Crocky!

As the day winds down, I realize that I didn't get nearly as much accomplished as I wanted to, but it was a good day nonetheless. My belly is full of homemade soup and grilled cheese with garden tomatoes and my spicy fermented dilly beans. My gods, the dilly beans are BEYOND.

My friend Margaret harvested elderberries for me this year and put them in her freezer, so today I took the hour drive out to her to pick them up. Such treasure!! She had not only a bumper crop from this year, but also from last year, as well as juice the she had put up. It took me a while to clean the stems out of the frozen berries, but I now have a very full pot of elderberries on the stove awaiting my further attention. I'm thinking jam. I'm thinking tomorrow.

Margaret also had a 5 gallon Crown crock that I took off her hands for a reasonable price. It's in good shape and that gives me a total of five crocks to work with: 10, 8 and 5 gallon Crowns as well as a fancy 7.5 litre German crock and a cast off 1 gallon crock from a broken slow cooker. Currently all but the 8 gal and the new one are in use. I'm making white wine in the largest crock, and as for the smaller ones, I'm infusing my friend Siro's red wine vinegar with beach plums in one and black raspberries in another.

With all the driving around, scrubbing the new crock and cleaning frozen elderberries, I never got out into the woods today... or all the other things on my list for that matter. Feeling pretty done though. whew.

At the end of the month I'll be teaching a workshop that I outrageously titled, "The Gestalt of Chinese Energetic Systems: Two Polarities, Three Burners and Five Phases." Tonight I'm going to work on that presentation. Honestly though, I really just want to create a platform for discussion so that we can all share ideas and I can guide the conversation. I feel it's important for us to get a sense of where we are oriented in time/space in order to manage and balance our individual constitutions with diet, herbs and lifestyle. It should be interesting to see how it fleshes out.

On that note...