So much to do in Charlottesville now!! This weekend, we are planning to finally visit Sugarleaf Vineyards - www.sugarleafvineyards.com - and I couldn't be happier! As innkeepers busy not only with the day to day running of the inn and taking care of guests, but also still renovating house and gardens - it is often hard to find time to do the things we know our guests are enjoying. So, even though many guests have raved about it - and Lauren has visited us several times with kind invitations - we have yet to visit, and it isn't even that far! So - I will have pictures and a report on Monday.

This weekend is also a winemaking workshop at Monticello, with Gabrielle Rausse - who also happens to care for our vineyard and make our wine. We are crossing our fingers that this harvest will be a good one for a red from our grapes...we need rain, but if it can hold off a couple of weeks til harvest Gabrielle will be a happy man!

We are currently making plans to restore some of the vines that have been lost over the last 20 or so years...we dig the holes in the fall, and plant the new vines in spring. Gabrielle said that though Pinot Noir isn't the best grape choice for Virginia - he can ALWAYS use them in one way or another - last season for example, he blended ours with some from Barboursville...can't wait to try that.

It is almost harvest time for our grapes...we have over an acre of Pinot Noir - not the best grape to grow in Virginia, as winemakers have discovered over the last 25 years, BUT - our vineyard was planted in the mid-80's when it was all still kind of an experiment here! Gabrielle Rausse helped get this vineyard started, and he still is THE MAN to talk to about vinifera in Virginia. He tends our vineyard and makes our wine - so I am sure it is pretty much the very best it can be!

Last year, we had big trouble with frost, drought, and beetles. That, plus the fact that so many trees have been allowed to grow up around our vineyard to house birds that will EAT the grapes and give too much shade, made for a pretty small harvest. This year, we have big, fat, full bunches of grapes everywhere - not as many as in years past, but it is beautiful! Hopefully, with our pruning and thinning of the cedars surrounding the vineyard, and replanting some vines, next year will be back in full swing. I also happen to think that just walking in the vineyard thinking happy thoughts helps them produce more...not very scientific, but maybe they know how much we love it here! (Remember those reports in the 70's that made people talk to houseplants? I still kind of like to believe that... ) Anyway, it is great fun to come watch the harvest - usually around the third week in August, and Gabrielle is giving guided tours at some local vineyards this weekend, if you are really into wine.

ducklings hatching!

The ducklings are hatching! Reports from the incubator: out of 9 eggs, one wasn't viable, one has a pinhole and may not hatch, 4 have hatched and seem to be active and healthy, 3 to go! Plus of course the one lonely egg that Mama duck is still actually sitting on...if it hatches, it will be in the next day or 2.

The Scottsville Farmer's Market Tomato Festival was yesterday - what fun! Over 600 people attended, we had 16 tomato varieties to taste, and several demonstrations - including canning and Fried Green Tomatoes...yum! (late summer may find crispy, cornmeal-crusted fried green tomatoes on breakfast plates - if you are a fan, be sure to ask and I will make them for you!)

Also in Scottsville - coming up on August 9th, the 'Honey Dewdrops' return to Victory Hall. If you are planning a visit, include that show on your itinerary. They won the 'Prairie Home Companion' young artists competition this past year - and they live here!

If you are hoping to come in the fall - October 11 is our Fall Herb Festival, and the Saturday before that is Old Farm Days at Pleasant Grove...about a 15 minute drive, and a great way to spend a fall Saturday.

Well, you wouldn't know it from this - but there is actually a pond for ducks at the edge of the yard in the woods....yet they seem to like being around the chickens and us, too. Mama is the one splashing in the tub...Papa is the brown and white one on guard. It is interesting - we started with a flock of 10 - they dwindled over the summer (there was a fox around for a while) to just these 3. Both females take time on the nest, they both sit at night and the mama gets a turn off her sitting duty a couple times a day. They have laid probably 5 nests - so many would get up to 7 or 8 eggs, and then something would eate every egg in one night. The girls would find another spot, again and again...til finally, they began REALLY sitting on this nest of 7 eggs. In the beginning of this nesting, the ducks would lay an egg, and then visit the nest several hours a day to check and turn the eggs. They would return to the pond or coop at night, after carefully covering the eggs with hay and grass. After witnessing their first several failed attempts, and knowing we had oppossum and skunks around, we decided to collect the eggs when the ducks went in for the evening, and put them back in the morning before the mama's came back to lay again. In this way, we collected 10 fertile eggs that we planned on incubating, and the ducks ended up with 7 to sit on. Well, of our 10, there are 9 that are growing and viable...and the mama ducks have ended up with 2 shiny, hard big beautiful eggs that we hope will hatch for them. (the other 5 were discarded by the mama's over the past 2 weeks) With a little (ok, a lot of) luck, we think the incubated eggs will hatch within a day or so of the other 2, so maybe we will be able to give the duckings to a mama!

Garden, vineyard, baby ducks and baby chicks!

Too much time has passed since I wrote last!! The garden has exploded, the vineyard is FULL and beautiful, and we have ducklings being hatched. What to talk about first??

The garden...We have harvested beautiful romaine, leaf lettuce, beets, kale, collard greens, purple and white onions, garlic!, basil, strawberries, zucchini, yellow squash, snow peas, sugar snap peas, and now we are down to okra, and green beans. We just planted another batch of beets - oh, I forgot the corn! - and carrots, and we have tomatoes (lots of interesting varieties, including brown and white tomatoes), peppers and pumpkins still growing. The garlic is great - our neighbors at Best of What's Around grew LOTS of garlic....Matthew Holt said this is his 7th year I think for this garlic...this is just our first crop here. Every year, if you save and plant the garlic again and again, the bulbs will develop a distinct flavor unique to your yard, garden and soil type...no one else will have exactly the same flavor as their you! We are still of course attending the Scottsville Farmers Market every Saturday morning - this past week was just loaded with great stuff - including a very tasty granola made by a couple of young entrepeneurs...their free samples help their sales I am sure. :)

The vineyard...a little over an acre of Pinot Noir - not the best grape to grow inVirginia to be sure, but the original owners of the inn planted it over 20 years ago, and it still grows strong. We have the pleasure of Gabrielle Rausse as the man to tend the grapes and make our wine - who could ask for better?? The vineyard is gorgeous to stroll in the early morning, and late afternoon, and even in winter it is beautiful. We are planning to take out a few cedars beside the vines that, although they create a beautiful allee', house way too many birds and cast too many shadows. What began as a simple hedgerow 25 years ago is now a border of 30 foot trees - and it is time to remove some. I dream of paths between big hydrangeas and lilacs, that we can clip for flowers to keep in line.

I will post a few pitures in a week or so of our new little baby ducks and chicks -

Come see the glory of summer!

Scottsville Center for Arts and Nature

Almost forgot...the Honey Dewdrops played a benefit for the Scottsville Center for Arts and Nature...WOW! They won the latest 'Prairie Home Companion' competition for musicians...and they were amazing. So were the dancers and friends who performed with them...

The Center is being built on property nearly neighboring ours...trails connecting us are not out of the question - check them out at http://www.scottsvilleartsnature.org

May flowers already!!

What a glorious spring so far!! Except of course for the tornadoes and nickel-sized hail all round us last week...luckily for our peonies and iris, we didn't see any hail! The grass is growing so fast you can almost watch it...and everything is so GREEN.

Our little town had a meeting of more than a dozen people interested in 'local foodways'. There is a big idea circulating in Charlottesville about a multi-point need for our local food producers...a distribution center, processing/butchering/curing center, educational facilities/community kitchen, etc. We wanted to start to think about how Scottsville - with it's amazing history of agriculture and commerce, and current wealth of empty buildings - could play a role in this 'big picture'. For starters, our new Saturday Farmer's Market is going like mad! 2 weeks open, and it is already VERY strong. LOVE IT! Scottsville has acquired a $100k grant for a permanent farmer's market facility, and has the property set aside (exactly where the current THursday/saturday market is held under the tent). So, some of the discussion participants posed some bigger questions like - 'what is it that we WANT out of the market building?', and 'what role can we play?' We have a couple of great sites that could house 'satellite' distribution centers, or a retail space, or a community kitchen...and LOTS of great people to get involved with this. I would really like to see this happen - and my 'big idea' for High Meadows, as a non-profit garden/market/farm animal educational property as well as inn - could still fit right into this.

Since our gardens are so great, and we DO have a creek that flows into the James and the Chesapeake eventually - maybe our focus could be on JUST the water side of all this...could we show how to have gardens luch and pretty without chemical fertilizers, pesticides, etc. Can we show how to collect and use rainwater efficiently? What about wind/solar power for water pumps, etc. That side of responsible living, in addition to the chickens, goats, and other useful farm animals might make for a very interesting inn, and from Wednesdays through Fridays, maybe useful to local schools. Again, thoughts are still just floating around - nothing has come together yet as a formal 'mission statement' though I am getting closer!

For now, the ducks are happy, we are happy - and getting busier. Our guests continue to be interesting, well-read, informed and well-traveled people...just this weekend we had a couple get engaged in our gazebo, several others attending a wedding at Spring Hill (a 'commune' of sorts...I love the co-housing concept...Cobb Hill in Vermont!), and a couple who were making me drool with envy at their description of their trip to Portugal, in the wine country there and of the views of twinkling town lights over the vineyards that stretched as far as the eye could see in the river valley they were visiting. Which also happened to be in the port region, which I am sure made for some very nice wine drinking....but our conversation still kept bringing my thoughts back to little Scottsville - and the importance of local foods. The most memorable parts of their visit to Portugal was the food - local farmers, local foods, local cheeses and meats - the freshness was totally new for them, and very well-appreciated. Made me remember the beautiful cream from our friend's cow...and that if everyone did just a LITTLE bit to keep the food on their table as close to home as possible, it would make a difference in the big picture. I will continue to enjoy my mangoes in Virginia, of course - but no more store bought chicken eggs, thank goodness!