Happy Friday dear friends!    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...

   It’s been beautiful out lately.  That sideways light that early spring brings for much of the day is truly magical and puts a little pep in my step each day.  On the few days that hit 70 degrees last week I caught faint whiffs of floral fragrance in the air and heard the chorus of hundreds of frogs.  Seems early for frog song, but I guess when the mood strikes and ambient temps facilitate romance to course through your cold blooded veins, you have no choice but to serenade.    Flowers are trickling in with a slight increase in velocity, but not enough to satisfy everyone quite yet.  It’s coming though, I promise.    I know Valentine’s, Galentine’s, and...

Happy Friday y’all! 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...

   Happy Frosty Friday y’all! Keeping it brief, cause my family is in town.      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...

Hi friends,    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...

   The new year is nigh.  Whether you spend it immersed in glitter and bubbles, quiet contemplation, or somewhere in between, we hope you have a great night and an even better 2024.     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...

   Happy Friday and welcome back to the light!  Yesterday was the winter solstice, so the days will only get lighter and longer from here and we welcome as much light into this world as possible at all times, except when I'm sleeping.   So, In a move that's out of character, I just started taking the occasional boxing class.  I’m not the right age for it and I have no desire to ever use it, but new skills expand the brain and it can’t hurt to know how to defend yourself, so I signed up.  The reason I mention it is that I’m only 3 lessons in and I’m feeling a bit like a baby deer out there…like I just found...

Happy Friday dear people,    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...

Howdy y’all!    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...

  Happy Friday from a rainy north Georgia.  We got down to 20 degrees Tuesday evening.  We had been gone for 6 days to visit my family in CA and when we left, the forecast was all warm temps, so we had low stress and good times.  We had a few hikes on the coast, a day burying the kids in the sand on the beach, lots of laughs with family, and a touch of the holiday traffic.     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...