Yuletide Greetings to One and All!

The Deer Mother (Beaivi) takes to the skies on the longest, darkest night of the year to capture the sun in her antlers and bring it back to warm the earth.

In this season where we celebrate the triumph of light over darkness, our hearts are warmed by all the love shown to us after my last letter about Ralph’s battle with Lyme disease.

It’s sad for me to announce that we are suspending mail order until 2022.

Ralph, our rock-solid, strong-as-an oak, founder, is very sick with Lyme disease. He’s been bed-ridden for days with temperatures higher than 102, but late yesterday afternoon we finally got some antibiotics and his temperature is down to about 100.

We know from experience that the only way to beat this is with complete rest.

December is typically a frenzied month for us, with dozens of holiday packages mailed out every day, and cooking still going on in the kitchens. Even with Elisha’s and Lara’s help, it’s way more than I can manage.

It’s a sunny day, but chilly - bright for November, which is a hard month to love, especially with the return to standard time, which beings the afternoons to a smashing halt way too early.

Most of the trees have shed their leaves, leaving the oaks to stand alone in the landscape - their spreading crowns the only color but for the evergreens. The pears in the orchard, too, keep their leaves for a while and provide some color, and the witch hazels in the woods give me a grin when I see their blooms - blossoming in autumn in opposition to all the other trees and shrubs.

Happy Last Lovely Days of Summer!

The air is crisp and the light golden as summer slips away and autumn emerges. The hummingbirds have left, geese are flying overhead, and crows have returned. Their caws replace the songbirds’ morning melodies, and the comical clucks of wild turkeys bring us smiles throughout the day.

Happy High Summer, dear ones!!!

It’s been a wild ride since my last post in - YIKES - April! All those beautiful seedlings matured into plants that we transplanted in late May and they’re thriving.

Drought in June presented a huge challenge to our sandy soil and we rotated watering between 3 wells and managed to keep everything alive - but it was so bad you could feel the parched earth crack and gasp between waterings. Our main focus was keeping the transplants alive, and hydrating the strawberries who rewarded us with a stellar crop. Red currants also gave us their best yields ever - thanks to Ralph’s careful rotational watering.

Do you feel it too? That surge of energy as spring awakens? It’s rolling forward even in spite of fits and starts like today’s low chilly temps after the balmy teasing days we enjoyed in late March.

We took advantage of that unseasonable warmth to get the long rows of raspberries and blackberries pruned, thinned and cut back.

This is the month where winter melts into spring, the month my neighbor calls “the month of waiting.” It’s a month whose sunny days tease us into thinking that spring is nigh, then strains our hearts with days of gloomy drizzle, slush, sleet, snow, and notorious winds. That said, I’ve heard the spring sounds of cardinals and the chickadee love song, and there was some bare ground that was soft underfoot when I walked into the woods yesterday.

Happy New Year!

Sending out lots of love and best wishes for a healthy new year to all!

This newsletter will be short and sweet, even though the news is BIG!

We have a brand new website! We first went online in 1999 (or was it 2000 - I remember being concerned about Y2K (remember that?) so it may have been 2000…!)