From our family trip to Copper Falls near Mellen, WI last weekend. #Wisconsin #countryliving

Good morning. I hope I haven't posted this picture yet. It's the one that jumped out at me this morning. It's a rosin weed (Silphium integrifolium). I planted it along the driveway a few years ago. It bloomed for the first time this year. I planted a couple sickly looking ones next to our mature ironweed a few weeks ago. They were in 2 inch pots. Root bound. Slowly dying. Annie said, "Go ahead plant them. No one is going to buy them." Our front meadow is full of sickly looking plant stories. Sometimes I look at it and say what a mess. But then I remind myself, it's my mess. When I'm in the meadow I am learning. And I become quiet inside. I become unsettled when I start worrying about what people are going to think of it, and of course me. Because I identify with it. Self concern leads to separation, as the Buddhists say. Quick story if you have made it this far. I used to have a life coach. She was a woman in her late 60's or early 70's. She immigrated here with her parents from Nazi Germany as a little girl. We found each other on Facebook. It was through the Ishmael Community (that's how Annie and I also got together in a roundabout way). It always comes back to that damn book. LOL. Anyway our coaching sessions would last an hour. I would drive down to Spring Lake boat landing, call her (she lived in Texas), and she would coach me. It was a master/student relationship. It lasted for maybe 5 years. It ended in 2020 along with a lot of other things in my life. Whenever I would get stuck in our sessions, which was a lot, she would say "would it be okay if life was easier," or something like that. And then we would uncover how I was getting in my own way. I remember it as worthy work. The suffering was worth it. And life would slowly become easier. Sort of like learning about native plants in the front meadow. I believe life was easier when we understood plants. When we lived more primitively so to speak. And that's the vision I try to live into. One where life is a sacred process that I am a part of. The rest will take care of itself, as my coach used to say. I am off today through Tuesday. I am happy about that. :-) I hope you have a great Sunday. #gm #coffeechain

Good morning. Off to the mail. Fifth and final day. Then three days off. Need it. That's a blazing star. I think a meadow. I hope you have a great day! #gm #coffeechain

Good morning. That photo is from 2 years ago right around this time. Black eyed susan and bee balm. I planted my first compass plant in the front meadow at dusk last evening. It was the sickliest looking one we had for sale. Looking forward to planting more. It's a Silphium. Supposed to be well behaved.. Out of time. Time to hit the Mail Trail. Hope you have a great day. 🙏 #gm #coffeechain #countryliving

Today I will be delivering mail in Springbrook, Wisconsin. I will listen to one episode of The Bitcoin Edge. I made up my mind of that yesterday. Need some positivity in my life. 🙏 #Bitcoin

Good morning. Going through pictures to share. This one jumped out at me. It's from September 7th of last year. Rattlesnake snake master and the seed heads of side oats gramma on a dewy morning. Off to the mall trail. Three more days to go until three days off. Hope you have a great day! #gm #coffeechain

Good morning. That photo is from Sept. 9 2024. Seems like the meadow had more color then. More robust. The last dry spell didn't help. Glad we're finally getting some rain. Off to the mail trail. Hoping for an earlier day. Yesterday was long. Put in 11 hours. Enough time to get home, do a few things, eat, and go to bed. Hope you have a great day! #gm #coffeechain

Good morning. Took that photo yesterday while planting a few plants in the front meadow. It's butterfly weed. Off to the mail trail to deliver a lot of mail and packages. It's the day after a holiday. Raining and blowing here right now. Puddles in the pasture. Have a great day! #gm #coffeechain

Good morning. That's a picture from Copper Falls, just outside of Mellen WI. I took a dozen or so. We went up there for Sophia's birthday. She's 14 today. It's what she wanted to do. So we stopped in at Marketplace in Hayward just after noon and bought sandwich making stuff. Headed north 70 miles to Mellen. Walked the trails. Joked around.. Laughed a lot. Complained a little about the heat and body aches. Bought a Copper Falls sweatshirt for Sophia at the gift shop at the end of the trail. Then we went to make sandwiches and discovered Annie forgot to pack the bread. She started beating herself up about it. The kids and I talked her down telling her she's had a lot to remember packing everything else and running a backyard nursery back at home. It worked. That too passed. So we drove into Mellen, bought some sub buns at the Hardware Hank/Cenex gas station. Then drove back out to the park and made our sandwiches amongst others enjoying the day. While we were eating a doe and two fawns walked out underneath the hardwoods. They were browsing close to us. When they chewed it crunched. Sounded like crunching acorns I said. Annie corrected me. They were eating the black cherries that were falling out of the tree. Made sense. Because they were under the cherry tree. LOL. The drive home was pleasant. I rode shotgun like I did on the way up. The way home I didn't sleep as much though. That's it for now. We have some firewood to cut. Then son and I will run (slang for drive) to Hayward to pick up the Dairy Queen cake Annie ordered two days ago. After homemade pizza we'll head over to my mom's and eat DQ cake. I am happy we get to do this. My mom is alone most of the time with her mother, my grandma. Sometimes my Grandma doesn't know who my mom is. It takes a toll on my mom. Pisses her off sometimes. They both appreciate the company. That's it for now. Back to the mail trail tomorrow. I hope you have a great day! #gm #coffeechain #countryliving

Good morning. A day off from the mail trail. Quiet in the house. Everyone still asleep. Still on my first cup of coffee. A fresh start to the day. I have time this morning. So naturally I want to go in 50 different directions with this. I am going to stay with natives and nursery and see where it goes. We live in an age of distraction. This phone I am typing on only adds to it. Throughout the week I listen to books and podcasts while I deliver mail. Some music, but rarely. When I do listen to music the day gets lighter and I deliver mail more efficiently. I guess what I am getting at is I get distracted like anyone else. And the more distracted I get the more driven I become. And the more efficient I wish to be. Then I remind myself I am not a machine. That I am made up of the same material as the earthly things that surround me. And when I came into being those earthly things took on an order. In other words, human form. And when I am no longer living they will disorder. Like the life that surrounds me. The part of me that is interested in eternity will do what it's destined to do. Which is a complete mystery to me. I like it that way. This house, more earthy than most with its cordwood walls and earth roof, the native plants in pots that fill our front yard helps bring my attention back to what matters: The physical world around me. I am thankful for that. Here is a picture a customer sent yesterday with this message attached to it: "All plants from Bean Brook Nursery" We fect therefore we are. I hope you have a great Sunday! #gm #coffeechain #countryliving

Good morning. Off to the mail trail. Tomorrow the start of 2 days off. Looking forward to it. Things to do. Firewood to haul, cut, and pile. Help with nursery. Celebrate daughter's 14th birthday. Etc. Always things to do. Hope you have a great Labor Day weekend! (That's a harebell flower I took a photo of 4 years ago in the front meadow) #gm #coffeechain #countryliving

Good morning. Off to the mail trail. Last minute call in. Supposed to have the day off. Photo from 3 years ago. Sky blue aster. I don't think we have any for sale. They didn't germinate well this spring. Hope you have a great day! #gm #coffeechain

Good morning! Mail today. Off tomorrow. Hope you have a great day! #gm #coffeechain

6:30 AM. Good morning. Off to the mail trail. Hope you have a great day! #gm #coffeechain #countryliving

“Vulnerability sounds like truth and feels like courage. Truth and courage aren't always comfortable, but they're never weakness.” ~ Brene Brown Good morning. I had to look up that quote this morning to remind me what true courage is. My 5th and final day off. Tomorrow it's back for 2 days. Friday off. Saturday on. Sunday and Monday off for Labor Day. Then the crushing volume of day-after-holiday-mail-and-packages on Tuesday. I took this photo yesterday morning. Annie and I were in the front meadow admiring plants. It's one of my favorite things to do. I can be feeling down about this or that information I have taken in and the plants always seem to lift my spirits. Those are the seed heads of butterfly weed (Aclepias tuberosa). They'll pop open soon. The seeds will float away with the wind. And hopefully take root to keep the cycle going. That's all for now. I hope you have a great day! #gm #coffeechain #countryliving

Good morning. One of our customers took this photo in the middle of August back in 2024. Bee on a Liatris she bought from us. I was going through photos and it jumped out at me. I have the day off again. My 4th. Another one tomorrow, then it's back to the mail trail for 2 days. We blew a line to our wash machine yesterday afternoon. It sprayed water until Annie got the valve shut off. Luckily she was close by and heard something was off. It would've flooded the house. Still isn't fixed. What happened was the hose corroded and broke where it screws onto the brass shut off valve. We have hard water. So it eats away at metal in our plumbing fixtures. I was able to chisel, pick, and wire brush most of the corroded metal out of the brass threads. But apparently not good enough. I couldn't get the new hose tight enough to seal last night at eleven. So I'm waiting on a thread chaser from Amazon. Due here tomorrow. This morning my neighbor said he's got a few tricks up his sleeve to get it to work. I figured he did. But I didn't have a way to talk to him late last night. Either way I think we'll get 'er working again. Quick story, then I gotta go. I was over at a friend's house the other day doing some work. I deliver mail with her. While I was helping her clean up her chainsaw (her husband can't do it anymore) she told me a story. It was about her Dad who passed away a few months back. One day she was having a hard time staying awake on the route. So she called her Dad and told him what the problem was. He was a farmer in the area for years. In the nursing home at the time though. He loved to tell stories. So she asked him to tell her stories to keep her awake. For an hour and a half he told her stories from his youth. She kept delivering mail and packages while he spoke stories through her speaker. "It worked! It got me through." She said. Tlme to get on with my day. I hope you have great day! #gm #coffeechain #countryliving

Good morning. I noticed yesterday the asters are starting to bloom. Another sign we are moving into fall. I was reminded yesterday the golden rods starting to bloom is another indicator. We are open 10 to 4 today, our usual Sunday hours. The plants have perked up since it started raining again. It was dry for so long it was starting to feel like it would never rain again. The plants in our garden kits look especially healthy. We've wondered about this throughout the growing season. We're wondering if the plants would rather be surrounded by other species while in pots waiting to be sold. Otherwise it's a quiet morning so far. The sky is gray. Everything damp. Like it lightly rained on and off throughout the night. That's all for now. Hope you have a great day! #gm #coffeechain #countryliving

Good morning. That's prairie coneflower (Ratibida pinnata). This photo was taken 1 year ago today. I don't know if I would get a photo like this today. A lot of them have gone to seed in the front meadow already. Our neighbor stopped by yesterday and bought more cup plant. She has shared photos of mature cup plants she bought from us in years past. We drove over to New Prague, MN yesterday to buy a pickup a guy had for sale on Facebook Marketplace. It was 3 hours to the west of us. Acres and acres and acres of cornfields along the way. Anytime I leave home into uncharted territory, which is rare nowadays, I notice this. I think about the work and energy that goes into maintaining King Corn. I have picked rocks on, plowed, disced, drug, and planted fields. It's all work. We passed through a small town that had a house with a front yard full of cup plant. The house was old. Paint peeling off the wood siding. "That's a lot of cup plant. It's pretty." Annie remarked. I thought of my neighbor. I thought about the smallness of this front yard compared to the vast acres of corn surrounding it outside the city limits. At one time cup plant grew on those acres. It was prairie. I like to think the world made more sense then. That there was a wholeness to it. That the future extended out for millennia. That's one reason why I think we grow and sell native plants. There's a wholeness to it. And a connection to an unbroken past. I"m off to start my day off visiting with family and doing some work for the nursery. It's lightly raining out there. Things will be slow at the nursery today I presume. But I'm not complaining! After that dry spell we just had any rain is appreciated. I hope you have a great day! #gm #coffeechain #countryliving

Good morning. Feeling Fallish here. Those are the seed heads of Bradbury's Monarda. I was going to post this picture a few days ago, but it's not a bloom. So I held back. Figured the post wouldn't get much attention. To me, though, the fall and winter patterns and colors of natives are just as interesting as the bright blooms. We discovered bees living in our cordwood wall last night. Bees nest everywhere around here given how many native plants we have. The house is literally surrounded by them. I always try to work around the bees. I use it as an awareness exercise. The rest of my family doesn't see it that way. Getting stung isn't fun. And when you're not aware of them it happens. We have to get them out of the wall (I am not looking for suggestions). Some of them found their way through the cordwood and into my son's room. You can put your ear up to the wall and hear it buzzing. The energy of the hive is pretty cool. Not so much when it's in the wall of your son's room though. I have a friend who negotiated with coyotes once. They kept killing his chickens. So out of desperation he told one of the coyotes when he saw it that he would offer the remains of the chickens to them after he butchered. They quit killing his chickens. I can't remember if they started up again. He wrote about it in his book "A Language Older Than Words." Warning: It's a hard book to read. It tears your heart open. I still think of that book 20 years later. I wish I could negotiate with the bees. Let them use the wall until they're done doing what they need to do, clean up their mess, and be on their way. I was listening to a book on the mail route yesterday: "A Sense Of The Cosmos," by Jacob Needleman. In it he makes the he point that humans are microcosm of macrocosm. So if we have consciousness so does the world surrounding us. Whatever created us created the universe. So why wouldn't it be sentient? Native American hunters, for example, would ask the woods and spirits to offer them a deer. And when it did they gave thanks. I've done this before. But most of the time I haven't. Because I forget the world just might respond to my wishes. Why wouldn't it? Other humans do. Well, anyway. I am musing this morning. I have the next 5 days off. We're off to look at a pickup in New Prague, MN this afternoon. So we're closing the nursery at Noon. We discovered recently our 2006 Toyota Tundra's frame is shot. My neighbor was going to weld it for me, but said there was nothing to weld to. 20 years of Wisconsin road salt does that. The truck we are going to look at is 2 years older than the Tundra, but is from Idaho. So it's only seen Minnesota road salt for 8 years. It looks appealing in the Facebook Marketplace photos. And the seller has been responsive and flexible. So far so good. Gotta go now. I hope you have a great day! #gm #coffeechain #countryliving

Good morning. Liatris, I noticed during the drought, thrived. Yesterday, after work, I broke a milkweed seed pod off a plant growing next to the wall at work. I brought it home. I hope it wasn't too early. That's what's on my mind right now. Off to the mail trail. Hope you have a great day! #gm #coffeechain