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Hi Everyone,

               Drenched with sweat is the name of the game of late here on the farm. Whether we are sitting down milking the cows, standing around talking with a customer or actually working hard our clothes are soaked and our bodies are dripping with sweat. We rejoice every time the soft breeze blows and cools us down. Last Tuesday the outside temperature was 104—but the heat index was 127! I was not complaining that my “To Do List” had chores that needed to be done inside where the air conditioner was. Once the cows were milked I worked inside for the rest of the day. There was kefir to bottle and yogurt to make. A few weeks ago I started soaking the herbs in the oil for my Soothing Salve, and they were ready to strain. Then I had an egg party to attend and lotion bars to make. While it only takes a few lines to tell about everything I had to do, it actually took around five hours to accomplish all of it—and then it was time to cook dinner. While I was enjoying the cool air inside, Mom and Papa were braving the extreme elements as they worked outside on the tunnels in the new Market Garden. The frame for the first one is up, and it is now ready for the end walls and doors, and the plastic covering. You can see their progress in our latest YouTube short here.

               While it has been hot—which is what we expect during the summer in Florida, we finally started getting the one thing that helps us endure the heat, and that is afternoon thunderstorms. For weeks the weather forecast has predicted afternoon thunderstorms—but everyday those storms split and go around us or stay just north or just south of us. We got nothing, but certain places on the farm got dryer and dryer. Keeping the garden watered wasn’t easy for it seemed that we just couldn’t get the ground wet. It was always powdery when I dug in it. Then Thursday afternoon we got a little bit of rain, but come Friday we finally got the inch of rain we have been praying for. With the night temps in the 70’s and the afternoon rains the grass is starting to grow by leaps and bounds—and the weeds in the garden are too.

               Wednesday night I decided to take a little walk to the garden—I wanted to eat some of the cherry tomatoes. While strolling through the garden I was delighted to get a rare glimpse of Mr. Lincoln in bloom. He is a large red rose with very fragrant smell that was given to me by some friends when Genea died—my black lab. He doesn’t bloom a lot, so it is always a treat to find him blooming and to take the time to smell his rose. I also found another treat in the garden. The elderberry trees were full of ripe elderberries. With my allergies I live on elderberry syrup most of the year—so I was tickled pink to find the tree loaded with lots of berries. When I got back inside I quickly jotted down in my “To Do Book” under Thursday, June 27—Harvest elderberries. I couldn’t wait, and as soon as I was done milking the cows Thursday morning I headed to the garden with a 2 quart Tupperware bowl. I clipped down cluster after cluster of berries and the bowl filled up fast. I kept piling on top until the mound was so tall—and the trees were still full that I finally decided to go back up to the house and get a four gallon bucket. I filled that bucket with berry clusters! Being able to harvest elderberries in the garden really is a treat—a treat I planned for, but am not supposed to be able to have. Fifteen years ago we were given a few elderberry trees from a gardener friend and we planted them down by the pond. They grew big and I actually was able to harvest them a few times I think. Then Tropical Storm Debbie came along and dumped 24 inches of rain in 12 hours and our little pond turned into a giant lake and the elderberries ended up being in the middle of the lake instead of on the edge of the pond. It was like that for months, and when the waters finally receded back to the pond size the elderberries had died. A few years later the little roots decided to spring forth with life once again but some hungry sheep came along and munched them down and they never recovered—they went into hiding for eternity. We found another gardening friend and she too had elderberries and was very willing to share some with us—and by the way why don’t we take the one that insists on growing near her sink though she has dug it up a few times. Eager to have another elderberry tree we gladly accepted—and this time we planted it in the raised bed garden so that it wouldn’t get flooded out again. It wasn’t long before the whole bed was covered with Spanish needle and I couldn’t tell the difference between the Spanish needle weed and the elderberry plant. I studied the leaves and studied the leaves. I pulled up the Spanish needle one plant at a time and as I got closer to the middle of the bed where the elderberry was planted I studied the leaves even harder. I finally found my lost elderberry plant and once all the weeds were gone our worker helped me mulch the bed with a thick layer of soiled cow bedding from the winter hay barn. Now that the elderberry was weed free and fertilized it said “Thank you very much” and started to grow with a vengeance. While it grew taller and taller, it also started to send off a few runners and produced some more trees in the bed. We decided to move those “new trees” over into the neighboring bed so that we would have a nice large elderberry patch. Then the years went by and I harvested berries and I didn’t have to buy any berries and life was great—but that is not how the story ended. It was not a . . . “and they lived happily ever after story.” A few years later the elderberry trees decided to get greedy and take over the whole garden, so they sent their roots low and crawled under the wooden raised bed and snuck undercover of the black rubber mat in the walkway across to the neighboring bed to the north and to the south and to the east and to the west and to the northeast and to the northwest. Garden bed by garden bed it was moving its way across the garden. We prepared for war and garden bed by garden bed we took them back and eradicated the elderberry and pushed it back to its original bed. Then before long she would creep back under the mats and back into the neighboring beds and once again we would declare war and weed them out. We would even roll back the heavy black rubber mats so that we could pull up all the creeping roots. Then one day as our worker Eli and I are weeding the roots out of the walkway my Papa comes driving by on the tractor and Eli gets this brilliant idea to hook a chain around the elderberry trees and hook it to the tractor and pull the trees totally out of the ground and be rid of them for good. I was not willing to let go of my trees, but Mom overheard Eli’s idea and told me that it was cheaper to buy elderberries than it was to pay a worker $10 an hour to keep them weeded out of the other garden beds—and then she flagged down Papa and those trees disappeared. We worked hard to get every single root out of the beds—but alas some were missed and we didn’t stay on top of them and before long we had a forest of elderberries in way too many beds. Papa would mow them down, Mom would dig them up with a back hoe, and we would weed and weed—but we never seemed to conquer them. The dirt around the fish pond used to house canna lilies—until the elderberry took over. For the last three years the elderberry trees around the fish pond have gotten bigger and bigger. Last year they were full of berries and Papa wanted to cut them down, but I wanted to wait until I could harvest the berries—and then the birds ate them all. The trees never got chopped down either. This year the trees were thicker and taller and they produced abundantly. I was so glad that I found them when I did for I knew that the birds couldn’t eat all of them overnight. It took quite a few hours for Mom and me to pull all the berries off of the stems. In the end we had six cups of little purple berries that I put on the dehydrator and they dried down to 2 cups of berries—which will make four batches of Elderberry Syrup. I was excited to say the least—if they are going to take over the garden they had best pay their rent.

               Right before the rains started to arrive Thursday night I was working frantically in the garden in order to get some zinnias and sunflower seeds planted and to get the cayenne peppers and some green peppers transplanted into the garden. I didn’t have much success with the cayenne pepper plants last year and I am about out of cayenne peppers—so I am hoping that they really produce this year. I planted 17 plants and I hope to be tired of picking peppers when the first frost arrives next winter.

               Friday was spent milking cows, making yogurt, taking care of customers and processing chickens—so when we finished the dinner dishes that night and there was still quite a bit of sunlight left I decided to go for a walk. My first stop was the garden—I wanted to snack on some more cherry tomatoes and I wanted to see how the transplants were doing after the rains. As I was heading into Martha’s Vineyard to check on the pepper plants I noticed a deer in the neighbors pasture—and then I noticed a second deer. Those deer were making havoc in our gardens so I really wasn’t very happy to see them. While we hotwired around the garden somehow the spool of hot wire kept getting pushed onto the metal fence and grounding out all the “hotness”. Then the deer would jump the fence and have a hay day eating the sweet potatoes. I was determined to keep those deer out of the garden—or at least keep them from eating the sweet potatoes. Steve and I strung plastic flower netting down each row two feet above the sweet potatoes since I had read about zig-zagging fishing line around the plants to deter the deer. A few days later the deer did manage to get into the garden—but the netting kept them from eating the sweet potato vines. Papa was finally able to secure the hot wire spoil so that it would not fall onto the metal fence. I don’t mind seeing the deer grazing in the pastures—I just wish they would stay there and not think that the garden is part of their daily diet.

               Well, it is going on 10 o’clock and my eyes are starting to fall asleep so I had best say “Goodnight” so that Mom can edit this journal and I can get it sent off to you so that you can read it before your eyes start to go to sleep.

Serving you with Gladness,

Tiare