This bit of sunshine is a pleasant surprise! We sure aren’t complaining about the rain (we needed it), but we’re gearing up to plant our garlic. This can be a monumental task, as we’ve set aside about 50 - 75 lbs of bulbs for next year’s crop. This doesn’t factor in the 20 lbs of our newest hard-neck variety, “Music”. Some of you may already know this, but each clove of garlic, when planted on its own, produces a whole new bulb of garlic. It’s best to get your cloves in the ground before the end of October - so, hoping that our fields dry out and we prep the soil, we’ll be planting garlic in every moment of spare time before the end of the month. You’re welcome to come on out and help if you’d like!

We’ve had a bit of a reality check with the Marcellus Shale drilling in our community. Just over the county line in Butler, there’s been a lot of drilling activity. We’ve seen them flaring the gas at the top of the drilling rig, heard constant loud industrial machinery and even witnessed the tanker trucks dumping waste water onto Ekastown Rd. This type of drilling is going to have a big impact in our region and it’s going to sneak up on us. It’s well worth a road trip to Washington Co. to see what the visual impact these kind of operations are going to have on us.