Twilight Grove, LLC

09/06/2026

Lots of fun vendors at Hyde Park Farmers Market today! 41st & Gillham Rd in midtown - we’re here until 1pm

…And I have elderberry jelly available for the first time!

09/05/2026

One thing I’ve noticed a lot this harvest season: dark purple doesn’t necessarily mean ripe.

After spending a whole lot of hours walking our elderberry rows this year, I’ve started looking for what I call “black pearls” - berries that are plump, glossy, and essentially black, with little to no red tone remaining.

In the latest Grove Life, I’m sharing what our first harvest has taught me about judging ripeness, why lighting matters more than I expected, and how my harvesting strategy has changed over the season.

For now, I’m looking for black pearls. 🖤

👉 Read “When Are American Elderberries Really Ripe?” on Grove Life: https://grovelife.substack.com/p/when-are-elderberries-ripe

09/01/2026

This is worth paying attention to - especially for farmers and anyone who cares about the long-term health of our soil and water.

A new lawsuit is challenging the EPA’s approval of trifludimoxazin, an herbicide that breaks down into long-lived PFAS compounds - the chemicals often referred to as “forever chemicals.”

The concerns go beyond residues on food. They include persistence in soil and water, impacts from spray drift and runoff, risks to native plants and wildlife, and the potential consequences for the people who work on and live near farms.

As farmers, we depend on healthy soil, clean water, pollinators, native plants and functioning ecosystems. Decisions about agricultural chemicals today can leave a footprint far beyond a single growing season.

We believe agriculture should be productive and responsible to the land we’re asking future generations to farm.

This is an issue we’ll be following.

🌱 Read the article from the Center for Biological Diversity:
https://biologicaldiversity.org/w/news/press-releases/trump-administration-sued-for-approving-forever-chemical-pesticide-trifludimoxazin-2026-08-31/

Center for Biological Diversity: Cancer-Linked Pesticide Currently Allowed on Widely Eaten Fruits, Nuts, Grains

08/28/2026

🌳 Want to plant a LOT of trees without spending a fortune?

Over the past five years, we’ve planted hundreds of native trees and shrubs at The Grove using bare-root seedlings from the Missouri Department of Conservation - sometimes for less than $0.60 per tree.

Our latest Grove Life article covers what we’ve learned along the way, including:

🌱 Why we love bare-root seedlings
🌱 What to expect when your order arrives
🌱 The planting mistakes we made (so you don’t have to!)
🌱 Why we stopped using a dibble bar in our soil
🌱 How we plant seedlings now for better survival
🌱 Why species diversity and soil preparation matter

And the timing of this post is intentional: Missouri Department of Conservation seedling orders open September 1 for spring 2027 delivery, and popular species can sell out FAST.

If you’ve been thinking about adding a windbreak, wildlife habitat, erosion control, shade, or simply more native trees to your property, this is an incredibly affordable way to start.

👉 Read the full article:
https://grovelife.substack.com/p/bare-root-tree-seedlings-missouri

08/26/2026

Pretty web!

08/22/2026

Our first full elderberry processing day was…educational. 😅

After months of researching equipment, building infrastructure, and planning our harvest workflow, we finally put the whole system to the test.

67 pounds of elderberries later, we had learned A LOT.

Some things worked beautifully. Others? Not so much.

There was a destemmer that refused to cooperate with our generator, tiny berry stems that stubbornly survived destemming, way too little workspace, berries and purple juice everywhere—and the memorable realization that sink water really does need somewhere to go besides directly under your feet. 😂

But that’s exactly why we wanted to share this part of the process.

In the newest Grove Life, I’m walking through our entire post-harvest setup:

🫐 Harvest → destem → wash → rinse → sanitize → drain → weigh → label → freeze
⚙️ What worked with our equipment
🧹 What took WAY more time than expected
💦 The drainage mistake we will not be repeating
🔧 The changes we’re already making
🌱 And what we learned from processing our first 67 pounds

There are some things you simply can’t figure out from research and spreadsheets. Sometimes you have to wait until the berries are ripe, the equipment is running, the sinks are full…and purple water is flowing beneath your boots.

Read the newest Grove Life:
https://grovelife.substack.com/p/elderberry-post-harvest-processing

08/14/2026

A used contractor trailer. A mountain of concrete dust. And a slightly ambitious idea. 😅

Our newest Grove Life series is underway: Building a DIY Mobile Blast Freezer.

One of the challenges we keep running into as a small farm is how to cool freshly harvested elderberries quickly when we don't have permanent cold-storage infrastructure in the field. Commercial blast-freezing equipment exists - but the price tag (and power requirements) put it well outside the reach of many small farms.

So we're trying to build our own solution.

In Part 1: From Dusty Trailer to Clean Slate, we're starting at the very beginning: stripping down a used 6×12 contractor trailer, dealing with years of concrete dust, treating surface rust, sealing the floor, and getting it ready for its second life as a mobile cooling and blast-freezing unit.

The bigger goal goes beyond our own elderberries. If this prototype works, we're hoping it could eventually provide a practical, affordable model that other small farms could replicate - or even share collaboratively.

And yes, we're going to show you what works and what doesn't. That's half the fun. 😉

👉 Read Part 1 of the build on Grove Life:
https://grovelife.substack.com/p/building-a-diy-mobile-blast-freezer

Stay tuned for Part 2—the transformation is just getting started.

08/08/2026

🌿 We had a plan for our second-year elderberries...

The elderberries had a different one.

We fully intended to remove most of the blooms this year so the shrubs could focus on root growth. That's what is widely recommended.

Instead, every trip through the field revealed more flowers... then tiny green berries... and before we knew it, ripe elderberries were staring back at us.

Suddenly, we had a real harvest on our hands—weeks before our harvest system was even finished.

This newest Grove Life article shares what we've learned during our unexpected first harvest:
🌿 Challenges with uneven ripening
🌿 The logistics challenges nobody talks about
🌿 The simple tool that completely changed our harvest workflow
🌿 Why we're building a mobile blast freezer instead of buying one
🌿 And why real farming has a way of rewriting even the best-laid plans.

If you've ever discovered that nature doesn't read your project timeline, you'll probably relate. 😄

📖 Read the full story here:
https://grovelife.substack.com/p/unexpected-first-american-elderberry-harvest

08/01/2026

Our first meaningful elderberry harvest has been one long lesson in humility. 🌿

One decision I hesitated on back in the spring ended up costing us fruit, time, and a lot of extra work later in the season.

Several fruiting canes grew at such a low angle that the weight of the developing berry clusters pulled them all the way to the ground. From a produce safety standpoint, those clusters couldn't be harvested for our intended market, even though they were still attached to the plant.

It's one of those farming lessons you don't truly understand until you're standing in the field with a pair of pruners, wishing you'd made a different decision three months earlier.

In this week's Grove Life article, I share:
🌿 Why ground contact matters for produce safety
✂️ The pruning mistake I made with our young elderberries
🍇 The hidden costs beyond losing the fruit
📚 Why hands-on farming teaches lessons no book ever can

If you're growing elderberries - or really any perennial crop—I hope this saves you from making the same mistake I did.

👉 Read the full article here:
https://grovelife.substack.com/p/pruning-young-elderberries-produce-safety

07/25/2026

Sometimes the soil tells a different story than your eyes do.

We recently sent soil samples from five different areas of the farm to the lab for Haney Soil Health Analysis, and the results challenged several of my assumptions.

🌼 I expected our thriving pollinator meadow to have the healthiest soil.
🌰 Instead, our young hazelnut planting came out on top.
🌱Even our two elderberry fields performed differently than they appear above ground.

The biggest takeaway? Healthy-looking plants don't always tell the whole story.

In this new article, I share:
• Why every area of the farm scored above the Haney benchmark for biological activity
• What soil respiration can reveal about the invisible life beneath our feet
• How our soils may naturally provide 34–46 pounds of plant-available nitrogen per acre
• Why collecting real data is often more valuable than relying on assumptions

Every soil test answered a few questions - and created a dozen more. That's one of the things I love most about farming: there's always something new to learn.

📖 Read the full article here:
https://grovelife.substack.com/p/what-our-haney-soil-health-test-revealed