Important dates:

Weekly: preorder bouquet drop off at LilJumbo Coffee Company for pickup between 9 and 2 on Saturdays. Call or text or email us ahead of time to order yours anytime by Friday ,the morning before. If you went the past couple of Sundays, you might have seen what we are serving up these days. They look good. Just sayin. It is pretty cool of the owner to welcome us to sell flowers there without orders ahead of time, so please get a cup of coffee there when you can. The big box would NEVER let us do that. They are open Thursday through Sunday.

August 23, 2025: Violet and the Newsroom will be performing at Turtleback Ridge Brewery from 6:00 to 8:00. We cannot wait! They played here at our Earth Day Celebration this past April. Love them all so much. Their show is the day after my last treatment in Northern Kentucky also, so we are going to be celebrating. Come have a beer or a spritzer with us.

September 1, 2025: monthly email subscription giveaway drawing.

September 21, 2025: SAVE THE DATE! We will be hosting a sound bath + flower day here at the farm. More details to come but it is going to be on a full-moon so lets get together!

Now for a weekly rundown…

I crossed a lot of bridges this past week. Just two, on Tuesday. Eleventh street and the Taylor Southgate. I don’t know how to explain it, but it was one of those days where each turn felt like more of a hurdle. The Southbank shuttle whizzed past me at one of my stops, then I got on the wrong bus and ended up downtown in Cincinnati. At the day’s end my step count was over 14,000 and through it all I kept reminding myself how good it felt to be able to walk so much. The universe granted me some quick encounters with old neighbors from Newport (one of them in the Great American building!) who I had not even thought I would see in the week.

There was some nostalgia for when I used to scoot across Taylor Southgate on my razor, going home from working the seat job years ago. Not so much nostalgia for living in the city though. You get stuck in the hot sun with little chance for respite and the abundance of life that exists on our little patch of flowers and weeds is nowhere to be found. It reminds me of Charlton Heston from Planet of the Apes, trudging through the desert in the hot sun.

There was a change of venue for my weekly accommodations, staying with dear friends who were so kind to claim me for the last legs of this journey. It just so happens that they are both wildly creative, one a potter and the other a chef, and their home was warm and beautiful and full of delicious food and lovely doggies who all told me in their own way that I was welcome there. My sibling gifted me a gift card for food delivery, so it was fun to offer the first night of takeout from an Indian restaurant close by. Suggesting takeout to a chef, whose food we’ve enjoyed before, was scary, but as it turns out, that was a cuisine that was welcomed as such! Additionally, we scratched the naan on the order as she whipped up some roti with an ^ over the “o” that definitely filled the bread spot.

Perriee and I are a proud one-car home. As you might imagine, it can sometimes get a little sticky, especially in times such as this where I am up doing a whole thing on the daily in another city while she rocks out all of the stuff at the farm. To accomplish this, I have been relying on a non profit called, Pink Ribbon Good (PRG) to move my butt to and from these daily appointments. It has been a life-saver and they have managed to not only get me to all of my appointments from the campground and my new location more north into Ohio, but they have done it in such a way to preserve my dignity throughout it all, being flexible with some late schedule changes.

The way it works is that you get like 40 round trip rides to and from treatments. It was an easy process getting set up, as you need to get enrolled, so to speak, and then request your rides a week in advance through email. Then, they set you up with a volunteer driver when possible or with a ride-share company when the volunteers are not able. All of the volunteer drivers are breast cancer survivors and so bad-ass in all of their unique ways. When you get one of them to bring you to and from an appointment, they pull up in the minivan with the huge pink ribbon wrap on it which may have been slightly mind bending to any of the campers who witnessed it a couple of weeks ago when I was delivered.

The scheduling staff at PRG are nothing short of angels, even staying on the phone with me on Tuesday until they could find a ride-share to get me back to my friends’ spot for the evening. When you get the ride-share, it is literally a click of a button to request your return ride back and that one afternoon there just was not anything happening for whatever reason. Saying all of this, we will be having some sort of a fund raiser for them in the future, as one of the rides from the cancer center to my place this week looked to be about 60 dollars, one-way. We will also be having a fund raiser for the local Cancer Care Club here in Fleming County who I have learned help with gas money for folks out here who have all of the doctor appointments over an hour away. There are just not options here locally for cancer treatment. It is a simple fact. If you are so inclined, and have been looking for another non-profit to help out, please consider one of these. They are saving our lives out here.

Anywho, flowers…lets talk flowers. More generally, summer bounty. Perriee cut a couple of beautiful buckets for a yummy looking farm-to-table dinner this past Friday. I rummaged around my hosts’ yard for some ingredients to make a wreath and loved every second of it, feeling most excited about the wild grapevine base I came upon. We had a special order arrangement this weekend to make that I could not stop looking at after I finished it, and schlepped some bouquets to LilJumbo Coffee Company on Sunday for a little add-on to someone’s morning coffee. The marigolds are still stunning, the celosia is the best it has ever been, in all of the shapes and colors (even yellow, which tends to look kinda dingy sometimes). Zinnias are here and there are never enough of them. Next year dang it.

Basil is basiling. We even harvested a handful of raspberries which was the most ever. Elderberries are ripe and tomatoes are trickling in. Our volunteer squash is producing delicious food. The neighbors brought over pounds of roma tomatoes and a bunch of fresh okra. Perriee shared a loaf of yeast bread in return. Friends moving out of the country shared their beans and rice and some spices with us that will carry us through winter and possibly beyond. We took their rainbow door mat and popped it in front of the Flower Studio Door. We are really going to miss them and are simultaneously so freaking proud of them for taking the leap.

As always, thank you for reading along. Thanks for all of the support, either virtually or in person. Let us know how we can help, if you need some flowers for a special occasion, we are only a phone call away. Call us, really. We would love to help. Regardless, buy local, whenever you can, make your own laundry soap. It’s easy. We have not purchased detergent from the store in about 3 years or so. I’ll ask Perriee to jot down her recipe and post it next week. Saying that, let me know if you ever have questions for her. I would be happy to share them with the group here. Ok, I’m off. Peace.