Happy Friday Y’all!Welcome to all you new subscribers who just found us through Southern Living, Flower Magazine, or Garden Gate!  The heirloom mum revival is so refreshing and wonderful.  There’s something extremely satisfying about these mostly forgotten gems of a flower getting their day in the sun again.  They deserve the attention and appreciation they are once again getting, and we are grateful to these publications for featuring them.If you haven’t perused our older blogs/newsletters, they tend to meander between a behind the scenes look at daily life on the farm, inside scoops and first dibs on upcoming sales, informational bits and tips for gardeners and farmers, and general musings on the rhythms of nature out here.  It's free flow...

Happy Friday Y’all. We’ve been sweating in tunnels and fields all week, but a shift in temps arrived today and we’re now looking at cool and cloudy temps of low 80’s and high 70’s for the next 10 days. We love it, the crew loves it, and the dahlias love it.The dahlias have just leapt into action this week!  We were reserving almost everything for our subscription customers and stair-stepping up our yields from week to week in un-dramatic and “why the hell aren’t they growing faster” fashion, when all of a sudden, they literally doubled in production from the week before.  This cool shift in temps and added rain we are getting should only accelerate that trend, so if...

Happy Friday y’all!We took the crew on a field trip this week to a true jewel of the community, Jubilee Partners in Comer.  They are always doing everything they can for the community and particularly for the most vulnerable members of it, and they had invited us to come collect chestnuts from their beautiful property. The team collecting chestnuts at Jubilee Partners! St. Francis of Assisi supposedly once said “Preach the gospel at all times. Use words when necessary.” I read that a hundred years ago, and it imprinted deep in my mind.Regardless of what your gospel is, your faith is, your beliefs are, they only truly change the world for the better when you lead with your deeds and...

Happy Friday y’all!The heat is back a bit. At least it’s hot in the greenhouses, with days in the mid 80s. This week we re-skinned a tunnel and started prepping for automated roll-up sides, which will be quite a help in the winter. We’re mowing cover crop, irrigating, fertilizing, and tilling beds in our biggest tunnel, in prep for our biennial steaming so we can get anemones planted next week. Spring starts now for us. Prepping the tunnels for planting spring flowers! Dahlias are still coming in from the fields in increasing numbers, and the air still greets us with a variety of fragrances. Yesterday I caught a smile off some honeysuckle flowers growing along the fence. The Farm Store...

Happy Friday Y’all,We’ve been chalky dry lately, choking on the dust from our dirt roads. The dahlias have been begging for more juice, and we’ve been trying to get them extra irrigation, but there’s no substitute for the magic of rain. The effect just isn’t the same. Every time we get a fresh late summer rain, we see the dahlia plants burst in growth and happiness. Hard to quantify the latter metric, but it’s just something you can plainly see and feel after awhile.So, dry as a bone and no real promise in the forecast, then out of nowhere, just as Fedex was arriving to pick up 40 boxes of flowers last night, the sky opened up. It dumped down...

Happy Friday y’all! It sure has been a beautiful week out here at the farm! We’ve had some days in the nineties, but they haven’t been aggressive. The cool from the night before lingers in the earth and in the air. It has been utterly delightful. To need long sleeves in August in Georgia….it’s the most romantic thing anyone’s ever done for me. For the last 14 summers, I’ve been completely wrung out by this time. Body feeling like the gears of a motor that has been completely drained of oil. Muscles filled with more lactic acid than they are of water. Cramping near constant with fingers and toes curling under in spasms each day. 3 brutal months, seemingly adding 3...

Cheers! Happy Friday y’all! It’s a beautifully cool day here with the occasional light shower and a high of 80 degrees. Doesn’t get much nicer than that for a Georgia August day, so we’re drinking it in. Gonna have a low country boil tonight with Mandy’s fam, so we’re looking forward to the end of the day, but before we get too distracted with shrimp and melted butter, we’ve got a sale to launch! Heirloom chrysanthemum varieties in our tunnels last fall! Today is the big day for those of you on the mum waitlist!  Check your inbox for an email from us with a special link to our heirloom mum cuttings pre-sale. You’ve got 2 full days of priority...

Ciao y’all! I guess I’m back to tippy tappin’ on this here keyboard. I hope y’all have had a good summer. We’ve done our very best to make the most of ours. We joined my folks and brother and sister in law in the Dolomites for a lot of deliciously slow hikes in mid June. When I say hikes, they were really mostly just leisurely strolls through Disney-esque mountain ranges filled with lush green meadows thoroughly painted in wildflowers. I’ve never seen so many flowers. At one point, I’m told, we were in the largest mountain meadow in all of Europe. Every inch of that meadow was covered in beautiful flowers. A significant number of those flowers were varieties we...

Happy Friday!Thank you all so much for your support through this incredibly busy spring season. We spread so many flowers and baby plants across this pretty country, and it always feels so good to know that we get to be a conduit for other people’s love and good will. Your best sentiments of condolences, congratulations, gratitude, and romance are made tangible by sending the flowers we have the good fortune of growing every day. Your plans, hopes, and dreams for a small part of your gardens and farms are made tangible in part by the tubers and cuttings we nurture throughout the year.In a world where animosity and fear are so prevalent, we feel incredibly fortunate to be a small...

Happy Friday Y’all! Feels good to be closing out another busy week and edging towards a slower season on the farm. Summer is our time to regroup and recover at 3 Porch. Our employees pare back their hours, take trips, tend their own gardens, nap in the a/c, and as best as possible, avoid as much of the intense stress that farming in a Georgia summer exacts on your body. There will be some brutal days in the fields doing all that’s required to prep and plant 9,000 dahlias, but they’ll be exceptions and not rules. I swear I’m much older than I would’ve been if I didn’t spend a decade laboring all day, 7 days a week, in the...