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Good for you to see the bright side. :) We have had a month worth of rain come down in a few hours but the scary bit is that we have had 150% of the normal average rain for 18 months now. Everything's soaked.

No. We have had 150% of the normal rain for the past 18 months and very heavy rainfall in the last few.

I am a very big fan as well :)

Thanks :) I try my very best! He does not even have to try to be cute.

And I learned something ;)

Thank you, Rebecca!

Thank you! I have thought about being a narrator but like with so many jobs, it is hard to get into, especially when one can only work remotely.

TH-cam both says I answered this and ate my comment, so let me try again: yes, you should be able to just respond to the email newsletter. It will only go to me, not anyone else who is subscribed. If you don't trust it, feel free to manually send an email to: newsletter@katehildenbrand.com.

Also: this is not a silly question! It just shows you can critically think before blindly hitting the response button on something you don't have the full educational background for. That has nothing to do with silly questions :)

​@RootsandCalluses thank you! 😊

Thank you! I am very proud of my everything-went-wrong onions :)

I got a really nice old scythe from an elderly neighbor who no longer needs it. It has a very long blade and works great. I really enjoy working with that. A few TH-cam videos and some patience later, and I can actually mow the lawn with the thing. I have already added a bushwhacker blade to my wish list. It would have made the blackberries a lot easier.

Thanks :) The scythe was sold as ready to mow which means it has been preened. I sharpened it as I went but the scythe was so cheap that there was no sharpening the cheap metal. The screws also kept loosening because of the bad quality parts. I got a really old scythe from a neighbor a few days later. Night and day!

@@RootsandCalluses I suspect the gang playing music at the soccer field has something to do with the vibe harming the scythes and creating the unfixable result to your efforts. People like that infest my neighborhood too. They're easily distracted. Usually waiting a while and trying another time works better than trying to work with their energetic intrusion.

I tried to see which one you mean but only see a wilting poppy there. But if you let me know which one, I am happy to look it up :)

​@RootsandCalluses I only see one orange flower at that time frame, so it must be your poppy. I absolutely love orange flowers. Have a great day Kate! 🙂

Oh, you will love my Icelandic poppies! They are actually orange!

Mint I do have a lot of, so that is worth a try. I guess it is time to visit the chickens and harvest some mint. I've been meaning to do that anyway to dry for tea, so might as well ;) I hear cedar helps a lot, too. But we don't have cedar here, so I can't try it.

The buggers love me too much. Vitamin B definitely never helped for me. I remember getting eaten up after my vitamin B injections in New Zealand.

Me too, they sting me through my protective layer of clothing, and I have such awful allergic reactions to them too. Is your blood O negative by any chance? Mine is, and I heard that they much prefer certain blood types.

You would not like our forest at the moment. We've not been for hikes here in weeks because there are literal millions of them. They manage to get through my fleece sweater. Buggers. I believe my blood type is A positive, but I don't know for sure.

Thanks! They usually taste good, too. Just not what I had in mind when I started ;)

@@RootsandCalluses sometimes those are the best tasting meals. I find that I get more creative when I deviate from a planned meal. I’ll see tomatoes that need used & then remember a tiny bit of bacon in the refrigerator & I’m off to something completely different from planned.

I don't follow recipes usually, so I start with a rough plan and then don't even follow that one. :D

Shoes are like gloves for me. I put them on if I benefit from the extra layer of protection. A lot of the garden had thistle issues, so I have been wearing sandals a lot.

I am so glad this is working so well for you! Do you have to handle any advanced terrain? Thistles are my current enemy.

@@RootsandCalluses My soles can handle pretty much anything at this point, for the past 4 years I've done everything barefoot including driving, going to work, cycling, in the gym, in snow, doing gardening, doing home renovations and I've went barefoot in lots of different countries in cities, woodland, sand etc. When I said that I've worn those sandals about 20 times since I got them 4 years ago about 13 of those occasions were in the first 2 years of my barefoot journey. Its been almost a year since I last wore them and I'm just about confident enough to get rid of them. My barefoot journey so far has been like learning to ride a bike and the sandals have been my stabilisers but eventually you can cycle without them just as I can now walk barefoot without the sandals.

Why no carrots? I pulled the plant, so it is definitely not there anymore.

@@RootsandCalluses carrots you can grow. But if you try to grow them out to seed, they will cross with queen Anne's lace in the area. Where there's one plant, there's more.

@ecocentrichomestead6783 aaah, that makes sense. Thanks! I will check if there are any more to ID it properly.

Just as an update: it's yarrow :)

I will have to do some research on that. Sounds intriguing!

Thanks, Maxie! I am so glad things survived so well.

Hooray for how well the garden did. Enjoy your rest from the trip. I have a bed a potatoes almost ready to harvest - yay. My area is the same as yours, everything wrapped in plastic 😢

@Julie-H congratulations on the potatoes! I just dug up some volunteer potatoes. Yay!

Very fitting ;)

Pepper didn't have a good time at first. But once neighbors picked him up at the doggy hotel, he improved. He must have eaten something wrong at the hotel, because he had a really bad stomachache until after our return. He's back to normal by now but it took some time. Our neighbors were amazing! I will pass the drone compliments on to my husband 🙂

​@RootsandCalluses I'm so sorry to hear Pepper wasn't well. Glad he's better now. You've said many kind things about your neighbors. They certainly are amazing. I'm sure they feel the same about you. 🙂

I have some very kind neighbors but also some that are the opposite. The ones I get along with are great!

Thank you, Rose! Yes, we believe we will garden and cook even more then. This is a trial run. Hopefully, the next step is our own land to restore and grow.

So happy to hear it! Thank you!

Thank you! It smelled so nice there!

You are very welcome!

This particular bed keeps on giving me trouble but the rest of the garden is coming along nicely.

It definitely was. I hope to return with fewer people at some point.

Our best ones as well. I remember some great ones from New Zealand. I will pass your drone compliments on to the pilot 🙂

Glad to hear it 🙂

I was so surprised when I realized it had been a year already. Right now, the year or two until we leave does not sound as long. Thank you so much 🙂

Thank you! Glad you enjoyed watching 🙂

That sounds like an adventure. Glad it worked out 🙂

We moved back to Germany during the pandemic. I decided to finish my degrees here. Neither of us wants to live in Germany, and the area here is especially unsuitable. I finish my degree in a year.

Thank you! And thank you for watching the premiere with me. I saw your comment at the very end but could not respond because TH-cam closed the chat. I am so happy to hear you are enjoying my videos. :)

Yes but but on this land 🙂

Oh yes, always something to be done. Good luck with the house!

As family booked the apartments, it was not an option. The area is very dog-friendly, though, so we would definitely book our own place and take him next time. He stayed with neighbors 🙂

Thank you! Hopefully, they all survived the rain storms of the last days. A lot of water in little time.

Yes, true that. I mixed up the name as I first learned about this one in German. Hence the "Borretsch" before my correction to the wrong English term 🤣

Fun fact: apparently, comfrey is in the borage family. Interesting.

Oh, I didn’t know that. Thank you. I wouldn’t have realised - they look really different.

We did! It was great to see mountains after living in too flat areas for the last years.

Luckily, most things survived quite well. My neighbors took good care of everything.

Yes, you will :) I was able to film a lot more than I had anticipated and my husband actively helped create some footage, so there will be an episode about it. Next week, I'll have my 100th episode which will be a year in review but the one after that (#101) is all about the vacation.

Hello, Kate. Is that your name. I’m enjoying your garden, it takes lots of energy and dedication to have a decent garden, you have both. I’m planting new strawberry plants today, the old strawberry bed was invaded by slugs and I couldn’t keep them out. My new plants will go into stackable pots, hope it works. ❤