It seems hard to believe that it has been four weeks since I wrote my last column. The time has been so full of activity that it seems to have flown by. It is almost hard to figure out where to start with my all news.

The main focus has been this year's sorghum harvest. We started off normally, expecting it to take the usual four or five weeks. However, the hard freeze that came on the morning of October 2nd forced us to shift gears suddenly. We rushed to cut down all our remaining standing cane prior to the cold snap. We were fortunate that the crew from East Wind Community was already here to help us, along with some other friends. We also had many volunteers from Dancing Rabbit.

Once all the cane was down, we cooked continuously for the next seven days. There were many willing hands to pick up cane in the fields, mill the wagon loads, stoke the sorghum cooking fires and bottle the product. We finally finished up on the evening of October 8th.

The crew from East Wind included our friends Kris, Will, Sarah, and her two sons Fabian and Tony.

Other folks who came from there were Peregrine, Max, and Kaos, along with Natalie and her two little girls Persephone and Francesca. Kris has stayed on to help us with post-sorghum tasks and Natalie and the girls are now extended visitors at Sandhill until mid-December.

Other folks who were here for the crunch were Kevin from Illinois, Matthew from St. Louis, Mike and Beth and their children Matthew and Kate from Maryland, and former member Lindsey, who came out from California. The Rabbits were generous with their help, some of them coming almost every day.

We are indeed fortunate to have all these friends.

We held our Sorghum Festival on September 27 and it was nice to see all the folks who came out in spite of less than ideal weather. We had our sorghum processing and cooking demonstrations, a very popular garden tour, a hayride field tour, candle-dipping, a kid's treasure hunt in one of the sorghum fields, music, and yummy treats topped with hot sorghum. We had friends visiting from St. Louis plus the East Winders and lots of Dancing Rabbit folks came, too. We had a potluck supper and get- together with them that evening after the festival.

The past two weekends have seen our biggest fairs of the year. Laird and Sue went to both of them. The Fall Festival at Keosaqua, Iowa was held October 11 and 12 and the Hannibal Folklife Festival was on October 18 and 19.

We currently have a visitor from Ireland. His name is Stephen and he lives in County Wicklow, south of Dublin. He has been helping with some of our projects, including refurbishing cold frames and building new ones. He is touring the U.S and found out about us from a brother of this year's intern Josie.

Sandhill hosted a group from the University of Kansas again on Sunday. They stayed at Dancing Rabbit Saturday night and came over mid-morning for a tour, lunch and work projects before heading back to Lawrence, Kansas about 3:30PM. There were thirteen students and their two instructors, Terry and Jane.

We had back-to-back birthdays last week. Miss Lindsey's was on the 14th and Kris' 60th birthday was on the 15th. Chocolate was a major food group on those two days. Last Friday, we had our annual "Biker Billy Chili Feed" courtesy of Kris. Some of the group came to dinner dressed as bikers in keeping with the theme. Bekka's version of a "biker chick" was hilarious.

We decided at our business meeting this past week to pursue conversion of our sorghum cooking operation to steam. This will lessen the amount of wood we need to use, allow more people to be involved in the cooking process, and enable us to turn out a more consistent product. Kris, with the agreement of his home community, will help us to do the conversion. Kris has quite a bit of experience with steam equipment and is a boiler specialist.

As a first step in the process of doing the conversion, Stan and Kris left this past Sunday to look at a boiler that is for sale in Youngstown, Ohio. They will then go to Tennessee to look at a sorghum operation there that uses steam in their cooking process and visit a company that deals with boilers and steam equipment.

The enthusiasm for the project is strong in the group. We know that we have a lot work ahead of us this coming year, but we hope to be ready to go with the conversion by sorghum season of 2004.