In the Garden...with Elvis Presley & My Grandmother

I think of my maternal grandmother often when I work in my garden, especially in the early morning light. This was one of her favorite hymns. There is no better rendition than that done by Elvis Presley. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NH_is7VuCI

I come to the garden alone

While the dew is still on the roses

And the voice I hear falling on my ear

The Son of God discloses.

Refrain

And He walks with me, and He talks with me,

And He tells me I am His own;

And the joy we share as we tarry there,

None other has ever known.

He speaks, and the sound of His voice,

Is so sweet the birds hush their singing,

And the melody that He gave to me

Within my heart is ringing.

Refrain

I’d stay in the garden with Him

Though the night around me be falling,

But He bids me go; through the voice of woe

His voice to me is calling.

Refrain

Words: Charles Austin Miles (1912)

Images from Pixabay.com, a free-to-use image site. 

2020 Garden Journal - April-May 2020

My monthly garden journals are in part to help me remember what I was doing when, but also written for my grandchildren about the gardens of our their ancestors.

Dear Grandchildren:

Rain, rain, rain, rain, rain. This is turning out to be a very wet year. I'll take that since we now live on the edge of the Cumberland Plateau and last year we had six months of 90+ degree weather, ridiculous humidity, and a draught. The surrounding counties had flooding.

Your Grandpa Ted being a life-long farmer, would have really enjoyed watching the weather apps on the phone because storms would head straight for us, hit the edge of the plateau, and scoot right up the edge into the next county and dump. We had nada.

Shot from the bottom of the eight raised beds, through the livestock panel arches to the tiny garden house. I have been battling the grass in the walkways and 30 percent vinegar is expensive, so I'm going to probably try a limited amount of salt water, if I can make sure it stays in the paths and doesn't dribble down into the beds. There are several rows behind me using woven weed barrier fabric, but not too many yet -- watching to see if the rain actually makes it to the plant roots.

My lateness in planting my garden this year is intentional. I notice a lot of other gardeners here in the south fight with pests and I thought I'd try something I have heard a lot: break the cycle. Don't plant when then nasties are breading and multiplying.

This has also taken a lot of self-induced pressure to get everything out as early as possibly, in part because I am still building garden beds. There is a lot of rockiness in the dirt here, and the slope of the property, which we would call a mountain back in Ohio can't really be easily tilled so I'm experimenting with various kinds of raised beds.

As you know, I move pretty darn slowly!

My garden this year is doing really well although my experiment to plant cold crops early didn't really work. They took forever to germinate then immediately bolted on the first warm day so I have been cutting them up for salads or scrambled eggs, including the flowers (although I may save some seeds for this fall's garden.)

Scrambled eggs with eggs from my neighbor's flock of three, with sautéed bok choy, and diced green onions and garlic, all from the garden -- yum!. You can eat your garlic any time, it just hasn't grown to multiple cloves this time of year.

"As God is my witness, I will never go hungry again." -- Scarlett O'Hara, Gone With The Wind, my second favorite movie ever. 

Radishes & carrots.

Above is my carrot patch, using my secret growing methods. If you read some of my history gardening blogs, you's notice some about the Y2K era, before you were born. I learned a lot of new things in each gardening/homesteading era because as you know, I'm a bit of a nerd, hahaha. 

One of the cool things I learned in that era was how to plant the tiny, tiny carrot seeds efficiently: one cup of sand, one package of carrot seeds and one package of radish seeds. Radishes and carrots are mixed together because the radishes are bigger seeds and grow quickly so that one knows where the row is, plus pulling them out to eat creates space for the carrots to grow. The sand helps make plenty of space between everything, plus helps to make heavy soil lighter.

Rhubarb plant started from seed last year. All the rain has made it HUGE this year!

Another thing I learned during the Y2K era: somebody encouraged everyone in our homesteading group to try planting one new thing every year. Although your grandparents had a rhubarb patch on the west side of the garden, I had never started it from seed. It seems to be quite easy and is definately much cheaper than buying root stock (also called crowns).

Last year, probably because of the draught, only one of the three pots I planted lived. This year, because of my garden expansion, I decided to plant an entire row. All 22 seeds sprouted and took off like gangbusters so I have shared around the neighborhood. I can't eat THAT much rhubarb, and as you know, Grandpa Rick lives on coffee and bacon (lol).

I still have a lot of things to plant, so out to the garden I must go. Love ya'll :-)

Gramma Debbie

MONDAY MORNING MEMORIES: My Mother's Garden

Written for this blog and cross-posted to the my family history blog about ancestral stories.

Photo by author's mother - Shirley Fleece Moore, Hardin County, Ohio, about 1970.

As I explained to the children where I worked as a tour guide on an agri-tourism based farm outside of Atlanta, my earliest garden memories are of working with my grandmother when I was as early as four years old. My mom was an avid amateur photographer but I've never located a picture of my grandmother's garden. My memories are so vivid, some sixty later, I could draw an illustration of it, if I had any talent along those lines.

If I were speaking with high schoolers during these Georgia farm tours, I would joke about what fun it was when I was four, and awful when I was a teenager.  By then, I felt like I was being sent out to the garden to weed as a form of punishment. You know, because I was a teenager and all.

But I would quickly follow up with all of the amazing things I have seen, and learned, and experienced in the garden. Sometimes I would throw in some incidents from other garden eras such as post WW2 Victory Gardens or the Back To The Land Movement (the teens especially liked the hippie stories, lol.)

Mom's garden the year before the hard freeze killed the cannas (the large, red spike flowers in the photo) stored in the basement. These beautiful flowers had been distributed among the gardeners at church and they multiplied greatly, but were not winter hardy in our zone. Mom was devastated but I think Dad might have been secretly relieved because he had to dig them up every fall for protection and stash them in our basement. 

 Pictured are (l) unknown friend of (r) Edna Myers from whom Mom and Dad purchased the farm where I was raised. One of my brothers is hiding behind one of the cannas.

Mom couldn't stand a weed and Dad had very specific gender guidelines in those days, so as soon as the boys were old enough to be on a tractor, the garden belonged to Mom and me. Mostly me I felt, you know, that teenage thing again.

In some circles, my hard labor (seriously?!) meant I developed a strong back from years of yanking weeds out of the garden or running the wheel-hoe down the rows, but really, all it did was make me want to escape the farm. I was slightly too young to run away to a commune, and I was only in Middle School or whatever they call it now, during Woodstock. No such thing as earbuds while doing garden work but I could put a transistor radio in my pocket!

My husband's Grandmother Maggie and (her son) Uncle Paul. Seems like everyone had one of those wheel hoes but dad bought an old broken one at an auction and fixed it back up (he did that type of thing a lot!) It was still in use it when I left home.

Love that Grandmother had her purse with her while holding the hoe in her Sunday best, lol. I've seen a lot of photographs from that era, a good garden was something to be proud of.

In the 1960s, gardens on farms in our area (the midwest) were plowed and disked before the men went to the fields for the season. There was no succession planting or rototilling and no mulching of anything. Everything was stuck in the ground, not in raised beds. For the most part, we didn't even use clay flower-pots, our flowers were planted in rows with the vegetables. I do remember peas always being planted on the end so they could be mowed over when done since they are done very early.

I wasn't able to find anyone who had a photo or postcard of the hardware store in the small town where I lived, We always bought our seeds there by weight. Library of Congress photograph.

We went to the local hardware store with its 100-year old creaky wood floors and manual cash registers to purchase our seeds by the ounce or pound. We always had Black-Seeded Simpson lettuce, and onions were purchased in sets. This spring salad was the only salads we ate until we reached dating age and expanded our horizons by eating in restaurants - the spring ritual of green lettuce and green onions were chopped and stirred into a dressing made of Miracle Whip and a touch of sugar and salt. We ate it every lunch and dinner until the lettuce became too bitter and bolted.

We planted Cherry-Belle radishes, Boston Pickler cucumbers, loads of green and waxed beans (the latter being a yellow version of green beans), Big Boy ad Better Boy tomatoes which Mom religiously juiced then canned in a water-bath canner, and sweet corn, which we froze.

Peas, I decided very early on, was the most disappointing vegetable on the face of this earth, shelling and shelling and ending up with, I swear, one pint! We never heard of eating the pods until this century.

Corn at tassel time (late summer). Library of Congress.

One year, I'm not really sure why, we ate field corn boiled in sugar water while it was still in milk stage (meaning soft. Corn is not harvested until it is completely dry, sometime in the fall.) Perhaps the hardware store had run out of sweet corn, or, more likely, it was one of Dad's failed attempts at frugality. Believe me, it was horrible (as was trying to sneak raw milk into our diet by putting it in an emptied grocery-store milk container -- it is a fine art to raise good raw milk and Dad didn't have it, sadly.)

Potato ad from Weimer's Fruit Market (Lima, Ohio), no longer in existence. 

Via ancestry.com's newspaper collection 2020.

I don't ever remember raising potatoes, perhaps because the price vs. manual work ratio was so off - about $2.00 per 50# in the mid-1960s. Everybody had a cellar or a basement in our area and 50-pound bags were easily available at the local grocery store, and easily storable for long periods.

Mom never saved seeds and never yanked a plant out after it had done it's job which I never quite understood because the chickens certainly would have enjoyed it. I remember being sent out to the garden to pick lettuce for The Salad and, always looking for a more efficient way to do something, I just yanked the plant out, ran my hand down the stem and watched the leaves peel off.

Mom was a "hysterical screamer", not an "angry screamer" and believe me, that was the last time I did that!

As Mom and Dad grew older, the garden grew smaller. Eventually they gave up the large garden that ran the full length of the yard for a couple small plots in the barnyard because there were no longer any animals there.

It became harder to bend over, or to weed in the heat, or to wrangle the heavy canners, or even to lean deep into one of the chest freezers. It was a slow disappearance, and my brother tried to encourage Mom to continue making pickles from her grandmother's recipe, so totally different than other pickle anywhere, but even that eventually became too much.

Mom died  couple years ago at the age of 82. Some of the grandchildren got together and made small flower bouquets for guests to take after the visitation at the funeral home.

Attached to each bouquet was a photocopy Great-Grandma Jennie's Three-Day Chunk Pickle recipe.

In Mom's handwriting.

It was fitting.

2020 Garden Journal - March 2020

Dear Grandchildren,

I planned to keep a garden journal this year, I really did, but I have a hard time remembering where I put the book. I do like to blog, so I thought I would journal online. I have a lot of my mother's journals and I like leafing through then although most seem to be weather reports -- the hazards of being a farmer's daughter and wife.

Pepper starts; there are still some on the heat mat waiting to germinate.

To this date, I have started a few things that are either heat-lovers that need a long growing season, (an heirloom cotton), slow germinating heat-lovers (four types of peppers), and some cool-weather crops (two different bok choy, broccoli, cauliflower and a lettuce mix.)

The first two are different varieties of culinary sage, one with fatter leaves than the other, and the one down on the end is silver sage. The three in the middle were pushing the envelope for my zone (tri-color, golden, and variegated) so I covered them with straw, but they still don't seem to have made it. They are a beautiful addition so I will probably continue to purchase them annually, or perhaps root cuttings. 

I also have transplanted my sage collection into a raised bed on the end of the black-topped driveway thinking it will do well in the dry and heat because I don't always remember to water things out back (plus I added some crushed limestone from my pile delivered a couple years ago from the local quarry) because it originates from the Mediterranean area, and I think it would be happier there than the compost-rich loamy soil where I did have it. At least it's worked well for my lavender.

Late-planted garlic, like just a couple weeks ago actually, and different sizes of horseradish in the background.

I also dug up my three year old horseradish and moved it out to my garden (my how it as replicated!!) and went ahead and planted some garlic. It will multiply a little, but not into big cloves like it would have I gotten around to it last fall. I will try to do an update this fall when I harvest.

Never be afraid to experiment, kidos. If I had the room and were much younger, I would experiment with planting apple trees from seed. Apples do not replicated from seed, they are grafted clones of a parent tree. This is not evil, so don't be afraid of it. It will, however, take years to fruit unless you graft it to dwarf root stock for testing the fruit, otherwise it will be years testing it on a full-size tree.

I did get my orchard started. I have all kinds of fruit trees and three apple trees that are supposed to be resistant to cedar rust. My favorite place to purchase from (Stark Bros.) were out of their cherry special (a sweet and a sour cherry combo) so I will check back with them next year. The best advice I have for you in getting trees through the mail, is to plant them when you can dig the soil, but before they have leaves. That way, they haven't broken dormancy yet and don't know they've been moved.

I hope. They all look really, really good so I'm excited.

Remind me to tell you the story of Adam and the Apple Tree, the guy that was our ancestor and lived in Shelby County [Ohio].

 

My first try a propagating elderberry. My bush was at the east side of a wooded area and I didn't have too many branches to choose from. The one of the left is from larger cuttings and the one in the white pan is from very fresh cuttings. The latter was much more successful!

Last fall, I tagged what appears to be my only elderberry bush so I could experiment with propagating elderberry cuttings.  Elderberry was quite the thing last year but the dehydrated berries are expensive so I'd see what I could do.

I am very happy with the results. I put the in a jar of water for a couple weeks, then because I happened to have a container of rooting compound, I dipped the in that, then stuck each one in it's own peat pot. I love peat pots, they have tremendously increased my success rate! Anyway, I ordered the really tall ones for the bigger cuttings and used my regular 35mm ones for the tiny freshly grown ends and they rooted at a much higher success rate! Now to figure out where to plant them :-)

Till next month - Love ya!
Grandma Debbie

My Top Three Favorite Garden Catalogs

I know plenty of people who love to thumb through garden catalogs. I especially enjoyed it when we had our farm in Ohio. I would sit on the sofa all snuggled up in a quilt in front of the wood stove with a stack of catalogs while the snow storms buried my car.

But now I live in a cabin in Middle Tennessee where there isn't much wind or snow and I have found that I have become more conscientious of paper usage. Somehow, it's not as cozy sitting in front of a computer, and over the years, I have pretty much narrowed down what I grow. 

These three catalogs re my favorite, but there are a couple of honorable mentions at the end.

GARDEN VEGETABLES

(1) Baker's Creek Heirloom Seeds
2278 Baker Creek Rd, Mansfield, MO 65704
www.rareseeds.com

This is my go-to for seeds and has been for years. They have perhaps one of the largest heirloom seed companies in the world and Jere and Emilee and their four kids travel the globe searching for more.

From our family visit to the 2019 Spring Planting Festival.

Bakers Creek is more than a seed catalog. They host monthly Heritage Day Festivals at their headquarters in Missouri, and the Spring Planting Festival. I have attended the latter several times, sometimes as a vendor, sometimes not. My ultimate garden goal is to attend the National Heirloom Expo they host in Santa Rosa, California mid-September every year.

Here is their story:
https://www.rareseeds.com/about

Click here to order their free catalog of over 1,200 heirloom seed varieties:
https://www.rareseeds.com/requestcat/catalog It is148 pages this year (2020).

Click here to order what many You-Tube gardeners and homesteaders are referring to as Baker Creek's Coffee Table Edition -- more than 450 pages of heirloom veggie goodness with large, enticing photographs and detailed, historical and growing information (they refer to it as the "2020 Whole Seed Catalog": https://www.rareseeds.com/store/whole-seed-catalog/2020-whole-seed-catalog-usa-canada-and-mexico I personal refer to it as the ultimate in garden porn and is also available in some farm stores, book stores and places like WalMart. I have heard prices ranging from $7-$12 (which with my background in the print industry, doubts that it covers the cost of printing.)

If you don't get enough information there, try their You-Tube videos:
https://www.youtube.com/user/BakerCreekSeeds

Even though they seem pricier than other seed companies, their packages contents are more than any other company I have dealt with, and I have always had ridiculously high germination rates, mostly 100%. They also support a LOT of community outreach programs and projects that I like, and I feel like I'm supporting all of them through my purchase $$.

(2) Pinetree Garden Seeds
P.O. Box 300, New Gloucester, Maine 04260

(mail order/internet only, no store front)

www.superseeds.com

While Baker's Creek has large packages with a lot of seeds in them, Pinetree has smaller than average packages in much smaller amounts. There is definitely a market for this and this makes them a close second to being #1 for me.

I like to experiment with varieties, or even vegetables I've never tried before. And I HATE wasting seeds - I know what it takes to grow, collect and store them because I do a fair amount myself. This makes smaller packages ideal for some people.

Smaller packages are also great for people with small garden spaces. Another caveat for me is that I am the only one eating most of the vegetables; it is a well-worn joke in our family that Hubs would prefer to subsist on bacon and coffee. I like a lot of variety and would rather four rows of beans be four separate varieties.

Also for sale are soap making supplies, all kinds of garden supplies, herbs and spices ready to use, a page of items for knitters and a nice selection of books.

Pinetree clearly describes how many seeds are in a package, and many of their the packages are only $1.95. They do have some hybrids but they also have some certified organic. There are a lot of heirlooms.

This year's catalog is 130 pages.

Seed Savers Exchange
3074 North Winn Rd, Decorah, IA 52101
https://www.seedsavers.org/

This year's catalog in the center with some of my past Yearbooks.

As far as I know, Seed Savers Exchange was the first to recognize that biodiversity in the garden was being lost and old varieties were disappearing. Long before genetically modified seeds were even conceived of, Seed Savers Exchange sought to give people (mostly The Mother Earth News hippies) another way of taking care of Mother Earth, and our children.

Yeah, I was one of those...

SSE was a true exchange, a catalog being sent with instructions on who had what available and how it worked but I was really grateful when they started printing a consumer catalog.

This is the inside front cover of this year's catalog (2020) and it looks as beautiful as it did when I visited roughly 20 years ago. Please visit the farm if at all possible or attend what will be this year the 40th Annual Conference & Campout. I have done both!

They have a lovely farm outside Decorah, Iowa and host an annual summer event at the farm. My husband and I attended one sometime around Y2K after we had purchased a few acres of my parents' farm. Hubs was a bit out of place at a vegetable event, but they SSE also has about 800 acres and a bunch of Ancient White Park Cattle, of which he was vastly interested since we also were researching heritage breed livestock. Sadly, I have no idea where my photographs of the trip are, having moved three times in five years, things are somewhat still in disarray.

See: http://blog.seedsavers.org/blog/ancient-white-park-cattle-new-babies

Here also is a brief description of the history of Seed Savers Exchange. It is a 501(c)3 and also has a very nice catalog both paper and digital as do most businesses today.  https://www.seedsavers.org/story

HONORABLE MENTION:

Southern Exposure Seed Exchange
P.O. Box 460, Mineral, Virginia 23117
https://www.southernexposure.com/

I especially enjoy Southern Exposure because of the biographies of their seed growers. They do not have a store front but they do have links to the retail stores they sell to. They specialise in southern organic and heirloom seeds from small farms.

I first found them when I was searching for an heirloom variety of corn developed in Ohio and preferably not yellow. Amazingly, they had one: Ohio Blue Clarage. I also had planned to raise cotton in pots to show school kids how horrible a plant to work by hand but we moved out of the midwest the year after my personal trials. SESE has a lovely collection of heirloom cotton varieties and because it has a very long growing season, it's the perfect think to start during these dreary winter days. In a pot of course, in my south-facing bedroom window...

Now that I actually live in the south, I plan to purchase more seeds from them. It's kind of nice to have a growing zone longer than the 4b-5a I am used to :-)

I do not have a catalog handy but their website lists close to 1,000 seed offerings this year.

They attend many garden-homesteading events (https://www.southernexposure.com/events/) and teach seed-saving.

SPECIALTY GARDEN COMPANIES

HERBS
Richter's Herbs
357 Highway 47, Goodwood, ON L0C 1A0 Canada
https://www.richters.com/

Richter's and Companion Plants have a large number of offerings. I tend to purchase my seeds through Richter's but my plants through Companion Plants and Colonial Creek Farm since Richter's is in Canada and it seems to take a long time to deliver live plants. The herbal section of this year's Richter's catalog is about 70 pages with another 25 or so of veggie seeds.

New Info About Receiving Richter's Products from Canada: Quote from their website: Most plant and plug tray shipments to U.S. destinations will be shipped from Buffalo, NY. We take care of all customs fees and paperwork free-of-charge. All U.S. plant shipments are government inspected and come with a phytosanitary certificate provided free-of-charge. End Quote. I will probably be ordering some hard-to-find plants now, ones not available from my other two favorites.

Companion Plants
7247 N. Coolville Ridge Road, Athens, Ohio 45701
http://companionplants.com/

Companion Plants does not have a catalog but has a decent website to order through. They have an enormous number of offerings and this is where I buy most of my herb plants. They have the best herbal descriptions of any company I have found and items are well-packaged and ship well.

Colonial Creek Farm
65 Modoc Lane, Swainsboro, GA
https://www.colonialcreekfarm.com/

Mail order only. I found them when I was looking for specific herbs I had not heard of before for the farmer I worked for when I lived in Georgia. I was specifically looking for a nursery within the state, or as close as possibly because of shipments in the hot temperatures of the state. I have continued with them because they have a lovely selection of mints and in case you didn't know, mint can be killed. Or at least I have a propensity towards forgetting to water them and actually have to occasionally replace them :-(

TOOLS

Johnny's Select Seeds
https://www.johnnyseeds.com/

A nice selection of seeds but what really stands out to me is their selection of tools and their Grower's Library.

https://www.johnnyseeds.com/tools-supplies/
I don't know what thrills me more -- their selection of tools, or the fact there's a market for it. Y'all give me hope!

https://www.johnnyseeds.com/growers-library/growing-center.html00
This alone is worth supporting them with your purchases. Internet infrastructure is not cheap. This section is a Grower's Library consisting of 16 sections of information containing: instructional videos • planning tools & calculators • hardiness zones • ask a grower • key growing information • vegetable library • tools & supplies library • flower library • herb library • farm seed library • fruit library • organic growing • disease resistance codes • cooperative extension • glossary of terms • farm visits & grower profiles.

Hoss Tools
P.O. Box 429, Norman Park, GA 31771
https://hosstools.com/

Hoss Tools has an awesome list of equipment and other things gardeners need. They have reached out to the homesteading community and this is how I ran across them -- watching some of my favorite you-tubers field testing (literally lol!) some of their equipment. They do have seeds available too, but I'm not sure of the source. I hope I get to meet them at a conference or something.

From their seed section: We offer a premium selection of heirloom and hybrid seed varieties that have been selected for performance, production and flavor. All of our seeds are non-GMO and free of any neonicotinoids. Each variety is tested for quality germination rates and those rates are posted on the back of each seed pack. Our seeds are kept in a climate controlled storage to ensure top-notch quality for our customers. 

List of equipment: wheel hoes • garden seeders • garden tools • premium garden seeds • drip irrigation • pest control • fertilizers • food preservation.

You-tube videos: https://www.youtube.com/user/HossGardeningTools

+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +

I have other favorites too: homesteading-related books, chicken catalogs, permaculture you-tubers, favorite You-Tube channels to follow, and more. Stay tuned -- one of my biggest goals for this year is to be more consistent in blogging. Best to everyone :-)

Baker's Creek Spring Festival - Then and Now

Written 2019 for this particular blog. This blog site will, from time to time, include stories I wrote when my husband and I owned part of Mom and Dad's farm with my own website, and shortly after Y2K when I wrote for a now-defunct garden site. This is not a how-to site.

Back in 2008, when I was pushing hard with my herb business, I realized that it could also, besides earning a farm-based income, allow me to travel.

I had been infatuated with Baker's Creek Heirloom Seeds for quite some time. Here was a young kid from Missouri saving and selling seeds from varieties that may have been planted by my great-grandfathers and mothers. He was also vocal about why it was important - the loss of bio-diversity, the monopolization of corporate giants and the like. His timing was good too, coming up on Y2K in which many people started looking for ways to be independent in case of world-wide collapse.

On the surface one would suppose this to be a bad business plan -- selling open pollinated seeds and encourage customers to save their own seeds.

But it worked. Today Baker's Creek is the largest heirloom seed company in the world.


THEN...

Baker's Creek Heirloom Seed Company's spring festival near sunset from our campsite out in the field in 2008.

Below is my daughter, almost seven months pregnant, with our double booth. She made tie-dye and I brought my herbal soap. Because we were able to rent space from in the tent provided by Baker's Creek, we had enough room in my small-ish car for camping gear. All we had to do was make enough money for our gas, which we did.

Jere and Emilee stopped by and bought some tie-dye for their new baby, and I gifted bars of my garden soap for the entire staff (made with an heirloom variety of corn meal for pumice.) I ran around buying plants, mostly herbs and multiple varieties of heirloom tomatoes if I remember correctly, and as many as I could stuff in the car that would still make for a comfortable ride back to Ohio.

The Mercantile and the Apothecary in 2008 is part of what is now a full-blown historical village (Bakersville Pioneer Village), where they host the spring festival as well as monthly gatherings. The Gettles have also written a couple books, own three businesses (Comstock, Ferre Seed Company of Wethersfield, Connecticut and is New England’s oldest seed company, in business since at least 1811)and the Petaluma Seed Bank in Petaluma, California. )


While Daughter dressed in her usually modern hippie attire :-), I jumped on the chance to wear my Civil War era work dress because historical attire is encouraged. However, due to the astounding heat and humidity one of the two years we vended was so bad that I couldn't stand the thought of wearing it the second day, although my blue jeans definitely wasn't any better!

The second year we vended with Baby Audrey but I can't find photographs of that trip. After that,  we were hit will the full force of the depression/recession of 2008, sold the farm in 2010, and moved out of state.


NOW...

Hippie Momma, Baby Audrey and me, 11 years later.

Jere and Emilee are very approachable, walking through the vendor areas speaking with vendors and customers alike, sometimes with children in tow. Their family has grown and the business has had explosive growth. The last I heard, 10,000+ people attended even though the lead speaker was cancelled and rainfall that would have made Noah proud caused a last-minute change of camping arrangements.

There were Ozarkian musicians scattered about plus a couple of barns with music stages because another thing Jere and Emilee are working to save is the culture of the area's music.  There were food trucks and a restaurant and a variety of sweet treats, multiple vendor tents -- both private pop-ups and large, multiple merchant tents similar to where we once rented space, and an enormous tent for garden and homesteading -based speakers, many of whom I follow on You-Tube.

Lines were long to get in, there were tours of the multiple greenhouses, and getting into the seed store was a challenge at times. There were also many, many people pulling children's wagons full of garden plants, bushes and trees and the like, as well as just about any garden-related crafts imaginable such as birdhouses, gourd art, enticing jams and jellies, garden aprons, garden tools and garden art.

We waited almost two hours on Sunday afternoon to get in, which was about two hours after it opened!

The Gettles have a strong philanthropic side to them and my daughter has received many seed packets for the montessori school where she is the head chef. The students help in the gardens and the kitchen so she had them write thank you notes and they also sent a few plants along with us to present to Jere and Emilee.

From the top of the hill looking out to where I'm pretty sure we camped 11 years ago. A lot can happen in a few years! My daughter and granddaughter toured the greenhouses which were offered every hour. I had seen many you-tube videos plus I was pretty sure a greenhouse in Missouri in May was not going to very comportable for (as you-tuber Jessica Sowards of Roots & Refuge would say...) a frigid northerner lol. Instead, I hung out at the seed store .

It was a touch crowded so I didn't hang for long. I stuck my iPhone up in the air, took a handful of pics, and quietly exited.

It was awesome to return, and I hope to not wait so long the next time!

The gardens in front of the seed store, 2019.

FROM MY ARCHIVES -- The Last Ride

The following was written in 2009 when I had my own farm website.

Gage and Hubs on one of our many mountain hikes in Tennessee and Kentucky. Black dogs are always so hard to photograph! About 2004.

THE LAST RIDE

We’ve had a lot of farm dogs over the years, some memorable, some not. When I was growing up on the farm in those ancient years (I know that’s what my grandson is thinking when I tell him stories!) of the 1960s and 1970s, dogs were just another farm animal with a job to perform.

The dogs we had then protected us kids, let us know when company arrived, so that sort of made them a member of the family. They also watched over the livestock, brought the cows up to the house to be milked, flushed quail out of the fencerow for dinner and let us know if someone was trying to sneak into the barnyard to steal gas.

The farm dogs ate in the barn and slept with the herds or flocks, in the milking parlor, by the (outside) door of the house or in the barnyard by the fuel tank.

They did not sleep in the house, let alone share our bed.

Ah, but times change…

We brought home a stray dog a few years ago. The vet-check proclaimed him healthy, about a year old, and mostly Lab. He followed the kids around, tolerated baby chicks with a look in his eyes that said, ya know I’m supposed to be a bird dog, right? and mostly ignored the steers.

He barked like crazy when my dad took a tumble, stared unbelievingly when the cat dropped a baby rabbit in the hallway, and had a really irritating habit of finding dead things to roll on. And even though he barked loudly when somebody approached the house, it appeared, by the wag of the tail and the panting, that he was not guarding us or anything else – he was anticipating a new friend!

He was scared to death of garden hoses and anything I used to clean cobwebs up high, which makes his puppyhood very suspect in my eyes.

Oh how he loved to ride – and unlike redneck cartoons that show the dog up front in the pickup truck and the wife in the back, our dog was quite content to ride in the back, head hanging over the pick-up bed and ears flapping in the wind.

And yes, he shared our bed.

His name was Gage and we lost him shortly before Christmas.

He had a tumor on his bladder and as time wore on, we knew we were going to have to do something. I waited for his tail to stop wagging, but even after this Lab started having the sad eyes of a Basset and approached steps with the wariness of the elderly, he continued to wag his tail.

We rescued a fuzzy puppy to keep him company in the last days but again those expressive eyes told us what he thought… “at 12 years old, I do NOT want to take the energy to assert myself as the Alpha Male and I most assuredly do not was this fuzzy ping-pong ball bouncing all around me…”

Someday I will try to face the fact that rescuing the fuzzball was to ease my transition, not to make Gage’s last days entertaining. But for now…

As this winter approached, friends dug a grave for their old dog, knowing he would not survive the winter and not wanting to have to use a pick-axe on frozen ground.

My husband could not bring himself to do likewise.

He had told me often he was more attached to Gage than any other dog he had ever had, and though he could put down a wounded sheep, he would never be able to …

I called around and asked friends how they had handled similar situations because I have never had to make this choice. I looked on-line for pet crematoriums a "thing" that is relatively new, especially in rural areas.

Finally I called my vet but I had an extremely difficult time getting through the sentences. They did indeed work with a pet crematorium and it was more reasonably priced than having a farm visit from their office (veterinarians cannot dispense the medication and let the owner administer it at home, they must administer it themselves). 

My husband would not have to dig a hole.

We would not have to bring home a lifeless body, a final ride with the dog that the thought of even now, threatens to make my mind go numb and send my body into spasms.

For Gage and for us. I made the arrangements, and my husband took him to the vet’s office. The vet said he was ready to go, she had barely inserted the needle when he let out a small sigh and was gone. My husband sat on the floor of the vet’s office cradling Gage.

I just couldn't make that final ride.

I hope he understands.