Donna's hibiscus flowers continue to go bonkers.

Bonkers!!

We distilled a gallon of REALLY nice mountain mint hydrosol today. The plants really like this hot weather, they are very pungent and potent. Cool wet weather seems to make for wimpy herbs.

I do not mess around when I harvest herbs. This is all that's left of the mountain mint plant. I promise you, it will grow back lusher, fuller, and more beautiful than ever. You can almost never cut back herbs too far.

The woody mint stems I save for my bunny. He loves them!

Donna, Maggie, and two friends shucked, cut and froze 16 dozen ears of GMO-free corn from
Our farm neighbors, Twin Girls Garden.

The yield: 33 pints corn and 8.5 quarts sopa de elote (Mexican corn soup)

Donna continues to work her booty off weeding and mulching the flowerbeds -no small feat in this humidity. Her perennial hibiscus are blooming, and look amazing!

And look at the size of these rosehips! Will be amazing in tea, jam or sauce.

We harvested our garlic. It will dry, then it can be trimmed, cleaned, stored and used.

Baby watermelon!!

We distilled a new hydrosol -bee balm. So far it's INCREDIBLE! really interesting, fabulously strong... Wild and pungent. We will give it a day or two to rest and mellow, and play with it. It has a lot of wonderful medicinal and aromatherapy properties.

And then.... Maggie's legendary mess-making tendencies kicked it. I was working on cleaning out our drying shed. We store packing peanuts in there, but last winter a raccoon got in and made a HUGE mess and they all have to be thrown away. I loaded a bunch in a box and carried them halfway across the farm to the trash.... Not realizing I was leaving a trail of peanuts the whole way behind me.

Lets just say... There is no good or easy way to clean up packing peanuts off wet grass.

My young nephew helped me pick up peanuts (as well as John and Donna), and then he helped me check the bees! He suited up and got right in there and enjoyed the process. He was great!

Dante enjoying the day's veggie harvest.