Cultivating

I'm out digging, will share more next week...

Here on the island the buzzing has begun: summer businesses are all awakening in anticipation of the start of the tourist season. Decks are being hammered, paint is being touched up, and everyone is busy getting their gardens set up — including us!

This has been a busy week, so I don’t have much to report as we have been deep in gardening mode — preparing our garden beds, and getting ready for some trade shows coming up next week for Narrative Food. So, please bear with me: I’m sharing just a few photo highlights of us being busy bees and some sneak previews of the most adorable new line of products we are launching with local makers — Coffee for Community (with 44 North), Caramels for the Climate (with Virgo Moon), Pears for the People (with 5 Star Orchard) and more — all with illustrations from my daughter Lily, and silk-screened kraft bags (a new skillset for me that’s for sure)

Putting the barn to good use, with the silkscreen trials

First Coffee for Community prototype, with cermamics from a local potter

Caramels for the Climate, Chocolate for Change, local ceramics

In the garden, Beau and I have been building some new perimeter beds designed for our climbers — tomatoes, pole beans, and more. As well as planting our beds before our travels next week. We actually ventured off the island to our neighboring village Brooklin, to pick up bags of compost at the Food Corps garden — where Molly also volunteers — Molly grows the pears we are going to dehydrate for our new product “Pears for the People”, at her Brooklin-based “Five Star Orchard”. This is a small community, and it’s exciting to be cultivating these relationships — and the soil, in tandem!

Get the garden up and running again. Favas in the ground!

More next week! And here’s our first tulip. Happy cultivating!