Happy Friday y’all!
For all you new subscribers that found your way to our farm through Floret, welcome! Mandy took Erin’s very first workshop over a decade ago and they’ve stayed connected ever since, with Mandy joining her on projects like weddings and assistant teaching at some of Floret’s early in-person workshops back in the day. Floret has made the biggest impact of anyone on the small flower farming industry worldwide, and our lives have been forever changed by her directly and indirectly. If you are unfamiliar, I wrote a blog about Floret last year that you can find here. Very inspiring.
Like many of you, we first got into mums because of Floret. She wrote a great piece on them a decade ago that caught our attention and we’ve been hooked ever since, so if you’d like to learn more detail on these beautiful heirlooms, you can read that piece here.
Mandy and I started this farm in 2011 firmly planted in our ethos to put principles before profits and have since grown an almost 9 acre flower farm that is Certified Naturally Grown, completely solar powered, fully bio-fueled, and with a well considered and cared for staff. If sustainability is your thing, you can read more specifics about our efforts here.
We’ve dialed back our social media presence, so this newsletter serves as the main window into our lives on the farm where you can see images of its progress through the seasons and share a bit in our failures and successes. The newsletter also serves as an informational resource for farmers and gardeners on growing techniques (particularly in the south), and as an opportunity to be the first to know when new flowers or plants will become available. Occasionally I’ll regale with musings on life, nature, or how we got here. We aren’t from farm families. If you wanna read how the wildest adventure of my life found me on a veggie oil powered school bus with the occasional celebrity, driving thousands of miles from home and winding up on a small farm in Georgia where I met a cute and inspiring young farmer named Mandy, you can find the story here.
Okay enough of the intro. I’ve gotta get out to the tunnels and repair the bird netting so the guineas don’t scratch out all of our spring flowers, so nothing but the facts from here on.
We are finishing up our mum harvest today and have determined that we can add more inventory and have just done so. We’re sending this email out first and then follow up in a bit with an Instagram post, so you’ll have a head start. Demand is currently through the roof, so act fast if you’re interested.
Once we get through with harvest, we’ll start digging out all of our mum plants and potting them up in order to start propagating our heirloom mum nursery for spring orders that are getting shipped out to farmers and gardeners starting in April. In their stead, we’ll be planting poppies, campanula, snapdragons and godetia. We’ve got 6 of 7 tunnels (greenhouses) completely planted out now and spring will be filled with everything just mentioned in addition to ranunculus, anemones, butterfly ranunculus, daffodils, and of course hellebores and peonies. Flower shipping will start again in January and February, so we’ll have a month and a half or so to grow our heart’s fondness in their absence. Our spring flower subscription pre-orders will also go on sale next week for those of you who’d like to get weekly or bi-weekly blooms in the spring, or would like to gift them to loved ones for the holidays.
For you crafty folks, we’ve just made our wreath making video available on our website. You can gather friends and family over this holiday weekend and collectively watch the video and go for a nature hike to collect your materials and make your wreaths.
Off to the birds. Y’all have a great weekend and thanks for joining us!!
-Steve
