The ‘great tucking in’ is underway around here. The leaves are dying back or falling off (in many cases, in one fell swoop!). We’ve spent a little time trying to glean out the last of the garden – Fall Raspberries, Wonderberries, dry Vermont Cranberry Beans, Calendula, Herbs, and collecting some seeds (Echinacea, Common Milkweed, Black Hollyhock, Blue False Indigo, Evening Primrose, Calendula, Bee Balm’s, Snapdragons, Pansies, Rue, etc). I love seed saving. I didn’t get to save as much as I wanted this year but I did get some and invested in some seed packets to decorate and share over the holidays. I managed to dry some herbs and flowers this year, too, but again, not as many as the last couple of years where I sometimes have 2 full hanging drying racks, a dehydrator, and likely something on drying shelves in the garage or hanging on the porch. I managed a batch or 2 of Red Clover, Calendula, Bee Balm’s (both Wild and Scarlet), a bit of Yarrow, Mullein, and Comfrey, Raspberry Leaf, and later this week I will dry some Apple slices for teas and next week or the week after some Rose Hips for tea and bath.
The new store and business site will be up and running this week! Stone Broke Bread might be coming to your town (ok, only if the town is somewhere between here and Portland, Maine) – with a new business structure of Community Supported Bakery Shares; an innovative share model being tried out in other places, too, as a way of connecting and building both business and community together, not as economic relations but as ecological ones. Get on the list! We’re excited to roll this out and see our ‘customers’ become ‘community’.
The days and nights have certainly shifted here, with our plans and thoughts and energies, getting cozy together – celebrating the seasonal changes with folks when we can (didn’t she do a lovely job on her Bastet costume?! And though she had already decorated a few pumpkins at home – painting one a glorious rainbow, the other with a drawing of Comedy/Tragedy, she & Daddy carved a classic happy Jack on her bumpy pumpkin!), and trying to reinspire our space – all spaces to be reimagined!
Rock Bottom Homestead 