HOT SUMMER DAYS!!!

This extreme heat is dictating our farming schedule. We wake up early to water and harvest and spray in the evenings.  We feel like trapped indoors like winter. We have some plants and crop really starting to thrive and other things that are dying off.  We love gardening because you see birth, death, growth, disease, insect habitats. It is like a mini ecosystem, and you can never predict what it is going to do. Here are some pics of our garden.  You can see the garden, cabbage, kraut, cherries, baby komquats, pumkins, dyers indigo flowers, drying flax in the garage. We are so excited to harvest the flax!  And  a pic of Matokie in his chair! XOXO A&J

Something New!

New sign!

One of many new bottles of ink with our brand new logo designed by Jeremy!

Tonight we are launching our new company "Belly of Flea Inks and Paints"! We have been really busy this summer making ink and watercolor pans at home in preparation for our shop opening up! We have had so much fun doing this and we hope you will go and check it out! 

Our site: Information about the stuff we make and the materials we use.www.bellyofflea.tumblr.com

Etsy: Our lil' shoppe!

www.bellyofflea.etsy.com

Belly of Flea flickr: Pictures of our farm and pigment/ink/paint making in progress. (and the occasional cat picture...)
http://www.flickr.com/photos/bellyofflea/

Here is the opening message from our etsy shop! 


Hello and welcome to Belly of Flea Inks & Paints, a historical artist ink and watercolor supplier, est. 2002. We are committed to producing sustainable and non-toxic professional grade artist water media. We use organically home grown pigments. We also use organic plant, insect, and genuine earthen and mineral pigments to help fill in the gaps of what we cannot grow in the Belly of Flea mini-farm. We are dedicated to making safe art supplies that have little impact on the earth. 

Marie Antoinette's favorite shade of reddish brown fabric was christened "Puce" the French word for flea. The name stuck and dyers soon offered hues called, "Belly of Flea", "Thigh of Flea", and "Blushing Flea". When we first started making inks, some of our very first colors were various browns including, oak gall, walnut, and pokeberry. The name seemed fitting. Belly of Flea is run by the husband and wife team, Jeremy Seth Taylor and Allyson Mellberg Taylor. We are working artists, gardeners, and teachers based in Charlottesville, Virginia. 

Red Ochre, Lemon Yellow Ochre, Maya Indigo Blue, & Green Earth Handmade Watercolor Halfpans!

Jeremy's Awesome Logo & Package Design in action!

Lots of halfpans!

Shiny brand new watercolor cake drying!

June Garden Update

I love this time of the year. Our garden starts to get really big, the flowers are starting to bloom, little green tomatoes are showing up, its exciting! We have some new things in our garden this year: flax, holy basil, tomatillos, etc. Here are some pics! Hope everyone is having an awesome summer. xo!

Flax plants only flower for part of a day before they fall apart and begin the process of growing the seedpods which we will harvest in a few weeks! They are so delicate and pretty.

This is the first year we have tried to grow tomatillos. The plants are really beautiful. And from what we can see now, very productive. I am going to be freezing some salsa verde!

Tulsi! Also known as Holy Basil, which will be harvested and dried for delicious herbal tea.

Echinacea!

Farm view late June. Sunflowers are about half grown now & the zinnias are blooming!

There is an old tree stump & root system in our yard that predates us living here, it is an amazing substrate for mushrooms (no we are not eating them!) but they are really beautiful and we have lots of different varieties after every rain. These popped up today.

Edible flowers! Aphrodisiac! Ooooh la la. Also good on salad.

Blue Green

Its funny. When you realize you can make a pigment out of something that you don't have in your yard, and that is also not a weed (i.e. you can't just stop along the side of the road and pick it like pokeweed anywhere you like) it kind of makes you go crazy! When we read about Iris dye we started eyeing up everyone's iris plants in their yard... (for the record we have them, but ours are white and don't have any dye to give) "look at those!", "whoa, those are the darkest ones we have seen", "can we drive by at night and pick them?" "do you think they have cameras?!!" In the end I mustered up the guts and went in to the Charlottesville Veterinary Clinic, who had the biggest, darkest purple Irises and just told them what we wanted to do with them and sheepishly asked if I could pick some... people are so nice and so no sneaky flower stealing was necessary... whew. I am posting pics of what we got from that batch... we haven't made anything from the beautiful blue-green ink just yet, so there will have to be a follow up post soon to show what it looks like. In the meantime! Look at these beautiful flowers before we destroyed them!

Big Iris!

 So we boiled the flowers until they lost their coloration (they turn sort of greyish pink) and then added alum to fix the color. At that point the ink turned from purple to dark blue-green. Then we added glycerin and vinegar to stabilize the liquid. More pics of it in action soon. Irises are done and we are grateful that someone let us pick some! 

Here is our garden as of mid-May... its already much bigger now! One of my favorite new things we have growing is German Chamomile. Well its sort of new anyhow, last year Jeremy planted it and it never showed up. The seeds are tiny and herbs can sometimes be really hard to germinate... we were stoked and surprised to find four plants that had decided to come up this year instead! Volunteers! So we transplanted them together into their own little section and they are going wild!  Everyday we get more and more flowers and the fresh chamomile tea is so delicate and wonderful. 

Hope everyone is well and enjoying the beginnings of summer. We will post more updates soon!

xo,

Allyson

SUMMER IS HERE

It is May 26 and it was 95 degrees today. It has been a mild spring so far, but today was a glimpse of summer. We are hoping this summer is not a scorcher like the last. This week we got everything in the garden including our tomatoes, dyers knotweed sprouts, melons, and pumpkins. We seem to have an ant and aphid problem. They are buddies. Every year it is something else, but we are trying to keep our cool and do the best we can. One thing we have learned is that "you have to let go at some point". You cannot control a drought, you cannot control a groundhog burrowing under your fence, and you certainly cannot control extreme blight, or tornados breaking your cold frames. With gardening you have to let go.  We are learning slowly but surely that "patience is a virtue".  We have had some awesome harvests so far. Checkout the giant leek, the juneberries, raddishes, and the dyers weld drying in the garage.

"who plants a seed beneath the sod and waits to see believes in god" ~ anonymous

Open Letter to Congressman Hurt: Open Water Drilling in VA

Dear Congressman Hurt,

I am a teacher at Piedmont Virginia Community College in Charlottesville Virginia and grew up in Virginia Beach, VA. I spent the majority of my childhood fishing, swimming, surfing, in the ocean. Even as a child I knew about the ship yards in Norfolk and the pollution that was being continually created. I have this vivid memory when I was 7 of waiting for the Ferry to go from Waterside to Portsmouth (near the shipyards) and seeing jellyfish swimming in the dark blackish water with pools of rainbow colored patches visible on top of the water. I certainly did not want to swim in that water near waterside. I certainly would not enjoy swimming near New Orleans or the gulf coast of FL due the 2010 Gulf Oil Spill and the risks of swimming in petroleum imbued water. I think drilling off of the coast of VA would open itself to another disaster like the Gulf Oil Spill. The first issue to recognize is that Virginia and North Carolina are hot spots for Hurricanes. These oil-rig platforms are floating structures and very unstable. Turbulent weather can lead to ensuing oil spills and further economic disaster. Virginia and Carolina coastal economies are strongly based on tourism and fishing. Any damage or spills (which are inevitable) will damage the local economy as we have seen in the gulf. Secondly drilling off the coast could pose greater risks to the National Wildlife Refuges off the coast of Virginia and NC. My mother lives next to Backbay Wildlife Refuge. This is the last bastion of untouched coastal nature with rare endangered bird species. These spaces are becoming smaller and more infringed upon with farm run off, litter, and our currently polluted bay waters. Drilling off Virginia’s coast will definitely disrupt these natural habitats. The third issue is the short sightedness of drilling off of the east coast.  The amount of oil in these locations is finite and limited. The amount of money that local economies and car drivers will benefit from this drilling is minimal. The environmental damage from searching, drilling, and from the ensuing oil spills would far outweigh the benefits and would be devastating not only to local fishing and tourist economies, but our environment and the species that make this planet a place to live.  You must remember we cannot live without food (animals and plants) and clean water.  The more we violate these natural spaces the less clean food and water for us.  In your speech to congress you said “we need to help our local economies”.  Not drilling would help our local economies in Virginia.  Another consideration is not supporting and continuing our dependence on 140 year old technology. I think as 21st century humans, we can supersede a gas powered combustion engine. It is time to change. It is time to find a cleaner, safer, and more technologically savvy ways to travel and transport goods. We should be learning from recent natural disasters of our time involving oceans like Katrina, the tsunami in Japan, and the tsunami in Indonesia. This is a sign that nature is much more powerful than humans. It is time to be cautious and change. I urge you Congressman Hurt to change your position on relieving the Drilling Moratorium as the risks of drilling outweigh the benefits. I am sure you will not read this and I will get a form letter back, but thank you for your time and consideration.

Sincerely,

Jeremy Taylor

relax!