Happy Freebie Friday everyone!

We will be at the Downtown Des Moines Farmer's Market tomorrow, on Court Avenue in front of Dos Rios. Stop by and see us!

Last week's winner of a Milk Bath is Melanie from the UK! Melanie, drop us an email - shop at prairielandherbs dot com - with your mailing address and what scent of milk bath you'd like!

This week's Friday Freebie is our Aromatherapy Bath Salt Kit! 4 refillable/resealable tubes of bath salts packaged together in a mesh bag make a fun aromatherapy bath salt kit. You receive 1 tube each of Peppermint, Rosemary, Tangerine and Lavender bath salts. These are AWESOME as a gift, or a delightful way to pamper yourself! If you'd like to enter yourself to win one of these kits, simply comment on today's blog post!

Rules:
1) One entry per person.
2) You must have a registered ID to post - if your post shows up under "anonymous", we don't know who you are, and therefore you can't win.
3) You have until the next Thursday at midnight, CST, to enter your comment.
4) Winner will be announced the following Friday - you must check back to see if it's you!
5) International folks are welcome. We ship Prairieland Herbs items all over the world, so we'll ship our "Friday freebie" anywhere too!
6) Each eligible post will be assigned a number, and we'll use a free online random number generator to determine the winner.

Just a quick post to update everyone. Sorry we've been so quiet lately. Summer is always a challenge in any year - our workload more than doubles, due to gardening, distilling, harvesting, and farmer's markets. We do all those thing in ADDITION to making, packaging and shipping our products, running the blog/website, and just general business maintenance "stuff" (paperwork, paying bills, cleaning, the boring stuff!). I'll try to be better about keeping the blog interesting with photos, recipes, etc!

This summer is even a bit more different. Our business is located on my mom's property, along with her house. She has to have a new septic system go in....which HAS to be located right where the majority of our herbs were grown. That's fine, we dealt with it, moved the plants we needed, and adjusted our other growing areas. THEN, the fellow who was going to put in the septic system sorta went MIA. So now the area where the septic system will go is suddenly a field of 12 ft. weeds. Niiiiiiice. *sigh* So we've given up any great ideas of having a "pretty" farm this year. :)

Another challenge for our summer involves my grandpa's health. My grandpa lives on the farm with my mom. He turned 90 just a few weeks ago! Overall, he's been in great health, and is an utter delight to have around. However, the last few weeks he's been struggling with some health problems; doctors visits and extra health care needs have kept my mom very busy with him, and introduced new challenges to her life.

We are able to enjoy and care for him in the last years of his life, BECAUSE we are a small family-run business able to work near home. For this, we owe you, our customers, a tremendously huge THANK YOU. Thank you for allowing us this job and lifestyle, full of both challenges and flexibility! Thank YOU for allowing us this job and lifestyle that allows us to care for the oldest and youngest (my sister's young children are here often) members of our family as needed. I wish everyone in the world had such options.

So if we're occasionally quiet on the blog, or your order ships a day or two later than we had anticipated, please, know that we are doing our best. We appreciate each and every one of you more than you know, and truly do our best to juggle work and family to the best of our abilities.