the ways Elementals supported her work. Her words went much further than the Elementals request. Hers was a very moving tribute to the Elementals in her life.

A very short time later, like less than a week, she got back to me to tell me that she had been offered a TV show and that wildly improbable and wonderful gifts were flooding her life. This is such a classic example of the generosity of the Elementals, if we but show a modicum of gratitude for their service to us.

In both the small and grand scheme of things, it is about moving from an attitude of entitlement to one of gratitude and partnership.

May we all acknowledge we know the difference and get a move on to be our best selves in relationship to this gorgeous Earth and in relationship to the profoundly generous spiritual partners that we share this whirling green planet with.

Yessenia had her baby on Sunday, April 30th at 2:47 pm. The baby was 7 pounds, 8 oz. Her name is Klaudia Svia Russman. Mom and baby are doing beautifully. Vicki took some great photos but we didn’t have the right adaptor to put them on this computer so for now, no photos. One of the “only in this millenium” shots was one of Yessenia holding a cell phone up to baby Svia’s ear so sister Kyra could say hello from home. Later Kyra came in and checked out the baby in person.

Meanwhile back at the ranch, May May oversaw mulching in the back yard.

Riley is a more mellow supervisor. He mostly lies down in the sun. That’s him at May May’s feet.

I am an extremely fanatical fan of mulch. I know many people like the look of exposed soil in their gardens, but I don’t think the soil likes it at all. Sometimes it is all I can do to keep myself from stopping at a stranger’s garden and telling them to put some skin on their earth! I think every garden deserves and wants a skin. It upsets me to see naked earth. It damages the soil to leave the earth exposed to the elements. For one thing, it makes everything so much drier for the plants. And the soil erosion! It’s so unnecessary! Plus, it is so much more work not to use mulch. If you use enough mulch, there are so many fewer weeds! It is not necessary to spend your summer hoeing unless you prefer that to the other jobs you might have to do if you left your garden.

In the perennial gardens, I use native bark mulch. I don’t lay it on too thickly, because by the end of summer I want to have the seeds from plants like the columbines growing new babies in new places. So, I get some weeds by the end of the summer, but also some new baby plants from the self sowers. However I NEVER get the weed volume I would get without mulch. This time of year, after I have weeded each bed of those late summer weeds from last year, I then put on organic amendments and compost. When this is done, I mulch the beds with this bark mulch. The mulch keeps down the weeds, keeps in the moisture, and eventually adds more nutrition to the beds.

Experts People writing gardening books say wildly conflicting and confusing things about the use of bark mulch. They say it leaches lime out of our already acidic soil. My feeling is this, acid rain is a lot bigger problem than bark mulch. I mean, we have rain falling here that is more acidic than vinegar and we are worrying about bark mulch? I just add as much lime as the Elementals ask me to each spring and fall and then I mulch like crazy. My life would be one long vicious battle with crab grass weeding session without mulch.

I have only just begun with this year’s mulching. Pretty much any run to town this month, I will ask whomever is going to get a scoop of bark mulch for one garden or another.

In the vegetable gardens, I use mulch hay. I need to call Taylor farm soon and ask them to bring up 100 bales. They hay our field and in return, deliver about 200 bales of hay to the farm for a modest fee, 100 in the spring and 100 in the fall when we lay all the gardens to bed.

A dog’s work is never done and for May May, Sunday brought another project that needed her focus. Ben and I decided that we needed to drain the fishpond of the vast quantities of weirdly gray, dead algae water. Here you can see the strange colored water mid draining process. Ben also rebuilt the wall to hide the UV filter that will theoretically keep the algae under control from now on.

As the sun fell on Sunday, Yessenia was with her babe, the fish had a sparkling clean pond of fresh water, one perennial bed had the mulch it deserved. Emily had found a prom dress, Will had a sunburn from an all day track meet on Saturday, his first ever, and Jim? He was still urethaning the shelf units you see in the background of this shot. Viva his office laundry room!

I would like to say that we were paid for product endorsement with this placement of flip flops in the middle of the action scene by the fishpond. But that would be a lie.

A Green Hope friend from Atlanta wrote this week asking if there was anything she could do about her cat’s relentless hunting. She was weary of finding bloody animal corpses everywhere and wondered if there was some way to get her cats focused on some other activity. She asked if the Angels had any suggestions.

The Angels suggested she take Eyes of Mary. This wonderful Flower Essence helps us see life the way I imagine Angels see life: without judgment, with complete knowledge that all is well, with total acceptance about what is.

Both this Atlanta friend and I found this a funny and wise suggestion. Much as I would like to sit around knitting with my cats, sharing tips on intarsia style knitting or cutting a steek through a fair isle sweater, most of the cats I have known and loved have preferred to be cats. This means they loved to hunt. As the Atlanta friend quipped after she got the Angels suggestion, well then, I guess I just need to keep the carnage out of the house.

The three royal cats in our household are cats and live like cats. They spend most of the winter dreaming of big game.

Okay, so Mishka is actually looking like she is dreaming of getting away from William.
Now, with spring upon us, we see the cats at breakfast and then again at dusk when we make a concerted effort to get them inside and out of reach of the bigger game hunters in the neighborhood like coyotes and fisher cats. Plus, William needs his cat time!

The rest of the time our cat trio is out doing whatever it is that cats do. I see them tearing across the yard periodically or digging in the rose garden aka the outdoor litter box. They leave strange small organs on the front porch. They resist cuddling. No discussions about knitting.

Yesterday, there was a funny cat moment at breakfast. Mishka resembles a gently toasted marshmallow. There is no camouflaging herself in the greening gardens. Consequently, despite hours underneath the bird feeders, she has not caught anything. I must confess to being relieved by this. I usually stop feeding the birds when the cats start going outside after their long winter’s nap, but it was such a hard winter for the birds, I have gone on feeding them a little bit longer. I have been glad this has been safe for the birds.

Mishka, however, reached her limit of patience yesterday and took things into her own paws.

But if cats don’t like to knit, birds don’t like to be cat breakfasts either. Not even a chickadee visited the feeders while Mishka tried her new hunting strategy. Finally, completely miffed, she jumped down and Bella, the experienced huntress in the clan, came over to give her a pep talk.

Me? Just for that moment, I could see the dance of it all and felt like I was having an Eyes of Mary moment of enjoying the cats being the cats and the birds being the birds, even if Mishka was not!

April is mostly about one thing for me. Weeds. Here is my weed pile from Friday’s weeding. At lunch today I went out in the rain and looked at where I had weeded on Friday. Not a good idea. Every last weed I missed has multiplied tenfold. At least I know what I will be doing when it stops raining.

One of our garden ponds has been more than a little green, as in day glow green. After much research into algae management and also a lost season with a barley ball that floated around the pond and did nothing to improve water clarity, Ben decided to install this rube goldberg UV filter to see if it will do the job of cleaning the water.

Within a day, the green was gone, but so far we are not sure this gray is a whole lot better.

Ben tore out the stone wall and plans to rebuild it with the UV filter inside the rock wall. Hopefully all this dead algae that has turned the water gray will now settle out and we will have that sparkling clear pond of our dreams. Good news is that the resident goldfish and koi in the pool seem unfazed in the face of changing water conditions.

On Saturday, before a lovely rain began, Ben and Will, with May May supervising, potted up our new grape cuttings for our “vineyard”. Maybe someday we will make our own vinegar for our Flower Essences!

William was in charge of writing the labels. As soon as the grapes were in their pots and the next job was transplanting the 6 zillion seedlings in the greenhouse into six packs, the place cleared out. Transplanting broccoli seedlings just doesn’t have the cachet of putting up grape cuttings for a vineyard.

When it started to rain, I sat down and finished a pair of socks for my wonderful six year old niece Taylor. What have I been thinking knitting adult socks when I could be whipping out many more socks for little feet? Taylor picked the wool. I hoped she would like that each sock was a bit different than the other. Looks like she does!