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)

Birds are the big news of the day. 21 baby birds, to be exact. Grackles, robins, warblers, etc. Our friend Jenni, wildlife rehabber, had to go out of town, and she entrusted her wee babies in Maggie's care. Here they are in the classroom.

They have to be fed every hour or so during daylight hours, so they travel where I travel. This is the sight that greets me when I open the robin cage :)

Monk's hidey spot in the prairie plants.

I took my gathering basket out to get catnip to distill...and found a giant 5 ft plant that wouldn't even begin to fit in the basket!

Dante says he didn't inhale.

I really love my still.

Our kittens are spayed, neutered, vaccinated, microchipped, and ready for adoption!! Here our little torti tests the yarn for softness (it passed the test).

Lunch!! We love lunch. This is a fresh corn tortilla topped with adobo spiced black beans, queso fresco, a fried egg, and homemade chipotle/roasted garlic salsa with fried plantain slices on the side. I don't know what this is called - I think I had it at a restaurant some years ago. If anyone knows the name of the dish, please let me know!

It was WAY yummy.

The gardens are going bonkers, in the best way possible. Our first zucchini! (you really only get excited about the first one, right?) I pulled some weeds, and staked up the tomatoes (about a week too late).

Donna did tons of mowing today... Tons and tons. It is a never-ending job.....

Friday...we picked some St. johns wort for infusing into oil. This plant is pure magic! Bright yellow flowers stain your hands purple as you pick the blossoms, then turn the infused oil a lovely ruby red.

We distilled some lemon balm. up next: catnip, and bee balm... Then more peppermint and comfrey.

Donna pulled loads of orders!

And John packed loads of orders!

Dante supervised all the proceedings.

Then our favorite local herbologist friend Lynn came out and got a bunch of fresh herbs for tincturing.

The minis "helped" her gather elderflowers :)

And then we packed up for farmers market! A busy day indeed.

What a gorgeous sunny day!!

Got some peppermint put in the still.

Donna worked her tailfeathers off today!!! Did very major trimming back of HUGE weeds... Giant ragweed and out-of-control wild plums. We had cut down many, MANY overgrown plum bushes last fall, and left them
In big piles. Now they needed to be taken care of, so we wrassled them into big piles and attempted, with some success, to burn them.

Peter rested.

As did the canines.

I was supposed to post this last night but ran out of steam.

Finally, a bit of sunshine!! The butterfly milkweed has begin to bloom.

As have the daylilies....

And the wild yarrow.

We were finally able to run the still, and distilled a gallon of comfrey hydrosol.

We started cleaning out the drying shed...a raccoon or possum got in there this winter and made a HUGE mess.

It broke open out stash of dozens of bags of packing peanuts. It's a Very Big Mess.

Donna channeled her inner firebug and we burned the HUGE pile of brush that's been sitting there, drying. It's mostly wild plum and mulberry wood. Keeping some of the wild plants under control can be quite a job.

And in the evening we went to Des Moines for good eats, good wine, and excellent live music played by Daphne Willis :)

It's going to frost Friday night....and be rainy all day tomorrow. That means, this afternoon was our final chance to harvest our tender herbs. I harvested the last of the eucalyptus, white sage, lemongrass, and lemon verbena. These will be distilled in the few remaining nice days of the season.
Here they are, hanging in our drying shed.

Here's a great blog post about a small essential oil distiller in Canada. I have a heck of a time explaining to people why we don't distill our own essential oils....they see we have an herb farm, and a still...so why aren't we making essential oils? The question is one of scale. We have a TINY herb farm (less than 2 acres, most of which is occupied with house/barn/outbuildings/store/parkinglot/miniature horses), and a tiny still. You need many many pounds of herbal matter to make OUNCES of essential oils! This article and pictures give a small taste of the size of still needed to make quantites of essential oil.

Check out our friend Tina's blog for some AMAZING pictures of distillation with her gorgeous glass still. (We're going to get one of these pretty glass stills this spring, I think.....)