The reset is the point (Country Living Connoisseur)


Pull Up a Chair

Pull up a chair — we’re writing this one with sand between our toes.

This week, our whole family descended on St. Augustine, Florida. Kids, grandkids, all of us under one roof with the Atlantic out the back door. It’s loud and full and a little chaotic and we wouldn’t trade a single minute of it.

There’s something about stepping away from the ordinary that makes you see it differently. The farm will be there when we get home. The garden will keep doing what gardens do. But this — the grandkids chasing waves, everyone gathered around the same table — this is the stuff that doesn’t keep.

We’ve been thinking a lot this week about what it means to actually design a flourishing life. Not just tend it. Not just survive the season. But to stop long enough to notice what you’ve been building. To look at the people around you and realize — this is the harvest.

Sometimes the most purposeful thing you can do is step out of the routine. Rest isn’t wasted time. It’s the thing that makes everything else grow better.

We’ll be back at the farm before long, dirt under our nails and donkeys hollering at us from the fence. But right now, we’re right here. Fully here.

And that feels like exactly where we’re supposed to be.

— Jules & Lane

Out in the Garden

Basil Reset

If your basil is starting to look tall and leggy, don’t be afraid to cut it back hard. I know it feels counterintuitive — you look at all that growth and think, surely I shouldn’t cut it? But pinching or pruning basil all the way back to a set of healthy leaves is exactly what it needs. It signals the plant to stop putting energy into going to seed and start throwing out lush, full new growth instead.

The reset is the point. We did a whole video on this

video preview

Tuck it in Your Pocket

A reset isn’t starting over. It’s starting from everything you’ve already learned. — Jules

Have a question you'd love me to answer? A project you're proud of? Something inspiring you've seen? I’d love to hear it—and it might just show up in a future newsletter.

We’re building something beautiful here, together. Now that's BombDiggity!

Here’s to designing a flourishing life,


360 Bethlehem Lane, La Follette, TN 37766
Unsubscribe · Preferences

Country Living Connoisseur: Designing a Flourishing Life

Design a Fourishing life—one bloom, one barn, one bite at a time. The Country Living Connoisseur newsletter delivers farm-fresh inspiration, vintage charm, and real talk from Sweet Bombdiggity Farms, straight to your inbox every other week.

Read more from Country Living Connoisseur: Designing a Flourishing Life

Pull Up a Chair I walked into the greenhouse yesterday and just stood there. The strawflower's cracking open, the gomphrena's showing off in magenta and white, a whole bed of lisianthus is coming in this gorgeous neutral I didn't know I wanted until I saw it, and the dahlias are so tightly budded they look ready to burst. We're right on the cusp of all of it happening at once. This spring, I was at my friend, Mark Schaeffer's marketing retreat called Uprising — this is one of my never-miss...

Pull Up a Chair There is something deeply satisfying about choosing the right thing on purpose. Not the prettiest seed packet. Not the one that looked most impressive on the shelf. The one that actually fits your space, your soil, your life. That's what we've been up to in the garden lately. Cucumbers that stay compact instead of taking over everything in a five-foot radius. Carrots are tucked into rows by dropping them into corn starch, so you can actually see where you are planting them!...

Ripening tomatoes on the vine in a garden

Pull Up a Chair Lane and I got our tomatoes in the ground a couple of weeks early this year. Right around Mother’s Day is the “safe” date here in East Tennessee — but we took our chances. The semester is winding down at the university, the rescue animals need their daily love and care, the grass is growing faster than we can keep up with, the weeds have opinions about that too, and gardening season is here in full force. It is a lot all at once. And we wouldn’t trade it. But here’s what’s...