Sarah taking our mum propagation to the next level!
Mandy and I have cultivated a very functional approach of using the force to find our way successfully through a season. It’s not guesswork. It’s more like amorphous calibration derived from years of experience and familiarity with how all factors coalesce to reveal a certain outcome with a decent degree of accuracy. Somehow we’ve navigated our farm through each season more by looking at the stars than by using a map. In this analogy, Sarah uses GPS.
It’s always good to take another vantage point and broaden your perspective, especially if it allows you to see potentials more clearly and improve your approach by expanding your tool kit. We’ll keep learning til we die. We’ll keep getting humbled along the way.
Speaking of mums, we’ve got some pretty big news. If you ordered for the first 2 weeks of shipping, check your email. We are way ahead of schedule and are giving folks the opportunity to get their orders early and start growing and taking cuttings off their own plants even sooner. For those on our waitlist, this means we’ll be reaching out soon as we finalize our projections and add new inventory for more heirloom mums this whole spring. We are really excited to be exceeding our projections so significantly!!
Hellebore customers!!!!! Your orders will ship either next Wednesday or the following Wednesday, so keep an eye out for your shipping notification. Fedex will scan the orders Wednesday between 4 and 5p.m., so check your email then to see if your order shipped and for your tracking info.
Dahlia tuber customers, if you missed your shipping info, storage, planting, dividing, and growing recommendations and FAQ’s, please check this link to find all of that juicy info.
This week’s golden nugget to share is a song that’s enchanted me for years. Check out Ojos Del Sol by Y La Bamba if you want your heart to be greeted by a warm hug of sound.
-Steve
Spring is sending little teasers our way out here. The unassuming Witch Hazel has been delighting confused olfactories for the last 2 weeks out here. Always fascinating to the uninitiated, this 10 foot tall bush looks like a bunch of sad dead sticks and leaves, but upon closer inspection tiny little flowers (arguably also kinda dead looking) are wafting irresistable fragrance at passing noses. It's lovely and very perplexing if you don't know Witch Hazel, but randomly happen upon it. I couldn't figure out where that delightful smell was coming from for the life of me for many springs until Mandy observed my ignorance and unmasked the mystery of the witch for me. It is a good witch.
Not to be outdone, the entirely unmysterious, yet completely magical Winter Honeysuckle has unleashed her undeniably rapturous scent into a wide and intoxicating radius upon our farm. Without doubt, my favorite of nature's perfumes comes bursting from these cute little flowers that fill the air and my head with joy each spring. It literally has coaxed happy tears to fill my eyes on more than one occasion. It's just that amazing. Surprisingly, I was so busy and stressed trying to start this farm, that I barely noticed it for the first decade we lived here. Now, as though I were a comet, I exist in an elliptical orbit around this bush each spring, always circling back for another sniff that flings me back out to work with a fresh smile.
Speaking of work, for all you gardeners and farmers that have been waiting, the hellebore sale is launching next week! Everyone on the waitlist will have first access starting next Friday and we'll open the sale to the general public on Sunday.
As a reminder, we are selling the pinnacle of all hellebore varieties, the Ice N' Roses series! So, those of you who missed out last year (we sold out immediately, then did a second sale, and sold out quickly again), not only do you get another chance at getting them (we tripled our inventory), but we've also got access to some brand new varieties this year too!
Why are Ice N' Roses so sought after? Ice N' Roses varieties are not only beautiful, but they produce tall stems, upright flowers, higher quantities of flowers than normal, and exhibit incredibly vigorous growth which makes them productive about 3 times faster than other hellebore varieties. If any one of those details wasn't enough already on their own, they are also deer resistant and they aren't too picky about how much sun they get. They can be grown intensively in true farm style to increase yields, or you can just plant them in the woods and neglect the heck out of them and still be gifted with bountiful flowers each spring. Normally farmers plant them in full sun in rows with irrigation and fertilizer to maximize yield, but we just covered almost 2 acres of the forest floor (mostly shade with only dappled sunlight) with them 4 or 5 years ago and have never watered or fertilized them and our woods are gorgeous each year when they start to bloom (which is right now!!).
And here's the kicker…we had Sabine Seeling, who works with the Ice N' Roses breeder, visit us along with Dr. Armitage this Fall and they let us know that Ice N' Roses has proven to be resistant to Black Death! We didn't even know that! Hellebore Necrosis Virus, commonly called Black Death, is (no surprise) pretty bad for hellebores. We were willing to take the risk because we love them so much. Turns out…there's no risk. Also, the breeder mentioned you don't have to cut back the dying leaves to clean them up and prevent diseases. In fact she said that it's better not to! Those dying leaves are feeding the plant in the process, so leave them be. I love nothing more than when an authority figure tells me I have to do less work to enjoy my garden more. I love doing less. It's my true aspiration.
For you kind hearted senders of joy, who are looking to spoil someone, we are bringing back our Poppy gift box this week! Our beautiful branded box decorated in floral design with soy based ink, comes with a handwritten note to elevate the whole process of receiving and opening a gift, even before the flowers are enjoyed.
Speaking of gifts, if you are just now remembering Valentine's Day is coming and you completely neglected to think of something thoughtful, you are not up a creek just yet. We've still got some spring flower subscriptions where you can get that loved one a symbol of your undying love and your extreme thoughtfulness in the form of weekly flowers for a whole month. You can find them here. Outside of that, our poppy harvests are picking up a little bit, so if you rush to our shop right now, you may be able to pick up some flowers for a Wednesday delivery, but supplies are limited, so move fast. And for those of you who will read this late and email me asking if the flowers are already sold out….yes…they are.…but…..you may have noticed that on Tuesday and Thursday we've been announcing more flower availability. When our harvests come in and we discover we can add more inventory, y'all on our email list are the first to know, so all is not lost if you miss them on Friday at noon, just keep your ears and eyes peeled on Tuesday and you'll have an extra shot at securing a bundle of flowers that will arrive on Valentine's.
Also of note, we're adding a new element to our weekly newsletter. Mandy's really excited about spreading good vibes and has been consistently inspired by Blockshop Textiles' newsletter, so we're taking a cue from them to start sharing something special each week that we enjoy, whether it be a beautiful song, a favorite book, or an inspiring small business.
For our inaugural feature this week we wanted to share about one of the most inspiring artists and creators we've had the pleasure of watching and admiring over the last 14 years as she spiraled out of her role as one of the best and most highly sought after contemporary flower artists of our time into a whole new life on a rural upstate New York farm. In this beautiful remoteness filled with sheep and flowers, she cultivates a gorgeous and peaceful space for others to curate their own artistic passions, whether it be floral design, painting, photography, or just the art of enjoying the calmness of a beautiful setting. Couple that with homegrown and expertly cooked meals shared with new friends around a big farm table and you've got an absolutely delightful and fulfilling experience.
For those locals that have bought that amazing soap from our Farm Store, these are the folks who make it from scratch. Sarah Ryhanen, of Saipua acclaim, started World's End and has created such a beautiful and unique space in the world. She's a modern day philosopher in farm clothes constantly reflecting on her place in the world and how she can influence her slice of it in a positive way. World's End is a one of kind experience and we highly recommend a visit or at least a perusal of her newsletter. For those who have been kind enough to say complimentary things about my writing, prepare yourselves for a whole different tier of thought, prose, and honest exploration of one person and one farm's interaction with what it means to be a part of this great global community. She's a brilliant writer and the newsletter is very raw and open and in my opinion, fascinating.
That's my time. Stay classy America,
Steve
This will be our last newsletter from this email address. What this means for you is that next week, if you don’t see us in your inbox, we may have ended up in your spam or promotions folder. We’ll be sending from steve@3porchfarm.com with Flodesk instead of the current address with Mailchimp and are aiming for a somewhat more pleasant interaction between words and photos for our newsletters going forward.
The sunsets last week were quite glorious if you could handle the cold. My folks joined me for a shivery sunset or two. My brother and sister-in law were also here for the weekend, generally just eating, chatting, and spending a little time catching up with Mandy’s parents. I don’t know how it happened, but my family loves Mandy’s family and vice versa. I don’t think we could’ve gotten any luckier in that department. The only downside is we don’t see enough of each other and time marches on, but we sure are grateful for the times we do have together.
The dahlias are all cleaned and divided and we are looking now to purchase tuber stamps and stamp every single one of the many thousands that we have with its correct variety name, so that tuber customers have no confusion about which is which and what goes where.
Our mum nursery is getting lots of attention from us daily as we extend day length, maintain health, ward off intruders, and send good vibes to each momma on the reg. The godfather of the cut flower movement, Dr. Allan Armitage, came out to inspect and advise the project last week and generally gave it a thumbs up along with some helpful tips.
In that vein, we’re happy to announce that we hired a new lead for our mum cutting project. Sarah Anne Horton has run her own farm in Carrolton GA as well as having worked on very big farms propagating strawberries and growing out mum cuttings on a much larger scale than our own. We’re very pleased to have such an experienced grower on our team for the Spring.
That’s all for the day. We’re just dealing with a rapid change from windy 12 degree weather to balmy 70 degree days with100% humidity after all these rains. Thank goodness we’ve got decent water incursion prevention setups these days. Just knocked on wood.
Hope you have a great weekend,
Steve
Georgia people, keep dripping those faucets and wearing those long johns for another 3 nights. It’s gonna be a super frosty weekend. We’re always colder than the forecast out here, so we could get down to single digits on some parts of the farm. Next week it’s going to pop right back up to 70 degrees (with 3+ inches of rain), so I’m anticipating the acceleration of growth in tunnels and a few flower bundles will be made available. Poppies are coming!
As for farm stuff….we just got some Butterfly Weed seeds that are the host plant for arguably the coolest butterfly in the U.S. (Monarchs) and we wanna spread it around, so we’ll be giving a free pack of them to anyone who purchases 5 or more packs of any seeds we carry while supplies last.
We are launching our dahlia tuber presale and our hellebore sale very soon. If you’d like to get first dibs on either or both, you can sign up for the dahlia waitlist here and the hellebore waitlist here.
Last but not least, We’re Hiring! We’ve got some strong applications in and are going to begin interviews soon, but you’ve still got a little time to get an application in.
Stay warm out there and have a great weekend!
-Steve
The crew is back from their 2 week break and progress is afoot. The last greenhouse beds have finally been planted with our new secret, possibly awesome, possibly meh variety of a favorite flower. We’re excited to see which it turns out to be, but we’re also excited to have completed our Fall plantings of our tunnels. Much later than normal, but we had a tough time germinating them so the whole process was delayed. Anywho. The tunnels are fully planted and we are pleased.
We’ve actually been harvesting anemones here and there for the last few weeks and even the occasional ranunculus, but aren’t quite ready to start shipping. We’re gifting early blooms to friends and family and keeping a few for ourselves and frequently marveling at the magic of anemones. I wish they were more productive for us, because they are certainly a lovely flower, but try as we might, they never grow prolifically for us. So, we’ll just enjoy them as a special treat and offer them in smaller numbers in the same spirit. March Subscription members will be first priority for receiving anemones. They tend to peter out by April, so may not be included in that month’s subscription, though it will have other delights not found in March.
Flower shipping may timidly begin in a few weeks and start to pick up steam in February when Kali comes back (Yaaayyy to Kali coming back!!!). Poppy stems are poking up, but growing slow with this cold. Everyone keeps telling me it's not a cold winter and that may be true for daytime temps, but we’ve been at or below freezing just about every night for weeks and the forecast appears to be getting even colder, so all that has the effect of slowing down flower production. I’m fine with that. We’re still trying to catch our breath over here and get other work done to prepare for the coming year.
Speaking of which, we’ve been getting our dahlias squared away after clearing some space in the basement so the crew could have a warm place to work out of the wind. They’ve been carefully dividing thousands of dahlia tubers in preparation for our upcoming sale of our favorite, most productive varieties that thrive in southern conditions. Sign up for our wait list and be notified when they become available!
Our mum cuttings project is coming along nicely as well. While the crew was on break, Mandy and I finished the retrofit of the propagation house. It’s all built out with tons of 4 tiered racks, new electrical, new oscillating fans, rows of LED grow lights set to timers which extend day length to the exact duration of the length of day when our first shipments start (April 8th), so that they can grow as much as possible until then without being stimulated to flower. Our ultimate goal is to be able to stimulate as much growth as possible on the mother plants in order to be able to increase our offerings, but for now, we wait and watch and feed and water and make sure we can easily fulfill all of our current orders before we promise anymore.
If you missed out on our sale and would like to be on the waitlist for any updates of added inventory, you can sign up here. We hope to have updated inventory by February on our site as well as Farmer Bailey. Our flower farming friends at Harmony Harvest have just listed their mum cuttings for sale as well as Clara Joyce. Both have a great selection.
We are putting out a call for applications shortly for a spring position on the farm. We are looking for a hardy, good spirited, smart, and highly organized person to head up our mum cutting program in addition to pitching in with other farm tasks. The role will be full-time from February through the end of May. If you know someone that fits that bill, have them keep an eye on our Instagram account for notification that applications have gone live, or if you are that person, keep an eye out for an announcement through our email list. It's important that we provide the best cuttings possible to our customers, so it’s important that we get the best person for the job we can find. We’ll get the application created and uploaded as soon as we get a moment, so keep an eye out.
-Steve
We are grateful to you all for your support of our efforts to turn our ideals into an actual occupation that provides a living wage for not only us, but for our awesome crew as well.
We’ve really gelled as a team and as a farm these last few years and are exceedingly happy to have a strong sense of self as an organization. Gone are the days of trying a million different ideas to see which if any of them stick.
Mandy and I have now completed 13 seasons of running this farm. As her grey hairs come in and mine fall out, we now know quite clearly what we’re good at and we aim to make the most of our strengths in order to create the highest quality flowers and plants possible in the most sustainable manner for as many people as possible, while maintaining as happy, respectful, and enjoyable a workspace as possible for everyone here.
All of that helps us sleep well at night and none of that is possible without you, so we extend our deepest gratitude for all you do to support us, to enjoy our flowers, and to share them with other people.
From all of us here at 3 Porch Farm in Comer Georgia, Thank You a million times and have a wonderful new year!
-Steve, Mandy, Rachel, Naw Dee Poe, Eh Plaw, Marry, and Kali… and also, Huck, Biscuit, Cotton, Momma Dog, Winky, and 13 other winged dinosaurs…..and the squirrel that lives in our walls…Trudy.
The other day the coach told me, “You’ve got speed and you’ve got power, but we need to improve your movements. Effort is worthless without efficiency.” That second sentence summed up in 5 words, our whole experience of farming. Our first 3 years out here we literally worked 105 hour weeks year round and in that first year, we made negative income. The next two years we kept the lights on, but didn’t pay ourselves anything.
We weren’t puttering about either, we stayed in 5th gear, often running from one task to the next, growing and making every product we could and building our physical and digital infrastructure in the evenings. We’d work til 2:30 a.m. making frozen fruit pops and prepping for markets, get up at 4:15 a.m. to pack up and leave, get back to the farm in the afternoon and unload the market gear and load up the vehicles again to go do flowers for a wedding. Wrung out, skinny, unhealthy, broke, dumpster diving for food (because we couldn’t afford to eat our own crops and we collected compostable waste that was sometimes edible from a local store), squeezed dry of adrenaline, and really scared was how we moved through the world for some time. All the while people kept telling us we were living their dream or that they were so happy that we were so successful.
We both have unpleasant visceral responses to just talking or thinking about those years. I’m feeling nauseous as I write this.
Like many folks, we’re willing to work really hard for a good stretch of time to achieve a set of goals we believe in, but when it isn’t clear that your work will do anything but ruin your health and possibly the bulk of all you care about, it starts to become a very thin and desperate existence.
The industry we chose (market farming) is one of the worst you can pick from a financial perspective. Even the very best and most knowledgeable growers we know frequently fail to make their farm a successful business, because the margins are tiny and the obstacles are unpredictable and numerous. Location, effort and luck definitely play a role, but so does the ability to get out of your own way. We worked as hard as anyone I know, but that wasn’t enough. We were still really attached to our early ideas and the notion that we could do everything by hand, without a tractor or any help, while adding multiple layers of self imposed difficulties to every process.
It took years before we really prioritized becoming as expert at efficiency as possible in every process. As we identified more and more layers of our lives that we could alter to be more effective and efficient, we started to see the books get better and the future be more hopeful and it reaffirmed our desire to always re-evaluate not only ourselves, but what we are doing and how and why we are doing it. We learned to get out of our own way.
So, my advice to all you beginning growers is to have conviction in your attempts, but to be really observant and mindful and to frequently step back and look at both the big picture, and the little pictures. Emphasize this grand self reflection at every season change and every years end.
We were fruit farmers, popsicle makers, beekeeping honey producers, a preserve business, producers of syrups, herbal infused sugars, and savory seasonings, veggie farmers, a mushroom business, floral designers, wreath makers, flower wholesalers, etc…Each iteration lead to either a dead end, or an outcome that didn’t suit us. Don’t just keep following the same carrot around year after year. You’ll wear out before you ever catch it.
Additionally, don’t beat yourself up if you’re floundering and every other farmer on Instagram seems to be crushing it. That’s Instagram. Every farmer is struggling now, or has struggled a ton on the way to now. You can’t sell kale on IG if you’re complaining all the time about how hard it is to make a living selling kale, so you smile for the camera and other people think your life is perfect and compare themselves perhaps unfairly.
Talk to other farmers, join groups like GA Organics, ASCFG, CNG and other farmer groups like Floret's Workshop where you can connect, learn and find support. Find help with not only the field, but the business side of your farm (check out Lennie Larkin's new book!) and don’t be shy to reinvent your approach multiple times. Lord knows we have.
And so ends the musings, farm tips, and motivational speech section of today’s newsletter.
I know a lot of y'all spend the holidays planning for next year's plantings, so if you are feeling too full and fat to get in the fields, but wanna make some forward motion, check out our seed selection. We have restocked some of our seed supplies and you can find them here.
For those looking for holiday gifts, we have gift cards, flower subscriptions, a wreath making video, and the farm store is open today and Saturday.
For you flower fanatics, do note that we just added a poppy subscription to the spring offerings. A lot of people responded to our survey last year saying that they would love to get poppies every week in the mail, so we made it happen and you can find it here.
The store will be closed after that for the next few months until we re-open for the plant sale in March.
If you are looking to donate to both do good and offset some tax burdens, check out this list of organizations we have compiled and see if any of them float yer boat.
As for the farm, our crew will be taking the next couple of weeks off to observe their respective holidays and to appreciate time with friends and family and to just rest and digest. Mandy and I will be tending the farm, opening and closing tunnels each day and night, watering, doing pest control, fixing things, building out and wiring up the nursery, ordering supplies for the new year, catching up on administration, and spending a few days in between all that with her family for Christmas. She also has designs on finishing the kitchen remodel I started in the summer. I’m relaxed already.
If you place an order after today, do note that there will be a slight delay in normal shipping as our staff will be gone and our hands will be full. We might be able to get your order out in the next 2 weeks, but our expedient shipping of products will officially begin again on January 8th. Thanks for your understanding and have a wonderful holiday break whatever you celebrate!
Steve
It’s been a week of digging over here. I’m developing webbed hands like a mole. Stick the pitchfork in the ground, push with the foot, add leverage to the handle, repeat 100 times, then squat or get on knees, jam fingers into the loosened soil, pull up roots of mums, or tubers of dahlias, repeat ad infinitum. Okay, not ad infinitum, but a lot.
We’ve almost completed the mum digging and re-potting and had to turn our attention back to the dahlias in anticipation of more cold and wet weather. The more rain we get, the harder it is to dig up the tubers, because the days are short and cool, so the ground never really dries up and we get stuck in a tug of war with the mud. Deep freezes also have the potential to damage and rot dahlia tubers if the ground gets cold enough. Some winters you can get away with leaving dahlias in the ground at our latitude, but sometimes they get bit. Pro tip: dahlias should always be dug up and divided if you are farming them for profit. You can get away with overwintering them for one year, but after that they become less vigorous and less productive. They like for their tubers to be divided and replanted the following spring.
So anyway, we are trying to get the second half of our tubers excavated and safely stored in the basement before winter progresses much further. We seem to be running out of crates and basement though. We’ve definitely got waaaay more tubers than ever before, which means we are going to put together a big dahlia sale soon. For years folks that know what we’re growing have been asking us to offer more shipped dahlia tubers. We’ve kinda hoarded them all ourself to make sure we could up our production levels. We have sold a small amount locally and shipped a few at the last minute in years past, but we’ve finally arrived at a point where we can really offer these in sufficient quantities to other growers and can comprise a solid list of options well in advance of planting time to more adequately meet farmers’ planning needs.
We’re only growing highly productive, strong stemmed, heat, humidity, and disease tolerant varieties that are beautiful, so they are ideal for any farmers or gardeners in the South that have struggled with varieties they’ve purchased elsewhere. We’ve done 12 years of vetting them all for you, so you don’t waste anymore years or money on failed dahlias in the garden. We’ve done enough failing for 100 gardens in 100 lifetimes and painstakingly isolated the gems while questioning our sanity along the way. The successes started to mount though and we now have an arsenal of all around heat loving beauties.
On the other end of the dahlia spectrum, we have dahlia seeds that we just added to the website and they’re available now. The crew cleaned and packed them all up last week. They are as easy as zinnias to grow from seed, but in contrast to the tubers which have been painstakingly selected for ideal qualities and are genetically identical from one generation to the next, the plants you get from seeds are all going to be completely unique. They are a genetic mix of all of our favorites, so some of them turn out to be incredible and we are personally growing a ton of them in an effort to create more and more beautiful southern dahlia varieties. If you are a control freak, they may not be for you, but if you revel in the excitement of discovery and wonder, then these are definitely for you. They are a fun surprise wherein you will truly have many one of a kind varieties of dahlias…. and the butterflies love them! We had well over a thousand monarchs in our dahlias this Fall and they congregated mostly in the single varieties that arose from our dahlia seeds. It was magical.
We’re hoping to find a break between digging today to discuss all the details of said spectacularly stupendous southern dahlia sale, so we’re starting a dahlia tuber email list for anyone who wants to not only be in the know, but to be first in line to get access to our sale. You can sign up here!
A quick note to extend apologies to anyone my writing style may irritate. It’s been pointed out that my grammar and spelling could stand some polishing if I intend to best represent our farm and though it was just one email, I’m certain it represents a cross section of scholastically oriented left brained readers that cringe at every misused word or grammatical flaw I hastily spew onto the page/screen. So, if you find yourself thinking, “This newsletter’s alright, but why can’t the boy write right?”, you’re not wrong. A well intentioned and fair critique that I’ll attempt to address for the benefit of everyone who shares that sentiment.
I'm not a writer. I'm just a farmer who's just trying to share what's happening on the farm with what very little time I have to do so. This a blog that's more focused on mood, feelings, and events than it is on grammatical perfection. If I can convey our experience honestly, then I've done what I've set out to do. These newsletters are generally thrown together after a 12 hour day, when I’m exhausted and should be sleeping, or at the last minute Friday morning when I’m desperately needed in the field. In an ideal world, I’d commit more time to these, but the farm dictates triage conditions at all times, so I choose to focus on authenticity over literary perfection. The one lesson I do remember from English class was that if you edit while you write, you inhibit the creative space that makes for interesting reading, so for better or worse I live by that. And for the record (never start a sentence with “and”) I appreciate the criticism. So many of this farm’s improvements were born of a response to a sometimes stinging critique. Sometimes people are just grumpy and hurtful, but more often I find that there is truth to the critiques and an opportunity to grow and improve as a result. Nobody really loves the initial reading of a critique, but I do often appreciate them for the guidance they can provide.
Dear everyone, This is not an invitation to flood me with criticism :). My heart lives on my sleeve and I can process roughly one critique a week and this newsletter goes out to 15,000 people so please coordinate with each other and space them out accordingly. Thanks for your understanding on all fronts.
Local shoppers. The store is open through Sunday this week and will be open Tuesday-Saturday the 23rd next week, wherein it will close down until spring, so if you need something, do swing by before we shut down for the season.
That’s all today. Time to dig
Happy weekend,
Steve
We’re beginning an exciting transition and are currently digging up all of our mum plants from tunnel 7, potting them up, and moving them across the farm to create our new nursery in the propagation house. The prop house is where we take all of our seedlings and grow them out in trays before planting them in the high tunnels (greenhouses) or fields. Years ago I built waste high tables to fill it, so we could grow all our babies in there in an ergonomic fashion and they’ve served us well. Change is inevitable however and our new mum project is so big that this one dimensional approach wouldn’t cut it anymore, so all of the tables are moving out and 7 or 8 rows of 4 tiered metal shelves are taking their place. We’ll effectively have 4x more growing space in the same footprint and we’ll need every inch of it. I still have to figure out supplemental lighting and irrigation, which is obviously 4x more involved, but we’re pretty pumped on the transition. We’ve already got one wall of racks completely filled with new potted plants.
Back in tunnel 7, we have cleaned the dug up beds of old plant material, fertilized them according to soil samples, tilled them with a walk behind tiller, raked them into the desired shape, ran irrigation lines, and saturated the soil for tomorrow’s planting of snapdragons. It was 22 degrees when we started working today (Thursday), so there’s always a part of your mind that says “hey buddy, shouldn’t you be at the computer doing taxes by the heating vent or maybe taking a nap or something?”, but a little manual labor starts and you find you don’t even need your sweatshirt after 20 minutes, so all it really takes is that first push to get out the door and then the day moves along fine.
Over the weekend, Mandy spent days and nights working on making the Farm Store cute as heck for you holiday shoppers and she just got it finished 5 minutes before opening time this Tuesday. We’ll be open through Sunday and then back again next Tuesday-Sunday for our special holiday hours.
We’ve got some other spring flower excitement that is still in the very experimental stages, so I’ve been sworn to secrecy, but we’re incredibly eager to see if our hopes come to fruition. All I can say is it’s a new variety of a favorite flower that we’ve never actually seen outside of a picture and we have some really big hopes that it’ll live up to …..well…our hopes.
Pretty as the picture is important, but it also has to be disease resistant, weather tolerant, grow strong stems, have good vase life, and be productive. Our first effort at starting tons of seeds failed miserably and the second effort was looking weak as well, but upon returning home from a holiday week in CA, we were greeted by seed tray abundant in chlorophyll saturated cotyledons! We’ve now stepped them up into 72 cell trays and are eager to see what their future will reveal. Fingers crossed!
Well it’s been a 13 hour work day for me, so I’m gonna wrap this up, brush chops, and catch some zzzz’s.
I hope you all have as wonderful a weekend as possible. Probably getting rain in these parts. Put on your galoshes and stomp in a puddle.
Until next Friday,
Steve
We spent 2 days with my brother in San Francisco too and saw coyotes 2 nights in a row. On the farm, we are surrounded by huge packs of coyotes. They howl and squeal and keep us up at night. It's kinda wild how many of them there are. Every time a passing train honks its big airhorn, the coyote packs respond by howling. Neat, but eerie. Our neighbor claims a pack of them not only killed his dog, but tree’d him in the past. With all that activity out here, you’d think in 13 years, we’d have seen a one, but we never have. Yet we walk out of my brother’s apartment in North Beach (Little Italy) and right across the street are 2 big coyotes. Completely unfazed by our presence. We were blown away.
The next night found us with a ham sandwich in one hand and a glass of wine in the other, walking up to Coit Tower, which is a large monument built to honor the firefighters who worked to save the city after the great 1906 earthquake and subsequent fires that swept through. It’s also the site of some family history as legend has it a teenage boy that may or may not be my father, and his friend may have made headlines in the paper back in the 60’s for somehow scaling the walls and finding their way over 200 feet to the top and in a rascally fashion, unscrewing the lights of what is normally a brilliantly lit monument. Not the worst crime a teenager has committed, but he did make the paper. Allegedly.
So anyways, as we climb the steep winding hill towards the entrance to the small wooded park that surrounds the base of the monument, we hear howling nearby. Bite the ham sandwich, sip the wine, enter the park, the howls keep getting closer and closer. As we crest the first flight of concrete stairs, someone suggests we turn off into the woods instead of continuing up the lighted steps towards the monument. The howling coyotes have gone quiet. Bite the sandwich, sip the wine, enter the dark woods. Just half a minute into the dark and we stop. A breath pulls up short. A finger is pointed. A glass is sipped. Just 20 feet to our left, lit only by the nearly full moon through the tree tops, are two coyotes laying on their stomachs, calm as a mug of warm milk, just staring at us. They are fascinating. Their behavior is not threatening, not friendly, nothing like any dog I’ve ever encountered. Incredibly aware of our presence, they barely react to it, other than the cessation of howls. As I said…eerie.
We determined it best to find our way back to the stairs in order to complete our pilgrimage to the tower and the gorgeous view of the city line, the water and the Bay Bridge. It was a beautiful night. We listened to a little British music from the 80’s, finished our hammy’s and our wine, had a few laughs, didn’t try to climb the tower, and eventually made our way back to the apartment. Coyote’s aside, if you haven’t been to Little Italy in SF, consider it. It’s awesome. We had the best food and drinks, the best time walking around and visiting shops and meeting people, and it rolls right into China Town where we ate some amazing soup dumplings.
Back to Tuesday…stressed about holiday traffic, potential missed flights, and 20 degree weather killing all of our spring plants, we navigate our way back to Georgia and have a surprisingly seamless experience. At the farm by 11pm, check the heaters, seal up the greenhouses real tight, drip some faucets, and sit in the dark and cold stillness with my cat in my lap looking at the night sky. Great trip. Great to be back. Happy to be a farmer in this moment. We managed to avoid busted pipes and frozen plants. I hope y’all managed the same. The next few days will continue to rain pretty good, so we’re catching up on all the indoor chores.
Christmas music has infiltrated commercials and radio waves and folks are getting festive and/or scrambling for holiday gifts. We are a big fan of supporting small businesses, which in our mind make the world a more rich and interesting place, so Mandy has put together a list of local holiday fares and makers for you North Georgians to explore.
If you’d like for us to be a part of your holiday shopping, we always have gift cards available and our Spring flower subscriptions are also now available if you are looking for a really nice holiday gift for loved ones or for yourself. We have made the subscription even more user friendly by allowing subscribers to select a few varieties that they prefer not to receive. We discovered this spring that some of the most highly valued flowers in the industry are actually not appreciated by everyone, so with that in mind, we’ve made the process even more seamless by adding more customization.
For you farm store shoppers, the store is closed this weekend for a bit of an overhaul. Mandy is reorienting it in preparation for the holiday season, but we will reopen on Tuesday the 5th with expanded hours leading up to the holidays.
Have a great weekend,
Steve
Tomorrow is small business Saturday, so if you’re doing the Black Friday thing, our farm store won’t be open, but do keep other small businesses in mind. Small is beautiful and the world’s a better and more interesting place when small businesses proliferate.
Thank you very much for everything and we hope you have a wonderful weekend.
Steve and Mandy
]]>Happy Friday y’all!
For all you new subscribers that found your way to our farm through Floret, welcome! Mandy took Erin’s very first workshop over a decade ago and they’ve stayed connected ever since, with Mandy joining her on projects like weddings and assistant teaching at some of Floret’s early in-person workshops back in the day. Floret has made the biggest impact of anyone on the small flower farming industry worldwide, and our lives have been forever changed by her directly and indirectly. If you are unfamiliar, I wrote a blog about Floret last year that you can find here. Very inspiring.
Like many of you, we first got into mums because of Floret. She wrote a great piece on them a decade ago that caught our attention and we’ve been hooked ever since, so if you’d like to learn more detail on these beautiful heirlooms, you can read that piece here.
Mandy and I started this farm in 2011 firmly planted in our ethos to put principles before profits and have since grown an almost 9 acre flower farm that is Certified Naturally Grown, completely solar powered, fully bio-fueled, and with a well considered and cared for staff. If sustainability is your thing, you can read more specifics about our efforts here.
We’ve dialed back our social media presence, so this newsletter serves as the main window into our lives on the farm where you can see images of its progress through the seasons and share a bit in our failures and successes. The newsletter also serves as an informational resource for farmers and gardeners on growing techniques (particularly in the south), and as an opportunity to be the first to know when new flowers or plants will become available. Occasionally I’ll regale with musings on life, nature, or how we got here. We aren’t from farm families. If you wanna read how the wildest adventure of my life found me on a veggie oil powered school bus with the occasional celebrity, driving thousands of miles from home and winding up on a small farm in Georgia where I met a cute and inspiring young farmer named Mandy, you can find the story here.
Okay enough of the intro. I’ve gotta get out to the tunnels and repair the bird netting so the guineas don’t scratch out all of our spring flowers, so nothing but the facts from here on.
We are finishing up our mum harvest today and have determined that we can add more inventory and have just done so. We’re sending this email out first and then follow up in a bit with an Instagram post, so you’ll have a head start. Demand is currently through the roof, so act fast if you’re interested.
Once we get through with harvest, we’ll start digging out all of our mum plants and potting them up in order to start propagating our heirloom mum nursery for spring orders that are getting shipped out to farmers and gardeners starting in April. In their stead, we’ll be planting poppies, campanula, snapdragons and godetia. We’ve got 6 of 7 tunnels (greenhouses) completely planted out now and spring will be filled with everything just mentioned in addition to ranunculus, anemones, butterfly ranunculus, daffodils, and of course hellebores and peonies. Flower shipping will start again in January and February, so we’ll have a month and a half or so to grow our heart’s fondness in their absence. Our spring flower subscription pre-orders will also go on sale next week for those of you who’d like to get weekly or bi-weekly blooms in the spring, or would like to gift them to loved ones for the holidays.
For you crafty folks, we’ve just made our wreath making video available on our website. You can gather friends and family over this holiday weekend and collectively watch the video and go for a nature hike to collect your materials and make your wreaths.
Off to the birds. Y’all have a great weekend and thanks for joining us!!
-Steve
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We are out in the fields right now getting our workout and our wear out. It’s dahlia digging time and we’ve got like 9,000 plants (roughly 2 acres) to dig up. Fortunately the fields are pretty dry, so the earth isn’t fighting as hard to keep its potato bundles as it does during the wet years, but it's still a pretty laborious process. Mandy and Rachel have been bumping 90’s hip hop and T Swift to smooth out the rough spots.
Here’s the process: We pull up all the support netting and roll it up. We pull out all the rebar support stakes and stack them up. We do a high mow to take plant tops off and allow us to get easier access to the drip tape. We pull out all the drip tape lines and poly main lines. We mow the plants down to 5” inches. We use a tractor attachment that works like a horizontal blade that cuts under the dahlias to loosen the soil. We grab the 5” nubs of plants and pull with all our might to dig up the clumps of dahlia tubers. We knock the dirt and mud of the clumps and pile them up. We put all the piles into crates. We stack all the crates onto pallets. We drive all the pallets across the farm to the house. We walk all the crates down the stairs and into the basement. We stack the crates in from floor to ceiling in columns organized by variety. We take an epsom salt bath, fail to make dinner, eat chips, and collapse into bed. Wake up. Do it again.
We are very much looking forward to visiting with my family soon. For those of you who are also getting together to celebrate Native American Heritage Day, Thanksgiving, Friendsgiving, or any other opportunity to share space, food, and time with loved ones this month we are still offering our Gratitude Bouquets. We sold out the week of, but the week prior has 2 dates where bouquets are available and since they easily last 2 weeks (frequently 3 if treated well), it is often preferable to get them a week early. That way there is no concern for delays with congested holiday shipping and if, heaven forbid, there is a problem with transport…there is still time for us to send a replacement. So, consider getting your bouquets a week early here!
For you locals that would like to swing by the store to pick out your own flowers, we will be fully stocked with gorgeous blooms and will be open from the 16th through the 21st, so not just Thur-Sat, but Sun-Tuesday as well. We are not taking pre-orders for them, just come get what you want. We’ll be open 9-3 on the weekends. 10-4 on the weekdays.
Kinda weird to still be in the 80’s this late in the Fall, but we’ll be cooling off and perhaps finally getting a bit of light rain this weekend and next week. I know your plants will appreciate it.
That’s it for me today.
Be well,
Steve
Frostmas has come and the dahlia plants are melting in the fields. The butterfly filled fields are filled no more. The tunnel alarms kept us awake from 4 a.m. on this morning as the inevitable annual kinks need to be worked out of the system. In fact, one alarm is going off right now as I write this Thursday evening. I’ll be off shortly to try and sort it out.
We are about to get ready for an overhaul in our propagation house, but have been waiting out the unfolding of nature. Some Passionflower vine took hold in our propagation house and we let it run wild to serve as a host plant for Gulf fritillary caterpillars and boy did it ever do that. There’s so many hungry caterpillars in there, that they’ve all but completely demolished 180 square feet of leaves. We’ve enjoyed watching them grow day by day, eventually forming their chrysalises, and finally emerging as the beautiful butterflies that I first encountered the day that I met Mandy on her old farm 20 years ago. Back then, I found one trapped in her greenhouse and captured it so I could set it free outdoors. When it flew up and away, I was overwhelmed with delight at the shimmering of sunlight reflecting on the silver spotting of its under-wings. I’d lived for a summer as a butterfly tour guide in Costa Rica, but had never seen anything like that and it's stuck with me ever since.
The tunnel of mums is beautiful and the harvest has begun. The other tunnels are continuing to be filled up with ranunculus, butterfly ranunculus, anemones, and soon too with poppies.
Dr. Armitage (Floriculture legend and UGA prof) and Sabine Seeling from Heuger Plants in Germany toured our 2 acres of woods today to examine our understory that is heavily planted with the Ice & Roses series of Hellebores. They were tickled by our laissez faire approach to growing them, as traditionally they are grown in rows, fertilized, weeded, and irrigated. Mandy, instead, has them peppered throughout our woods, amidst grasses and ferns, never watered or fertilized, mulched only by their competitors, yet remarkably beautiful and resilient and naturally unharmed by deer. They hadn’t seen this approach before and kind of loved it. I’m sure we could increase our harvest 4 fold if we actively managed them, but their beauty and value to us is in part due to their self sufficiency.
A really exciting piece of information we received on that walk was that the infamous Black Death that wipes out peoples highly cherished collections of hellebores, does not seem to bother the Ice & Roses series! We always just loved them because they are really fast growing with beautiful flowers, long stems and high yields that come in just in time for Valentine's Day, but now we’ve learned the amazing news that in addition to all that, they are highly resistant to the Black Death that wipes out other Hellebore varieties! Amazing!
Once we started posting images of our hellebores a few years back, lots of inquiries on how to get them started pouring in, so last year we started to offer limited sales of them ourselves. For brief periods in the spring, we offer a lot of the Ice & Roses series and have a number of new colors this year, so if you’re interested in getting your hands on some of these incredible plants for your farm, garden, or landscape, you can sign up on the Hellebore Wait List here and you’ll be the first to have access to them. They did sell out on our first sale last year, so we offered another round and those sold out too, so the wait list is advisable.
For you dahlia lovers, we have been eagerly collecting all our seed pods prior to the frost and just spread them out on tables in the propagation house. We’ll dry them out and get them ready to process and store until planting time next year. We are super excited to experiment with the genetic offspring of our painstakingly selected heat tolerant varieties in order to see what new strong beauties will appear for the very first time into this world. Breeding is fun!
We were surprised to learn that a lot of gardeners are excited about this process too and are interested in these seeds, so we will be packaging them up for sale for you playful and adventurous gardeners to experiment with too. Who knows. You might grow the new southern favorite.
If you are a farmer that’s going to the ASCFG conference next week and want to see some of the heirloom mum varieties we are offering first hand, go and find Farmer Bailey’s booth. Despite them already being so worth a visit due to being the loveliest of people with the biggest plant brains ever, they will also have a lot of our mums on display. We’ve partnered with Farmer Bailey to get our heirloom varieties into the hands and tunnels of more flower farmers (and gardeners), so they asked if we might have some for display at the conference and we just shipped out a huge box of lots of varieties to them this eve. Bummed we couldn’t hop in the box and join them, but our plate is full on the farm right now.
If you are a flower lover, we’ve got holiday mum bouquet pre-orders available on our site. They are gorgeous and fragrant and will stimulate that gratitude mojo we all need to expand in our hearts. The best state of mind is that of gratitude for all the little things around you and the easiest way to that space is through the beauty of nature. We’re hoping to spread some of that good stuff
Last but not least….for you real flower enthusiasts, we just had a great chat with our old friend Scott Sheperd of The Flower Podcast where we discuss growing mums, breeding seed, business pivots and other odds and ends with a long time flower insider. Scott was the first large purchaser of our dahlias way back when and he shares how before us, it was widely understood that farmers can’t grow Dahlias in Georgia. Actually Armitage said something similar today. I knew it wasn’t being done when we started, but to hear from the big dawgs that we made an impact was a bit of an “aw shucks” moment…but anyways, you can find an auditory or visual link to our interview here:
The Flower Podcast
I think that’s it. At least as far as I can remember it is. The brain is still at half mast from too much halloween fun.
Take care y’all. Stay warm!
Steve
]]>Beautiful fall lately, but it’s about to get weird around here. Heading back up into the mid 80’s for a bit, before finally falling down into a likely killing frost next Wednesday. So, I guess you should grab your swim suits and head to the pool or the mucky Georgia pond you like to swim in with the snakes. Or gators. Depending on how south you are. Mandy grew up with the occasional gator in her swimming pool down in Richmond hill. Marsh girl. Maybe just run through the sprinklers or cut off your sleeves. Then grab a jacket.
Anyways, the store is open, but we are closing up Thursday and Friday at 4:00 now since deer season has started and the neighbors begin hunting around 4:30 right next to the farm store. There will be the very last stems of dahlias in there this weekend, so swing by to get a last gasp of their beauty.
Our friends down at Comer Coffee are doing dinners and cocktails Thurs-Sunday this week, so you know where we’ll be most evenings.
Flower shipments will begin again next week with some limited offerings of our first heirloom mums of the season, so head to this link now if you want first crack at the limited supply.
As of right now, we just went live with pre-orders for our Gratitude Bouquets for Native American Heritage Day and Thanksgiving Day in November. They were a huge hit last year and despite having record numbers, they sold out awhile in advance and we had our biggest shipping day in our farm’s history, so secure yours now to make sure you don’t miss out. You can pre-order yours here!
Right about now, we are wrapping up our week and getting together with the crew to carve pumpkins and shoot bb guns at rascally beer cans for a little end of week excitement. It’s always good for a laugh and we’ve got a major Halloween fan and enthusiast of all things scary in Kali this year, so we’re excited to see what she carves up.
For any local-ish farmers interested in learning about our infrastructure set up and preferences, we’re hosting a UGA Extension tour for farmers interested in infrastructure this Sunday. There’s 10 spots left and the deadline to sign up is noon tomorrow (Saturday). If you’d like to join, email Laura Caitlen Ney at lney@uga.edu before then and she’ll get you sorted.
Have a great weekend!
Steve
For those of you who came out to support The Plate Sale at last Saturday’s dinner in the dahlias….Thank you! What an amazing evening! Beautiful weather, beautiful flowers, beautiful smiles, and amazing food. Thanks so much for being a part of it. Keep an eye out for more events they are putting together. I hear whispers of another special evening a bit further south coming soon.
We also wanna thank Daniel Dent for accepting a last minute request to share his talent and expertise with us and photograph the whole evening. We can’t wait to see the photos!
My older brother and his lovely family just showed up late last night and the kids have never seen the farm, so I’m trying to get this written before they wake up (west coast time for them) so I can fill 'em with ham and eggs and introduce them to the animals, the flowers, the huge spiders, the school bus, the bb gun, the golf cart rides, and everything foreign and fun. Mandy and I are really excited to play farm aunt and uncle and she’s been hanging string lights and making forts and just generally doing her thing and going above and beyond to make everyone around her feel special and loved. She’s already got a Clydesdale ride and a fishing trip with a fish fry on the docket!
As for farm stuff, we’re in between flower seasons right now. Post dahlias and pre mums. Soon we’ll start taking orders for Thanksgiving bouquets. It turned out to be our single largest flower shipping day ever last Thanksgiving as people are getting more and more excited about the unique beauty and incredible vase life of heirloom chrysanthemums. There’s a big upswell in mum love lately and we’re all for it. The commercialized version of mums that became ubiquitous for decades in grocery stores and flower shops had convinced most of us that mums were a humdrum flower to be overlooked, but one of the many bright spots in the resurgence of small U.S. flower farms is the rediscovery of almost lost heirloom varieties that contain so much more character and beauty than their mainstream counterparts. We’re excited to be part of that resurgence.
Aside from that, we’re steaming tunnels, pulling weeds, planting butterfly ranunculus and enjoying this weather.
Be well and be kind,
Steve
]]>How to address your mums for winter.
For the farmers that are new to mums, I’m reprising a post I made this week last year as we approached an early killing frost. Those of you further north are likely experiencing “Frostmas” now, or soon, so here’s a few thoughts on how to help your babies:
Though the plants are relatively hardy, the flowers themselves do need frost protection. Whether that is Reemay, Agribon, a tarp, a greenhouse, or sunroom is up to the grower, but unprotected flowers will get nipped by frost. It is wise to take the insulative fabric off of the plant as soon as temps become favorable again. Any cover that’s left on too long during a sunny day can cause heat stress and create prime conditions for disease to flourish.
As mentioned, the plants themselves can handle frost, but during a deep freeze, it’s best to provide protection. The root systems of potted plants are particularly exposed to the cold, so after flowering is done, you may want to bring your potted mums inside the garage, a shed, a basement, or a sunroom.
In warmer climates, people often just cut them back to about 4” tall and set them up against the house to take advantage of the radiant heat for the winter. Another approach is to dig a hole in the ground and put the whole pot in the hole and then add a thick layer of mulch to the surface. In springtime, you just excavate the whole pot again and put it back in your preferred location.
Regardless of your preferred approach, you should trim the plant down to about 4” tall after flowering is complete and the plant has died back naturally.
Aphids are probably giving you a little trouble at this point too. For an organic approach, you can use things like neem oil, spinosad, or Pyganic (strongest) before bud break, but as soon as those flower petals begin to open, you may find that those products will spot up your flowers…particularly on a sunny day.
It’s tough, because aphid populations seem to love mums and they explode rapidly, so you need to use something to stop the onslaught.
Once flowers open, we have to rely on insecticidal soap to hold back the tide. You need to get the underside of the leaves too though and it’s still wise to try and avoid spraying the petals as much as you can. It’s kind of an impossible task, but in my experience, soap doesn’t discolor the petals as easily as the more aggressive organic treatments I mentioned do.
There’s almost never a perfect solution in the garden. You just have to play probabilities and do your best and be grateful for what successes you have.
The heirloom mum varieties are finding a huge resurgence in popularity for a reason. They are so much more beautiful and fascinating than the run of the mill mums that have filled grocery stores and flower shops for decades. The heirloom shapes and colors are brilliant and perfect for fall and their vase life is damn near never-ending.
And for a gardener who loves flowers, they’re the last gasp of blooms that you’ll get until Spring. They spread out the beauty season by an extra month. So much to love about them.
I hope you have a great weekend and remember to smile at a stranger and high five a friend. Or vise versa.
-Steve
]]>We’re getting to the end here. One more week of dahlia sales and that’s it for the year! They’re gorgeous right now. If you've been holding out, this is your last week to savor them yourself or give gifts to loved ones. To say “thank you”, “cheer up”, “I’m sorry”, “you’re cute”, “happy birthday”, “I know I could have been a more cooperative child and cleaned up my room more, sassed less, and not rolled my eyes so much and I’m sorry for the added stress that caused you while you were trying to raise three kids, maintain a household, and work a challenging job for an asshole of a boss….” or something like that. You can write your own gift note. You don’t have to use my suggestions. But next week is the end. We don’t sell them after the 14th.
It’s dry as a bone here. Everything we do kicks up dust and fills your nose and mouth with the fine powder of soil unwatered. We are keeping our fingers crossed for a light rain late next week. It’s been too long.
Comer had pizza parties at Baby’s (the Comer Coffee Building) last weekend. It was amazing and crowded and delicious and 3 Porch and friends broke into a dance party Saturday night and Mandy and I ate pizza 3 nights in a row. We also found ourselves at the Comer Distillery and the proprietor found the piano bench and busted out a ragtime ditty and dancing ensued there too. Comer was happening!
Each mildly hungover weekend morning, we sweated it out while painting the bus and it is (in our opinion) super cuuute now and ready for family and friends to enjoy for sleepovers. Just a few more details to be added and then we will share the results with you.
It also got cute just in time for our big dinner party in the dahlia fields next Saturday! We’ll be giving a tour during cocktail hour, after Seabear oysters are served and we couldn’t bear to have the bus be all dented, rusted and, covered in 15 years of dirt anymore, so we did some serious pressure washing, soapy elbow grease scrubbing, hammering out dents, grinding down metal, fiberglass and bondo repairing, taping taping, priming priming priming, painting painting painting and voila! Cute bus.
If you wanna see her in all her glory, you can join us for drinks, oysters, dinner in the dahlias, a dj, and some cut your own dahlia action next Saturday the 14th by getting tix for the fundraiser here: https://www.theplatesale.com/events/dinnerinthedahlias. It’s a one time thing, we aren’t hosting any other dinners or doing any other farm tours, so this is a great and festive way to see the farm if you’ve been curious. There is only a handful of tickets left !
That’s it for today. We’ve got dahlia deals in the farm store this weekend (BOGO !!) , so come on by if you need some blooms and a little time in the country.
Happy weekend!
-SteveSome spring flowers have already been planted! Tunnel 3 is full of ranunculus and tunnel 1 is half planted with them too. This is the earliest we’ve ever planted. We’ve found that ranunculus, anemones, and butterfly ranunculus are all more successful when pre-sprouted before planting and this year’s attempt at doing so was ever-so successful that we’re weeks ahead of schedule and they demanded to be put in the ground immediately. Wasn’t the plan, but plans schmans.
Speaking of which, we just barely got the plastic on the tunnels last weekend. Some of you may have seen our Instagram stories where the ladies belly laughed as the slightest of breezes bullied us mercilessly and thwarted our efforts to cover our largest tunnel. As the 7 of us used 5 ropes to pull the plastic over the top of the (18’ tall, 35’ wide, 138’ long) tunnel in preparation for aligning it perfectly and fastening it into place, a section ever so slightly started to rise. Then the malady began to spread. Then the whole side began to lift. Then the fight of our lives ensued as peoples’ strength began to wane, arms wanting to pull out of sockets, feet beginning to lift, skin being torn from knuckles by ropes attached to what became a 6,000 square foot kite. Holes began tearing in the plastic, my stress elevating, peoples’ hands releasing, bodies on the ground, and suddenly collective laughter at the absurdity of it all. I wasn’t laughing. So many things had to align for us to collectively have time to make this attempt and its failure was challenging my equanimity. I was seeing all the downstream problems and ramifications and was super stressed, but decided to let the groups’ laughter seep into my bones and color my experience. Better that way.
Mandy wisely suggested that we unfasten the part that had been fastened, gather the massive kite in our 14 arms and walk like the world's largest caterpillar to the other side of the tunnel to try again and see if the wind would help instead of hinder. The whole time, Naw Dee Poe and Marry were belly laughing. Naw Dee Poe’s belly laugh would alternate with a high pitched squealing giggle that was almost in the range of a tea pot at boil. It was balm on my wounded plans and worried mind. We managed to get it patched up and pulled over, but the breeze was still too much for us to finish. Saturday was calm and we finally all got together and finished the job much to my relief and were able to patch the major tears in the walls too.
Since then, it’s been racing around shaping beds, shoveling, raking, setting up drip tape, irrigating, planting, installing/repairing bird netting to keep the guineas from digging up all the plants while taking dirt baths, harvesting dahlias, bunching dahlias, shipping dahlias, prepping the farm store, weed eating, chainsawing, weeding tunnel perimeters, patching tires, fixing electrical issues on trucks and golf carts, composting, customer servicing, computering more than we Luddites would like to, and just all around trying to keep it afloat.
The bulb sale starts tomorrow and you can get a preview of what’s available for just a few more hours until 2pm! Our sale goes live online at 9am tomorrow morning (Saturday, September 30th)!
There’s a dahlia sale at the Farm Store this week, so come on by. There’s also a “mile long yard sale” in Carlton, which is just down the street from us, so we’ll be opening an hour early on Saturday (8:00) so we can head over and hunt for treasure. Additionally, the Comer Coffee Crew is opening up for gourmet pizza, wine and specialty cocktails Friday, Saturday and Sunday though that’s later in the day. We’ll be there probably every evening.
And that’s it. Come to Comer. Make our town, your town. Or so says the billboard. But even if you don’t move here. It’s a good weekend to visit.
-Steve
It’s more of the same out here. Busy with lots and lots of dahlias and prep work for spring. We’re also polishing up the place bit by bit in anticipation of the big dinner we’re hosting for The Plate Sale October 14th. 9 acres gets unruly pretty fast and cleaning up the yard for guests takes on a whole new meaning at that scale. If you missed the prior announcement and aren’t sure what I’m talking about, check out the link for tickets to Dinner in the Dahlias here!
The first ranunculus and anemone corms are sprouting fresh roots and are ready to be planted…but the tunnels are not ready just yet. To prep the tunnels, we had to take off the old weather beaten, ripped up plastic inch by inch around the whole perimeter (it’s locked in place with zigzag wires that you wiggle into a metal channel). We’re actually replacing the plastic on two tunnels, likely as you are reading this, so we’re currently “team building.” Everyone takes a turn trying to cowgirl a rope over an 18’ peak and 35’ across. It’s a lot of laughs and sore arms. They then pull 4 different ropes tied to a huge sheet of greenhouse plastic while I dart around like squirrel with my 16’ broom, trying to push the plastic up and over whatever it gets stuck on, so that when they pull, it doesn’t tear. Then we climb on the top of moving trucks and orchard ladders and straighten it out, pull it tight, and begin to wiggle that wire into those channels to lock the plastic into place for the next 5 years of crops.
In preparation for preparation, last week we took soil samples and once we’re done with the plastic, we will amend the beds with whatever organic nutrients the lab says we need. We already spread a bunch of compost all throughout the tunnels after raking out any un-decomposed detritus left over from our summer cover crops. We then have to take a bunch of unexpected showers as our dumb dumb sprinkler gives us all sorts of problems while we try to dampen the soil prior to tilling and bed shaping. You never want to till dry soil if you can avoid it. It pulverizes the soil structure, making it less hospitable to your plants for a variety of reasons. You don’t want to till soggy soil either. It makes the soil clumpy and is also bad for your plants. Anyways, after tilling the perfectly wet soil, we’ll make beds with shovels, rakes, and occasionally the tractor. We’ll then steam any areas that had strong disease pressure last spring ( this is the largest pain in the ass of all the steps), then we run irrigation lines evenly throughout all the beds and plant all the babies in very organized groupings and spacings. I know that sounds like a lot. It is. Mandy and I are constantly trying to find 30 minutes here and there to address all of these things in between picking, packing, fixing, emailing, prepping the store, fertigating the dahlias, watering the mums, weedwhacking, fencing, customer service, admin stuff, and everything else. It always seems manageable enough as we approach fall, but inevitably seems to stretch out to the very last minute as we squeeze the last seconds out of the decreasing daylight.
The Farm store is so lovely right now. We decided to put a little bench under the bamboo archway for anyone who wanted to sit and take it all in for a few minutes. We hope you enjoy your weekend!
-Steve
And if you’ve got an 8 foot tall Jumangi style dahlia plant in Georgia and are wondering why ours are short…it’s because early planted dahlias in Georgia do get huge, but they also become breeding grounds for pests and if you plant thousands of them, the result will be dahlia Armageddon. A billion bugeroos just feeding and fornicating until they become so numerous and so strong that every bloom will be tarnished despite your best efforts. The flowers will look like hell come September and October due to the thrip infestations and you’ll spend more time and money fighting the problem than you will selling the flowers. So, we plant late and circumnavigate that issue.
We’re starting to work on our tunnels to prepare them for spring flowers. Yesterday I spent most of the day on the tractor, scooping up soil from the bottom of our farm and driving it all the way up and across the farm to Tunnel 1 and spreading it around to build it up. It was the first high tunnel (greenhouse) I built back in 2011 or 12 and I didn’t understand the need to raise the area prior to construction, so now it needs to be elevated a bit. As you harvest plants every year, you are effectively removing matter and the result is that your tunnel can get lower over time. The outside of the tunnel stays the same height though, which can result in water pooling up in your tunnel because you’ve inadvertently created a pond inside, yet planted your most valuable possessions in it. So now your delicate and expensive plants are flooded and sad. This causes anaerobic conditions for plant roots and ideal conditions for water-molds and fungal pathogens to wreak havoc. Extensive or even complete crop loss on something like this is financially and emotionally devastating and has brought a tear to the eye of the toughest of farmers.
So, if you’re building your first tunnel…. raise it up higher than the surrounding area, so water runs away instead of inside. If it’s too late, you can rent a backhoe and install a French drain…though that is more expensive, time consuming, and can be a challenge around gas, electric and water lines. You can also try rain gutters on the top of the side walls of the tunnel. All help to a degree, but the gold standard is to raise your tunnel relative to it’s surroundings. And if anyone’s wondering why I was bringing soil from across the farm instead of buying in soil, it's because we’ve never bought in good soil. Ever. You never know what you are getting. At best, it’s all clay and completely devoid of nutrients and organic matter. At worst, if it’s “topsoil”, it’s got chemicals and noxious weeds in it that will forever be a part of your farm going forward. We had a pickup load of manure from a friend 10 years ago that destroyed our production on half an acre for 3 seasons. Their mom watched their horses one weekend and gave them a couple bales of hay from a different supplier. Turns out that hay was sprayed with persistent herbicides (most hay is). Those horses ate it, digested it , then we composted it, and spread it half a year later, and got ruined….. 10 parts per billion of this chemical was all it took to destroy all of our flowers for 3 seasons. So…. if we want to build up a location for a tunnel, we never buy topsoil. We may buy fill dirt which is just clay from deep in a hillside (no possible chemical exposure), but we’ll scrape our own topsoil off and put it to the side first. Then we build up our elevation with the fill dirt. Then we go to our own hill and dig out our topsoil that has more sand and is better for drainage and put a layer on top of the fill dirt. Then we move our own pre-scraped topsoil back on top. We end up with an elevated tunnel with 3 layers of earth. Fill dirt for elevation and compaction at the bottom. Sandy soil from a remote farm location that elevates us further and allows for drainage. With a final layer of the original topsoil put back on top for happy plant roots. This strategy has worked brilliantly on our latest tunnels. Don’t reinvent the wheel, or repeat our mistakes. Copy our successes. Use this approach.
Next step for us is to put new plastic on Tunnel 6, which is always a joy (its 138’ x 35’ and almost 20’ tall). It ripped off in the wind in early summer. I’m sure there’ll be vids of us trying to wrangle this together on Instagram. But meanwhile, it’s time to take your soil samples so you know exactly how to amend your beds for the proper pH and nutrient array. Your spring plants need every advantage they can get. Rachel just dropped off our samples at the UGA extension office this morning and we look forward to our results next week, so we can make the perfect beds for our upcoming plantings of spring flowers. Don’t skip this step!!
Finally, it’ the last call for the plant sale! We’ve got a few items left, but the sale is about to end, so if you’ve got some last minute Fall garden needs, check out the sale here. And if you are interested in easy to grow bulbs, we’ll be starting our bulb sale on the 30th!
Thanks so much for all your support and for following along. Wishing you a great weekend and a happy garden!
-Steve
1st: The Farm Store is back open and it is beautiful! Just last week the store was a bare bones shed with literally nothing in it. Then, I lost sight of my wife for four full days and nights and all of a sudden, it’s the most charming cozy nook I’ve ever seen! I don’t know how she does it, but it’s just so damned captivating in there. Every square inch has something unique and charming and is beautifully arranged on tables, in shelves, or dangling in space. I just don’t have the vision to bring something like that together. I get more and more aware of the depth of forethought and creativity that it requires as each season passes and find greater and greater fascination with Mandy’s vision. She's good.
The butterfly garden out front with its wispy grasses, whimsical vines and archways, and fragrant colorful array of flowers beckons you into a fairy tale realm for you to sate your curiosity and delight the senses. Tony’s new hand turned candle sticks and charcuterie boards are truly beautiful and Linda’s new vases are just off the charts stunning with their brilliantly colorful paintings and etchings. I married into a talented family.
The 2nd piece of news is that for one night only, we are hosting a dinner in our dahlia fields as a fundraiser for our friends Mike and Shyretha of The Plate Sale. The cause is a great one and the food and drinks they make are always delicious. We’ll be doing a pre-dinner private farm tour, right after cocktails are served. Then we’ll be seated out in the fields amongst the dahlias for dinner. Afterwards, guests are welcome to cut their own dahlias to take home, so go ahead and bring a bucket and cut away! 100% of the proceeds go directly to their fundraiser. Check out the link and join us for an evening of drinks, dinner, discussions, and dahlias on October 14th.
Dahlia subscriptions start this coming week, so if you subscribed, don’t forget to check your email for shipping confirmation and your tracking numbers so that when Fedex comes by, you’ll be ready to swaddle those adorable little babies and get them safely inside where you can bask in their other worldly beauty.
Cooler weather begins today over here and I can’t tell you how grateful we are to have the week ahead promising to be one where we aren’t sweating and depleted by 8:30a.m.
I’m so creaky right now, I feel like the tin man devoid of an oil can.
Meanwhile, we plug away, raising dahlias that live in tiny little baggies like a million miniature bridal veils and then sending them off to their new homes. The next big phase is preparing the farm and ourselves for the rapidly approaching tunnel work, required to plant and grow all of spring’s bounty.
If you are coming to the store, don’t forget to check out all the other things to do in Comer, and if you’re coming to dinner….cheers, we look forward to it!
p.s. If dinner in the dahlias sounds dreamy to you, I should add that we will remove all dahlia coverings for that evening. No field of tiny ghosts that night. Just a sea of beautiful flowers for you to enjoy.
-Steve
Prior to this were too many days in the high 90’s with a heat index well over 100 and no breeze. It felt like heat had you in a nasty headlock and only now has loosened its grip. Also, what happened to fireflies? We’ve hardly seen any this year. Love those little buggers.
The Fall Plant Sale is ready to go (go online at 9am tomorrow!), which means that next week the Farm-Store will reopen its doors for your shopping pleasure. Mandy is busy landscaping the front of the store with all new plants and grasses to delight your ojos and feed the butterflies. The shelves will be filled with Linda and Tony’s amazing pottery and woodwork as well as a bevy of new delights that Mandy has been sourcing from makers for the last couple of months. And of course….your new plants that you can pre-order tomorrow at 9am for your garden or landscape.
Lastly, our heirloom chrysanthemum plant sale for spring delivery is going live to the public! Last year we had emails coming in for 9 months before we could actually take orders in the Spring, but this year we’ve got our act together, our I’s crossed and our T’s dotted, and all the little ducklings in a row, so that we can help you prepare well in advance to select your favorite varieties and schedule the exact week that would suit you best to receive them. We’ve got a whole greenhouse filled with our favorite varieties that produce the most beautiful blooms with the strongest stems and that last in a vase for up to 3 weeks. There’s been more demand than supply of these for a number of years now, so we are beefing up our operation to help get more of these plants out to people that have been trying to get them without luck for the last few years.
For you flower farmers that have yet to dip your toes into the world of mums, these heirloom chrysanthemums are tall, incredibly productive beauties that flower in November and give you a bountiful market booth filled with colorful bouquets perfect for Thanksgiving. And since they last for 3 weeks, if your farmer’s market closes that week as some do, you can sell them the week before without stress, because they’ll still look perfect during Thanksgiving weekend and Native American Heritage Day. For all of our mum customers, we also provide a link to a video instruction we’ve made on how to make your own cuttings and multiply your mums to get 8 times the plants you actually purchase from us. If you’d like to see our chrysanthemum varieties on offer, check them out here!
That’s it for now. If we get another flash of deep heat, Mandy and I have refuge. She cleaned out the outdoor clawfoot tubs and I learned to make blended Piña Coladas for the visit of one of our oldest and dearest friends last weekend. Some of you know Wheeler Munroe through Floret and likely have her handcrafted leather flower belt on your waist right now. She’s as pleasant as she is talented. To shop her belts, you can Click Here!
Sometimes getting ready for company ends up benefiting you even more than it does them. We now have clean cool tubs, a blender full of piña coladas and a heat action plan for all future weekends.
Be well,
Steve
Hopefully you are enjoying cooler days than we. It’s rough out there at the moment. High 90’s and low hundreds, especially when the humidity and heat index is factored in. I keep trying the shade, but it doesn’t work. Still damned hot.
In the mornings, the team is busy cutting Peaches & Cream and a few other early varieties of dahlias and bringing them into the cooler. Then they head back out into the fields to cover the baby flowers with organza bags to protect them from insect damage. Every single one of our dahlias spend their whole growing period covered in organza bags. It’s a very time consuming way to produce dahlias, but prevents us from having to spray toxic chemicals and minimizes pest problems. Needless to say, our fields are not what folks dream of when they think of a flower farm. Everyone wants to come out and take wedding/prom photos in our fields, but it’s a field of rebar, structural netting and white bags cinched around the flower heads. Not cute. The resulting flowers are stunning though. It’s worth not being cute.
For all you mum growers out there, now is the time to start putting structural netting on them to support them as they grow tall and and get ready to be filled with blooms. String up those sides to prevent errant stems from flaying out into your aisles. Inspect for aphids and knock them back with insecticidal soap. We recommend an electric backpack sprayer from My4Sons. It's sooooooooo much better than the handpump ones, and so much quieter, cleaner, more reliable and just all around more life affirming than a gas powered one.
If you’ve been wanting to get into planting heirloom mums in your garden next year, we are about to go live with a sale of our absolute favorite heirloom varieties. This sale is for rooted cuttings that will ship Spring 2024. We’ve tried out many varieties on the market and thinned it down to the ones with the strongest stems, easiest to grow varieties, and that are incredibly beautiful. If you are on the waiting list, look out for your email, because you’ll be getting a notification in your inbox tomorrow morning that allows you to access our selection a week before the general public. If you’d like to get on that list, this is your last chance!!
Aside from that, we’ve just been dealing with a broken everything. Central A.C., truck transmission, septic system, Isuzu electrical and fuel system, tractor in the shop for 4 months (!), stove failure, ants short circuiting the greenhouse electrical, leaky kitchen sink, generator, mower, etc…. Every time I turn my head, it’s something else. But…. We have a dishwasher. So life is good. As long as a robot is washing my dishes, I am good.
Also, I’m prepping our old school bus turned guest-house for a facelift and I just ripped off the old roof rack to make space to build a roof this morning. Nostalgia ensued. The roof rack was not only our sunset chill spot to marvel at the spectacle of 10 Burning Mans, but it was built with the old stage that I had constructed for our wedding. My brothers and I and a few friends had a pseudo band and had the whole wedding dancing for hours in the mud (unexpected rainstorm) while I serenaded my lovely bride. Good times.
We’ll keep plugging away with dahlias and mums and broken stuff and looking forward to next weeks temperature drop. I hope you’re well wherever you are. Thanks for following along with us!
-Steve
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