The early deadline for this column crept up on me today. I had totally forgotten about it until I realized this is Labor Day weekend. It has been a hectic Friday for me with a community meeting, a tempeh cook(this is one of our products)and packing for a fair in Illinois that Michael and I are doing this weekend. Writing the column makes me sit down for a while at least.

The pace does seem to be picking up again after all the rain. We are starting to get in gear now for sorghum season which will begin the middle of this month. Stan went down to East Wind Community in southern Missouri to pick up our friend Kris and to haul one of Kris' small boilers up here to use this year. We are going to be implementing the first phase of our planned conversion of our sorghum cooking to steam. We will be preheating the sorghum juice in stainless pans prior to the final cooking and will use the boiler to provide the heat. Kris and Stan are busy getting everything set up and made a run to Quincy yesterday to look for fittings.

Folks who want to come for the sorghum harvest are getting in touch with us and it looks like we will have a good crew this season. This is really one of the fun times of the year for me and I enjoy seeing old friends and meeting new ones. In a couple of weeks, there will be a small tent city in our orchard.

We talked over plans for both the sorghum harvest and our Sorghum Festival in our meeting today.

The festival will be on Saturday, September 25 from 1pm to 5 pm and will feature sorghum milling and cooking demonstrations, a hayride field tour, a garden tour, "lost arts" craft demonstrations, music and other fun activities. Biscuits and ice cream with hot sorghum will be featured again this year. We are located off of Highway M two miles west of Rutledge. Look for the Sandhill Farm sign at the top of our gravel road.

The past two weeks were marked by more comings and goings. We said goodbye to another intern on August 27. Kristen returned to Colorado to finish her last semester of college. She will be writing her senior thesis on the subject of community and is using Sandhill as her case study. We are looking forward to reading her paper when it is done.

Laird left on August 23 to work with a community in Prescott, Arizona. After that he headed east on the train and Tony from Dancing Rabbit met him in Galesburg, Illinois. From there they drove to Virginia to attend the community conference that is held every year at Twin Oaks Community over the Labor Day holiday. Laird has attended this conference for many years and is a featured presenter and workshop leader.

We welcomed a visitor from Minnesota at the beginning of this week. Matthew lived in Japan for several years while he worked as a teacher there. At our meeting today, he asked to stay on through sorghum and has volunteered to be our Field Crew Manager. We didn't find it difficult to say yes to his request and his generous offer.

Another welcome development is that our intern Susie has decided to stay with us this winter. She will be here until February. We are also welcoming her feline companion Ernie into our midst. Until yesterday, he had been spending the summer with a friend of Susie's in Kirksville. I'm sure our current cat members Lee, Blackie, Tigar, Dragon, Granola and Max Bob will give him the scoop on life at Sandhill Farm