Happy Friday y’all! We got some rain and we’re really excited about it. The fields were dry as a bone. Everything was crispy and you could feel the dust in your throat. Now we are renewed. The soil is wet with life. We celebrated by tilling the earth and shaping beds for our upcoming dahlia plantings. Mandy & Steve driving around the freshly tilled dahlia fields! This is a big transition period for us. Not only are we doing all the preliminary work to plant dahlias and beckon Autumn, but we’ve also emptied all of our tunnels of spring flowers this week. Piles of old and tired plants as high as your chest have now been scooped into the compost...

Happy Friday y’all! The scent of jasmine and heirloom garden roses are finding their way into our home through the open door on the sleeping porch, lulling us into faintly smiling sleep. The smoke bush has burst into its beautiful billowy dark and smoky version of a flower outside our door, greeting us as we stumble out to meet the morning. A few magnificent and isolated iris plants are proudly displaying their beautiful flowers in unexpected, but much appreciated spots around the cabin in the woods. Their seeds must have washed down during a different season’s rainstorm.

Happy Friday Y’all! We just had a nice visit from a few friends old and new. One a flower farmer, one a photographer from Milan, and his old photography school buddy who is briefly visiting from Sicily. We shared stories about life in rural Georgia and life in rural Sicily over a couple of beers and had a few laughs and easy conversation…mostly in English, though I forced my fledgling Italian in there as much as possible. We rarely host guests during the week due to our schedule, but as someone who’s basked in the unbelievably generous hospitality of strangers in Cuba, Indonesia, Sicily, Costa Rica, Panama, Mexico, Chile, and Argentina, I’ve made it part of my heart to do...

Happy Friday y’all! The farm is really beautiful right now as I sit outside Thursday evening to type this. I hear the murmur of voices from over the fence as Mandy talks to the neighbor who’s out haying his field in the setting sun. Birdsong surrounds me, a cool breeze, the last of the pollen drifts from the pecan trees, the snowballs and dogwoods are beginning to drop petals, the grass is lush and filled with clover, the lunaria has begun to form its silver dollar seed pods that lend to its moniker “the money plant”, the smoke bush is turning purple, and there’s a giant purple iris over my shoulder. We’ve relished some cooler days and nights this week...

Happy Friday y’all, We’ve been hot and rainless for quite awhile now and it dawned on us that we had some work to do as a result. As I was getting some red on my neck while patching up old irrigation lines to the peonies, I couldn’t help but notice I was experiencing an odd amount of joy finding the leaks in the drip tape, cutting space for a coupler, and letting the cool water wash all the dirt off my fingers before coupling the line back together. Each time it felt as refreshing as diving into a cool alpine lake. Not sure why it was that powerful, but I made sure to bask in that feeling each of the...

Happy Friday y’all! Let me start by saying, Wow.  If you’re reading this because you enjoyed the interview with Floret, we extend you the heartiest of welcomes, and I hope we can share some more things worth reading going forward. This interview with Floret has been so meaningful to us! Check out the entire series on Floret's blog. When I was typing away the answers to those incredibly thoughtful and intimate questions about our life on this farm in the wee hours of many nights, I had no idea that it would have the kind of impact it has had. At present there are about 600 incredibly beautiful and heartfelt comments from farmers, gardeners, nurses, auto executives, customers, cousins, former...

Happy Friday y’all! It’s a beautiful blue sky day with little puffs of clouds and bigger puffs of pollen. The forest has burst forth with plumped up pollen bearing catkins, and you can actually see plumes of yellow dust billowing off the trees when a strong breeze sweeps through the woods. Also inhabiting the trees and decidedly more desirable is the Carolina Jessamine vines that are in full bloom. Like a botanical second line marching up the branches of our conifers, these little flowers look like a thousand trumpets that delight with scent instead of sound and subtly remind me that I want to get back to New Orleans at some point. The Carolina Jessamine vines are stunning right now...

Happy Friday y’all! It’s absolutely beautiful out here lately. Blue skies, birdsong, lush green grass, nice breezes. It did get too hot for a bit though. Almost 90 the other day was a tad much. I had to throw shade cloth on a few tunnels to reduce stress on the flowers, since the tunnels reached the high 90s due to the freakish weather.

Happy Friday y’all! Warm week out here with temps in the low to mid 80s, beckoning nature further from its slumber. The peach blossoms are gorgeous and are now being joined by beautiful plum blossoms on nearby trees. This year, some of our stone fruit trees are sporting both white and pink flowers, giving us extra beauty. The reason being is that a lot of these trees are grafted onto root stock which has sent up its own flowering branches and now we’re getting both colors in one tree, which tilted my head and tickled my brain upon first glance. It’s hard for me to photograph well with our camera’s lens, but it is quite lovely. Our stone fruit tree...

Happy Friday y’all! Rinsed fresh with a day and night of steady rain, the last drops just fell and the birds are singing with full throats this morning. A perfect pre-soaking for all the warm days we’ve got coming. In the 10 day forecast, we’ve got 5 days in the high 70s, so poppies will be popping. I saw some brilliant quince blossoms outside the studio and the snowball viburnums are just starting to leaf out. The daffodils are blinking their way into existence throughout the landscape and the field grown varieties are soon to follow. The baby lunaria is making its way up through the mulch. It’s a lovely, albeit squishy, time to be outside.