Farming & Perfume

 This past Saturday I received some seeds in the mail from India. I had ordered santalum album seeds, Indian sandalwood, and also received osmanthus seeds and palmarosa seeds. I've done some reading on all the seeds and found that the palmarosa will be the easiest to grow, the osmanthus nearly impossible to grow, and the sandalwood a very close second to the osmanthus. Osmanthus requires temp variations from cold to warm in three-month intervals before it will germinate. Sandalwood, if the seeds are fresh enough, will germinate with a host plant/tree to feed on. It's all very complicated, except for the palmarosa, which, honestly, is just grass -- but oh so sweet smelling grass -- that I probably won't do anything with them until I get into the new house. Which won't be ready until early June now due to the drought busting rain we've gotten this past winter and spring.

I've gotten back into the habit of burning resin daily. It helps with the feelings of anxiety and the blues over still not having a place to unpack my suitcase or my studio. Thank heavens for the farm or I'd be a mess. Planting, harvesting, watering, and planning things at the farm have saved my sanity many times over, which is why, despite the setbacks there, I've continued to do it. It just feels good, and I know that something good will be borne of it once things begin to grow in earnest.  We've done a fair bit of harvesting -- that Cecile Brunner tea rose is really throwing off the blossoms -- that soon we're going to be packaging things up for sale. At some point, probably mid-summer, we'll begin saving the tea rose blossoms for a distillation of rose hydrosol. We also planted over 60 tomato plants of differing varieties. Plus squash and cucumber and okra and eggplant and dozens of other things, and that's not getting into what we've started with seeds.

The Four Points Garden, or the witch's garden, is coming along nicely. We've got mugwort, lavender, rosemary, black hollyhock, nasturtium, Christmas holly, honeysuckle, cedar, pine, manzanita, blue sage, lupine, ivy, wisteria, and other things I'm sure I've left out, that are growing beautifully.

I wish I had more to say on the perfumery front. There just isn't space and time now to work out perfumes, but come June, I will be a formulating fool.