Happy Friday y’all! I’m writing this Thursday night, cause days are for diggin’. We’re rolling deep in the fields this week with almost the whole crew on hands and knees digging tens of thousands of dahlia tubers out of the ground in an attempt to beat the coming cold. Dahlias can sometimes survive cold temps in the ground, but if the ground freezes hard enough, they’ll freeze too, then rot. We’re looking at temps in the teens this Sunday night, so are at risk of losing everything that we don’t get dug, organized, and stored in our root cellar before then. It’s a race we didn’t know we were running until two days ago, but the gang’s all hustling and...

Happy Friday Y’all! Seasonally appropriate weather is back since I last wrote during a late November heat wave. We’re now a bit wet and cold out here, but getting some good stuff done after the holiday break. Our new technological installation allowed us to visit my family out in Truckee, CA for a Thanksgiving celebration instead of being stuck on the farm this year. In years past, when we had tickets to fly out west for the holidays, we’d have to cancel if cold approached. Always a heartbreaking situation. I miss my family. This year, every night we planned to be gone was a sub-freezing night that could ruin most of our spring flowers if tunnels weren’t closed with heaters...

Happy Friday y’all! We’re worn out over here. Mandy and I have been working in headlamps again as the days get shorter and the “gotta do” list gets longer. The crew’s been hustling too, and a lot has happened in a short time. Steve and Mandy with the heirloom mums on one of the last harvest days of the season! Bringing in the mums! Eh plaw with Mancetta Sunset (left) & Marry with River City (right) In the same breath that the last mum flowers were cut, we started ripping the plants out of the ground. Now, just a few days later, mother plants were potted, compost was spread, amendments were added, beds were tilled and watered, and thousands upon...

Happy Friday y’all! Apologies for my absence last week. Mandy and I were on a business trip in Holland visiting some of the largest flower businesses in the world. Growers, breeders, seed producers, brokers, and the world famous flower auction. The flower auction site is so massive, that it’s larger than the country of Monaco! Jaws dropped! You wouldn’t believe the flurry of activity in that place. It’s like looking into a beehive and trying to decipher whose going where and why…but ultimately there’s an insanely organized and beautiful dance, rich with purpose, whose meaning I get, but the specifics of it all are mesmerizingly bewildering and always just beyond the grasp of my comprehension. The world famous flower auction...

Happy Friday y’all!We’re anticipating a potential frost tonight, so would advise any local growers to consider frost preparations tonight on any flowers they might want to preserve in case it happens. Our forecast says 37 degrees, but in 15 years of watching forecasts like a hawk, we’ve regularly seen cold nights dip 4-8 degrees below the forecasted low.Every micro climate is different, so what happens to us might not happen 2 miles away, but “be prepared, it’s the Boy Scouts marching song” so with so much on the line, we protect our crops when the forecast comes within striking distance.Of note, the nights where those dips more likely occur are nights when the forecast is rain free and cloud free....

Happy Friday y’all!Fall is definitely upon us. We had friends out for a few days last weekend, and it was borderline hot the first 2 days, when Mandy declared “get a last look at these trees fellas, cause they’ll change color and start dropping leaves by tomorrow.” They (and I) were fairly stunned when we got outside the next day and it was raining down leaves and some foliage had indeed lost a noticeable amount of chlorophyll from the previous day. The girl is in tune. The mum harvest coming in this week! Harry Anderton (left) & Mancetta Sunset, Pink Fleece, Bess Witt, and Harry Anderton (right) Purple Light (left) and Harry Anderton (right) heirloom mums bunched and ready for...

Happy Friday Y’all!This is definitely one of my favorite times of year. Spring is gorgeous out here, but we run through it without breathing because the workload is so overwhelming. Winter has its charms, but it is winter nonetheless. Summer is nice, because the workload is the lightest and we get the opportunity to take a break, go away, and visit friends and family. The cart loaded up with the last dahlias of the season and the first mums of the season! Fall, though, is an opportunity to reconnect with the farm on a deeper level. Mandy and I still have full work days, some of them ending at 9pm, but there’s more space than there is in spring. It...

Happy Friday Y’all! Keeping it short as my plate is full today.Dahlia season is coming to an end for us.  We’re nearly sold out for shipping but may add inventory next Tuesday, so keep an eye out for that if you’re interested.  We’ve got a limited amount of bundles in the Farm Store for today and tomorrow as well, and the store will be closing a bit early both days.  We’re closing at 1pm on both Friday and Saturday.  Flowers will be in the store while supplies last.  I do see blooming begin to happen on the mums, so we aren’t too far out from having new beauties to share with you. The ladies harvesting the last of the dahlias...

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...