Reflection and Gratitude for Busy Days



Keep knocking

and the joy inside

will eventually

 open a window and look

  out to see who's there.

-Rumi

silent moment to relax


These last two weeks have been busy and jam packed with activity.  The farm is coming along.  With the change in weather we have been spending more time on our outside projects, specifically, building a mini greenhouse and getting our garden beds ready for planting.  This will be our first growing season here and we are super excited to put as much in the ground as we can manage.  Inspired by this informative site, http://neo-terra.org/default.aspx, we decided to try and stick with the biodynamic approach to gardening/farming instead of dabbling here and there with different philosophies.  (So since we already started sheet mulching some beds we will finish them and then double dig the rest.)

This week we had two truck loads of steaming horse manure from the local stable dropped off in our driveway which will become the base for our compost heaps, mulch for my kitchen garden, and the last ingredient for our sheet mulching experiment.  

future pole bean tepee

potato patch is almost ready to plant

Our weeks have also been filled with creative endeavers like repainting the old, empty bee hives, making mexican hot chocolate...

and sculpting mud men!



Now that the rain has nourished the earth and all of the new greeness is emerging, I find myself compelled to give more time to my passion for collecting and studying plants. The mullein I harvested from the medicine wheel is now dry and ready to be stored in glass jars.  The Amaranth hanging in the kitchen is releasing it's seeds for us to file away for spring planting.   The medicine wheel has been mulched and as I meditate on more medicinal plants to add to the wheel I am reminded of a great woman who I wish I could have met, Juliette de Bairacli Levy, my favorite herbalist and wild woman.  You can view a clip from this amazing documentary about her life filmed a couple of years back.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBY76schtNU .  

Juliette wrote many herbals but right now I am particlarly interested in her book, The Complete Herbal Handbook for Farm and Stable.

l

  

Also, check out our upcoming classes and calendar of events.  If you are interested in more information on any class or would like to register, email us at soulflowerfarm@gmail.com.