Happy Friday y'all!

It's been a beautiful week out here and will be a beautiful weekend too.  If you're in the area, just down the street from us begins the “Mile Long Yard Sale” this Saturday.  It actually is about a mile long and there's tons of stuff to go picking through, and there are usually some food sales supporting the local volunteer firefighters too.  The end of it is across the street from Neat Pieces Antiques in Carlton, so that's a massive bonus right there, because it's the coolest place ever. Neat Pieces will open early at 8am this Saturday and everything will be 25% off!

And since you're out here, come by the Farm Store and get a whiff of the amazing perfume in the air from the Tea Olive and Eleagnus blooms.  Intoxicating.  And while you're respiring, take a peak at the dahlia patch out the window of the store.  We're letting them go to seed (because dahlia seeds are awesome), and that makes for a full patch of unharvested flowers, ripe with pollinators.  We'll have the last of the season's dahlias in the store and the first of the season's heirloom chrysanthemums!  Some of which are brand new varieties to us and are really pretty.  

We may have a few mum disbuds on display in vases this weekend too, and if you don't know about 'em, it's basically a laborious but beautiful process of spending weeks taking the many side branches and buds off (disbudding) of hundreds of plants to redirect all of that flowering energy into a single gargantuas bloom.  It's the kind of bloom that pro gardeners enter into mum shows, and they are definitely worth a viewing.  If you're an active gardener and that sounds fun to you, we have mapped out the varieties that it works good on and offer them here.

Mandy showing the process for disbudding heirloom mums!

Speaking of mum shows, 3 Porch Farm is hosting a mum show in the town of Comer on November 14th, where we'll be featuring the fruits of all this disbudding in a bunch of different shapes and sizes from all the most beautiful and interesting varieties we've been experimenting with. Heirloom mums are beautiful on their own, but this process makes magic happen and is a whole other ballgame. The ladies at 3 Porch are giddy about it and are determined to buck any traditional mum show stuffiness and have absolutely as much fun as possible. Details to come shortly, but put it on your calendar for that afternoon/eve.

The mum show wasn't the only showcase the team has gotten excited about. While I was steaming the latest tunnel on Wednesday, Mandy, Grace, Rachel, and Karmen piled into the solar powered EV and cruised to Elbert County to enter a bunch of dahlias and mums into the County Fair. They came back giggling and bubbling over. They instantly made friends with the folks at the entry desk, filmed all sorts of silly vids to promote the fair, and saw “the biggest cow that ever existed.” First prize is $4 so please keep your fingers crossed for us.

I mentioned saving dahlia seeds, but didn't elaborate. Growing from tubers is the traditional method and great for certain reasons, but growing from seeds is one of the few tasks on the farm that really brings us immense joy and excitement. It breaks all the repeating patterns by infusing the year with intrigue and novelty. We don't know what blooms will come up. They'll be the first of their kind. It's like putting the genetics of all our heat tolerant dahlias in a hat and shaking them up to see what comes out. The seed of one exact type of flower never produces a plant that looks exactly like its parent. It produces 100s of new plants that surprise you in the fall with an array of shapes, sizes, and colors. The only commonality is that they all are beautiful.

It brings us so much joy to walk through them and admire them – to find qualities we treasure in certain new varieties and to save those plants for future proliferation. It's a pure delight, and I highly recommend it to all gardeners. You'll get a lot more bang for your buck too. Dahlia seeds are much cheaper than buying from tuber. They also are less impacted by heat stress, which is only getting more common these days. We sold out quite awhile back because people are catching on to growing dahlias from seed, but we're cooking up new ones as I type this, so I'll be sure to let you know when they are processed and ready for sale (within a month or so). Definitely before the holidays if you want a special gift for your gardening obsessed loved one.

Dahlia season is at its end right now. We won't be harvesting for future sales as the shortened day length affects production and quality. We do want to thank all of y'all who purchased our dahlias this fall. It's been a tough growing year, so every purchase has really helped.

Anyone living in, or passing through Athens this weekend, be sure to check out the fantastic pottery at the R.Wood Studio pottery sale.  The coolest artists, making the coolest pottery, run by the coolest lady we know…Rebecca Wood.  You broke that dish at your last party…it's time to replace it with something extra beautiful.

That's all for me. Have a wonderful weekend!

Farmer Steve