Important dates:

September 1, 2025: (today!) monthly email subscription giveaway drawing.

September 21, 2025 6:00 pm: Reserve your spot! We are excited to be hosting a sound bath, Flowers and Sound, led by Kristen from Graceful Serenity Yoga. The evening will begin with a light meditation followed by a hands-on flower activity that will tickle the artsy part of your brain. Using some flowers grown here on the farm, you will get to design something of your own take home. The evening will end with a sound bath at sunset. I mean, can you even? If you know someone who might enjoy a night out like this, feel free to forward this email on to them. New faces are most definitely welcome.

This week felt a like a lot of re-calibration, getting back into the swing of the life that we love: farming, cooking, caring for the animals and dusting out the house a little. My brain was definitely asking for it all to be complete by mid-week when my therapist kindly reminded me that four weeks of upheaval in both of our lives cannot simply be undone in four days. By Friday, my brain had come around to accept this fact.

Temperatures have cooled which has slowed a lot of the annual flowers down but creates a great opportunity to enjoy some weeding. “Is she crazy?”, you might be asking. Quite possibly but hear me out. While out there this week I was appreciating how the act of pulling weeds was awakening all of my senses and teaching me some lessons too. There is something so satisfying about pulling a weed out by its roots, sometimes taking more strength than you knew was inside of you. There are also times when that root is so deep that I will relent and cut it off at the base, accepting the defeat and turning the page to move along to the next one. The smell of the soil is sweet and the sounds of the ripping please my eardrums. That view of the bed when you are finished, tidied up once again and ready to receive its next assignment is always unmatched. My absolute favorite observation is when I use my fingers to tease away a plant we are keeping from the tangles of the weeds and appreciate how my body can discern the two, first by sight, then by picking them apart with my hands that engineers have lost sleep over trying to replicate those movements in machines. How amazing are we?

Saying all of that about weeding, you might also be saying, “But Marietta, I thought you and Perriee never weeded”. Well, we definitely do not spend a lot of time on it, that is a fact. When we do have time to dedicate to it, we have a list of plants that are not welcome to spread out to every corner, unchecked. Here are several off the top of my head: Hemlock (hard no always), Johnson grass, ragweed, opium lettuce, kudzu (just forgot the name and found it described as, “the vine that ate the south” when I looked it up on the interweb), garlic mustard (edible) and honeysuckle. Poke weed gets cut down too for the most part, but I think we both enjoy seeing a couple of them here and there as they have made their way into the landscape.

Things people consider weeds that we welcome but might pull to make room for something else are lambs quarters (I believe they can inhibit growth of surrounding plants but are also freaking delicious so eat them if you pull them), violets, dock, cress (we sell that as a filler!), Queen Anne’s lace, native aster (serves as late season pollinator food) and chicory. Plants that can almost always stay are dandelions, iron weed, goldenrod (it is the Kentucky state flower), chickweed (so delicious and nutritious), fleabane, purple amaranth, and sunchokes (also delicious and nutritious). As always, please don’t take my word before eating something outta your yard and for the love please know it has not been sprayed with anything poisonous before consuming even “safe” foods. When you kind of figure out what IS safe, you might begin to view your “overgrown” areas through a different lens. I know we sure do.

On the house menu this week were some amazing dishes. There was a minestrone, fried okra, fried plantains, some amazing chocolate coconut cookies (inspired by the Cooking with Curves cookbook), a sourdough loaf, and a sweet and sour pork that I will be telling you all about. The way we eat sometimes does not at all align (stereotypically) with our current level of income and we tell each other almost daily how happy we are that both of us know how to cook. All of those meals put together probably cost us about 10 dollars, as the majority of the ingredients were homegrown or gifted to us one way or another. What I am trying to say is that it feels like we eat as if we are billionaires (not the McDonald’s eating ones though). Sorry if this sounds like a repeat, but there are so many moments that could not be made better if we had all the money in the world. Some of the food we eat checks those boxes regularly.

Take this pork dish, for instance. The ingredients, except for the onions which I purchased from our local grocery store, Ken’s, and a few spices, were entirely grown within a few miles of our house and probably only cost a dollar or two to make. The pork was raised around the corner, gifted to us by our neighbors for helping them break down some of the meat from their hogs when they processed them last winter. The okra and peppers, sweet and spicy were gifted to us by neighbors on the opposite side of us. I used peaches from the freezer that we helped harvest last summer at Sunflower Sundries in lieu of pineapple. And of course, our homegrown garlic made the cut. Local and delicious. You cannot beat it. I feel so special that we are able to nourish ourselves with these fine foods but I refuse to believe we are an anomaly.

Sure, you might not have the luxury of living next door to folks who raise their own meat and vegetables, but there are people out there who might need a hand with some farm tasks for a trade of some sort and even if you are in the city, they are likely only a short-long drive away. Sometimes around this time of year, there is such an abundance that gardeners and farmers are happy to share their harvest to avoid tossing it in the compost. The common denominator in it all is staying in touch. If you never leave your virtual bubble and get out in the world to see people in person, it might not happen. We need one another, now more than ever.

Feel free to share about a moment in your life that felt as good as it could be no matter how much money you had. To me, they are the moments when you are exactly where you want to be, with who you want to be with, doing what makes you happiest.

PS: Again, thank you to everyone for reading and following along. Oh my gosh it means so much.