just a quickie!

we added two new events today.... a fabulous Bach Flower Essence Class, and a Shamanic Journeying class that will be held during Sample Sunday, Sept. 18.

Details can be found on our Facebook page - until Maggie's computer is fixed I cannot add them to our website (but hopefully soon....)

We ARE open this Saturday, on this fine Labor Day weekend, so bring your friends, family, guests, etc. - come on out to see the beautiful High Trestle Trail bridge, have a delicious lunch at Cayenne's Cafe, and visit our neighbors at Picket Fence Creamery. Woodward is a fabulous place to spend a relaxing afternoon!

We have a LOAD of fabulous classes coming up this fall!

First our awesome DIY Herbal Medicine with Lynn, our favorite "herbologist"...

September 10 , Make Your Own Herbal Medicine $50 1.00-2:30 pm, $50. If you are interested in making your own herbal remedies, this is the class for you. Herbs to help with colds, allergies, getting to sleep and fatigue, will be available for you to mix and match and make your own special blend to suit your specific needs. Meet the herbs in their fresh and/or dried forms. The class includes all the necessary equipment for you to take home a pint of your own concoction. Learn what master herbalists around the country are using for which ailments. Class taught by Lynn Parkey, herbalist and reiki practitioner.

Then, some craziness with the lovely Zan Asha!


September 17 - Beginning Organic Beekeeping 101 11:00-1:30

Learn the basic principles of natural beekeeping as based on the principles of Zan Asha’s WWII era grandfather, before chemicals were even invented for the home or the fields! Chemical-free beekeeping uses the natural social behaviors of the bees in order to best serve them. You will learn: basic bee social structure, basic equipment and setup of hives, chemical free management of diseases and pests and natural problem solving. Take this class now and be WAY ready for your Springtime beekeeping adventures! $50 early registration/$60 at the door. Class taught by Zan Asha of The Renegade Farmer, class held at Prairieland Herbs - please register online here: http://therenegadefarmer.com/?p=2979

September 17 - Beginning Organic Beekeeping 102 2:00-3:30 For the more advanced beekeeper, and for those who have taken 101 classes, this is the class for you. Still utilizing all natural, humane beekeeping practices, we will discuss more advanced beekeeping techniques including swarm capture and prevention, hive splitting, honey harvesting, varietal honey making, humane use of bees for commercial gain, and WINTERIZING your bees. If you have any questions or problems you are experiencing with your hives, please feel free to bring them to this class as well, and Zan will do her best to answer them! Class taught by Zan Asha of The Renegade Farmer, held at Prairieland Herbs - please register online here: http://therenegadefarmer.com/?p=2979

October 1, DIY Herbal Tea Blending $30 1.00-2:30 pm $35. Herbal Tea Lovers Unite!! Come make your own blend of herbal tea! Make infusions of 20+ herbs and decide for yourself what you like best! The best part is you get to take home your favorite!! YUM!!! Class taught by Lynn Parkey, herbalist and reiki practitioner.

October 15 - Dyeing with Indigo - $35 1-4 PM The Japanese word Shibori means “to fold” or “to crumple.” The technique has been used for centuries to create unique color patterns on fabrics and fibers. Indigo is a common dye plant famous for producing beautiful shades of blue and purple, most famous as the coloring agent used in blue jeans. In this workshop, we’ll put some contemporary twists on ancient Shibori methods and use modern, pre-reduced natural indigo to create unique patterns and textures. Each participant will learn the technique of dyeing with indigo, practice a variety of Shibori tie-ups and manipulations, and take home a one-of-a-kind hand-dyed t-shirt.

No previous dye experience is needed. Bring an old shirt or apron to wear in class – these dyes are permanent!

Sign up for these classes by following this link!

Pictures from Donna

Harvest!!

Lest you think the farm is all pretty... Heres Maggies new raspberry patch. We got about 1/8 of it mulched before it got hot and then I let the weeds get it. Major work is required.

But! This is very exciting :) yesterday we hired a bunch of young men from the local academy to clean out the horse pen!

A squadron of wheelbarrows and shovels of pitchforks....

And now we have nice piles of straw/manure to use for mulch :)

Then -harvest time!! I harvested black eyed susans to use for dye.

Elderberries!

LOADS of aronia berries, grown by a local friend.

The bushes are absolutely Loaded. I've never used these before so I'll
Be doing some experimenting.

Also, Andy got a haircut (thanks Donna!) so I have another bag of angora fur to spin :)

Our friend Lynn came out to harvest medicinals, with help from Donna. She got nettle, elderberries, burdock root, and here she is processing some marshmallow root. Nature provides wonderful food and medicine!

Have you missed us?

Maureen says hello. :)

Ernie says "I'm a good boy, please come adopt me!"

Sally says you should come adopt her too :) we have 4 lovely foster kittens available for adoption.... Please come out and meet them!

Once again, we have temps in the mid-90's, with heat indices in the 110 vicinity. *deep sigh*

We continue to get rain at all the right times. The plants love it. So do the weeds. Ah well, at least we can use some of them. Maggie is harvesting wild plants to distill and dye. I gathered a bunch of Queen Anne's lace on Saturday... Into the dyepot it goes!

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.

Honestly...we like to think we are pretty tough. We iowans deal with tornadoes. Thunderstorms, ice storms, and blizzards. It's over 100 in the summers at times, and below 0 in the winters. We dress accordingly, make snide comments and jokes, and mostly deal with it. But when any one particular weather pattern drags on too long, well... Some of us start to get a little narky about it.

Today it was 103, with heat index of 125. At those temps, you just sweat. You sweat indoors. You sweat in the shade. You sweat standing still. And if you try to, you know... Move around and do stuff? You're just gonna be soaked.

And the problem is... The air is so humid, the sweating doesn't actually cool your body properly. You gotta be very careful about heatstroke.

It's been super humid/hot for a couple of weeks now, and we are OVER it. And the worst part is...August isn't even here! That's when we tend to get the worst of the heat and humidity.

The garden, frankly, is loving it. We've had just enough rain at all the right times, and the plants are going all crazy and jungle-like.

This zucchini both terrifies and impresses me. It's already as big as a softball and the FLOWER IS STILL
SHOWING. Which, I'm assuming, means it grew that large in a day or two. No wonder people always have those baseball-bat sized zucchini to give away....

Our hive at Prairieland Herbs is acting very strangely. First... It swarmed, a few weeks ago. The queen took off with half the workers and a load of honey, despite being in an excellent location with plenty of room in the hive.

Then a few days ago we discovered that the hive -which successfully requeened itself after the first queen left -was making new queen cells. LOTS of them.

So yesterday was all about bees.

We assembled several new hives and lots of new wooden frames (we are thinking maybe the black plastic frames in the original hive are displeasing the Queen), and set up two new hive locations (shown here).

We removed as many of the black plastic frames as possible from the original hive.

And replaced them with wooden ones.

Next I removed the frames with queen cells, and placed them each in a new empty hive, with a frame of honey. There were about 8 queen cells on each frame. I was very careful not to remove the existing queen!

Then, I drove across the road to Picket Fence Creamery.

The hive we have over there is doing really well!

The girls were really interested in the goings-on.

REALLY interested!!

I took two frames with baby bees from
This hive....

And put them in the other two new hives with queens/honey. This is a sort of risky thing which may or may not work, but it's all an experiment (Zan, I hope I did it all right!!)

Now we will feed all these new hives and keep checking them for signs that the queens are all doing their jobs. I guess that's all we can do!