It was a 4-leaf clover day at 3-Porch Farm yesterday.  After chores were wrapped up, everyone gathered for a glass of Guinness, a nip of Baileys and a touch of Jameson’s.  We listened to reels and jigs and had a lot of laughs while sharing stories of some of my wilder Irish relatives.   St. Patrick’s day was always a thing at my house growing up.  My grandparents on my Dad’s side grew up in Ireland.  My grandfather was a bagpiper named Patrick, born on St. Patrick's day in a thatch roof home in rural Glencar Ireland 116 years ago.  As kids, we used to watch him play pipes in the parades in San Francisco.   He and my grandmother both fled an oppressive existence under the...

   For you North Georgians who aren’t watching the weather….it’s coming!  Strong winds and cold weather are happening this Saturday.  We’ll get into the low 20’s if not the high teens tomorrow evening, so bring in your fragile plants.  If you can’t bring them in, cover them up and consider tying down the cover because the winds will be strong.   Out here, we’re taking a few last grateful glances and sniffs at all the flowering trees and bushes that have been delighting us with their colors and fragrances recently.  Those blossoms will be frosted off in short order.   If you are going to brave the weather and head to the Athens Farmers Market this Saturday, consider swinging by Lazy Summer Farm’s booth and purchasing...

  It’s been beautiful out here lately.  These warm days have been a bit intoxicating to the point where it’s been increasingly hard to stay inside for admin and packing flowers.  Yet, that is increasingly the reality of my role on the farm these days.   Peach and Plum trees are bursting into bloom, cherry blossoms exploding pink against a deep blue sky and luscious green grass, maples are waking up, daffodils fill the air with fragrance, the hellebores are a brilliant sprinkling of color throughout the woods, and the tunnels filled with flowers are almost fully awake with poppies, anemones, ranunculus and butterfly ranunculus.   It’s a hint of a fairytale out here during the spring, so in my jogs from the office,...

Abby (left) and Mo (right) working on curing Hellebore stems!  The farm is starting to pick up steam as the days get longer and warmer.  I got my first mosquito bites 3 days ago and we got our first wasp in the house yesterday.  Spring is coming.   So, as we begin anew, it seems the perfect time to introduce our new crew members, since they’ll be playing such an important role in the flower side of all of our lives.   Mo is coming to us from…everywhere really.  She’s been living on the road for the last 2 years, traveling the country in an R.V., hiking, exploring, and working remotely in the insurance world.  She recently bought a home just across the river from us...

    We had a wild week getting our first real blooms of the season out to all you lovers and we really appreciate all the enthusiasm for our sustainable flowers grown here in the U.S.  We wish we could get flowers out to everybody, but are pleased to have gotten the early blooms we did. Thankfully, we are seeing more and more signs of life from the tunnels and fields and will be able to send out more abundant beauty as each week carries us out of winter and into spring.  Soon, we’ll be swimming in a sea of flowers that we can send in all directions. Meanwhile, here’s a few fun facts about the flower industry:    The U.S. used to...

    We found a beautiful variety of snapdragons last year.  So excited!  Most of our snaps were anemic and underperforming last year, but this variety was gorgeous and big and healthy and saved our Mother’s Day bouquets.  So, we adjusted accordingly and bought 23,180 plants, nursed them from tiny babies into legitimate plants in our prop-house, then devotedly committed hours and days of shaping beds, amending them with the best organic ingredients as per the results of our soil tests, adding compost, and fastidiously planting up a huge chunk of our biggest tunnel with them.  Last year these snaps were the Biggest, Strongest, and Most Beautiful of all….they flower at the perfect time (right before Mother’s Day). They are the right choice. “Smart planning”,...

Valentine’s day is coming!  It’s such an odd time of year to schedule such a flower heavy holiday, so I’m assuming someone in the chocolate industry initially lobbied for the February date to ward off competition.  There’s barely any domestic flowers this deep into winter, so that’s a large reason why roses, mass produced and shipped in from the equator, eventually became such a signature of Valentine’s day.   Don’t get me wrong, I love whimsical, ethereal, fragrant and explosively beautiful garden roses in all their splendor, but I’m not too partial to chemically bathed, fragrance free, dipped in paint, but still all look the same, grocery store roses.    Being one of the southernmost flower growers in the U.S., we tend to come...

...Continued from 1/21  Time to head south. Our final tour dates were both in GA. Our dear friend Nicky had set us up with her friends...one of whom was Mandy.     I grew up in the suburbs of Sonoma County and knew a lot of Italian ranchers, but Mandy was the first peer I ever met who was farming produce. It was an abstract concept before meeting her.     She rallied a big crowd in Athens to come see the bus and brought sweet potatoes she had grown that we diced, deep fried, and passed out. We then took the fryer vat and poured it into our fuel tank and started the bus for dramatic effect and so they could...

Continued from 1/14 ………We turned it down. We were too committed to even fathom getting off the bus. Instead, we offered to try to fix their veggie conversion and tour with them as support. Once her managers determined that we were upstanding citizens (an accountant, 2 school teachers, and whatever I was) they agreed.        We spent the day frantically patching up their problems so they could get their bus and crew to Boulder CO for a big conference at the University with Woody Harrelson and Johnette Napolitano (Concrete Blond/Talking Heads) the next eve. After many hours of gravel in our backs and grease and oil in our faces, we got it working (Huzzah!) and drove through the whole night...

There’s a lot of new people to this newsletter and we thought it a good time to give y’all the backstory to the farm.  Believe it or not, the seed for this farm was planted on an old school bus that ran on vegetable oil almost 20 years ago.  We named her Unifried.  I originally told this story back in the winter of 16’/17’ while Mandy and I were on a cross country drive from CA to GA to complete the circle and bring the old bus to its final resting place on our farm.  There’s adventure, romance, and celebrities and folks seemed to love it the first time around, so….. This is that story:     Unifried the bus was born in 2003 when...