It’s been a great harvest season here at Mucky Boots Farm!

I’m grateful for the regular (but not too heavy) rains, plenty of sunshine, and abundant berries.

As we wrapped up harvest, I reflected on some of the discoveries and musings of the summer. Here are a few, whimsical and practical, I’d like to share with you.

1. The plants are always in flux. By plants I don’t mean the elderberries, although they are also always changing, but the the everyday vegetal palette. We expect the celebrated ch…

Elderflower harvest is underway, but we took a break for a quick road trip to Columbia, Missouri for the 2024 Comprehensive Elderberry Workshop and Orchard Tour.  

It was our first time attending this event and we spent two days learning from other elderberry growers, as well as plant breeders and researchers who work with elderberry.  Most exciting of all was the ability to talk with other growers and visit another orchard.  

Elderberry growing can be a somewhat isolated exercise. 

There’s …

Ohio Elderberry Syrup is back in stock! The 2023 elderberry harvest is largely behind us and we finally have elderberry syrup available again.  

It was a strange season - harvest started three weeks later than last year and we had a little lull in the middle of the big harvest days.  We're chalking that up to the spring dry spell and weeks of haze stemming from the Canadian wildfires.  Now we're in that hectic time where we are finishing up harvest, prepping the field for next year, making syrup …

After a dry spring, and the crazy haze resulting from Canadian wildfires, summer has brought rain, sun and elderflowers. More of our plantings reach maturity this summer, and the flower displays have been beautiful.

We’ve been harvesting some of the flowers for our elderflower syrup, but we’ve left plenty to make berries and of course, be enjoyed by the insects.

I love walking among the flowers and breathing in their warm fragrance. But already the petals of pollinated flowers are dropping away an…

Farms are all about place, right? 

We are located in the Appalachian foothills of southern Ohio. We’re lucky to live in a very beautiful area with a lot of natural richness. Check out the Arc of Appalachia to learn more.  They do amazing work and several of their preserves are within a few miles of us.

Our focus is on the American elderberry, a native plant in this region. We have about 450 elderberry plants in the ground right now and make Elderberry syrup and Elderflower syrup from what we grow.…

This year we’ve been going through the liquor at an astonishing rate.

Really, it’s mostly been me. Beth being a lightweight, and having declared her first taste of gin “nasty,” has not contributed evenly. But to each their strengths. 😂

Honestly, though, I’ve not been drinking much of the alcohol we’ve run through. I mix a drink, take a sip, dump the rest. Then I alter the proportions, mix another drink, sip, dump. It’s not gone down the drain because I’m nervous about what all that alcohol, a …

In late August the elderberry bushes are nearly finished fruiting, and as the dark purple berries fade a new palette emerges across the fields: purple ironweed and goldenrod, now fully in bloom. Ironweed intrigues me perhaps because, unlike goldenrod, it is a flower I didn’t grow up with, but one I first met as an adult in southern Ohio.  It’s also a plant that starts as a humble florette of spear-shaped leaves at your feet in May. Then you turn around in August to find the flower head nodding d…