Happy Friday folks.

  Tomorrow our heirloom chrysanthemum cutting pre-sale goes live to everyone!  If you are looking for a late fall flower for your market booth, look no further.  Every single variety has been vetted by us to be a perfect cut flower.  All big yielders, strong stems, long stems, beautiful flowers, with super long vase lives that make customers giddy with excitement.  We make tons of bouquets with them for Thanksgiving and people love them.  We've been trialing and selecting the best of the best for a decade, so you don't have to waste years figuring out which ones look good in a photo, but turn out to be a dud as a cut flower.  There's so many options out there that fall short and waste space and time.  These beauties though are all top notch cuts!

  Our plant sale is still happening for you locals who are interested in picking up some plants for your Fall garden. And our Farm Store is now open Thursday-Saturday until mid December.

I can finally feel autumn's approach.  We've been graced with a light drizzle all day and temps in the low 70's.  I hope the rain keeps up.  The forecast keeps teasing lots of rain and then subsequent views find the projected amount diminishes or vanishes.  The fields need it.  It's been the hottest and driest summer I can recall and that is not awesome.

  Speaking of autumn, our Fall Bulb Sale goes live next Saturday at 8 a.m.   This is for local pick up only, so no shipping. 

  In other farm news, we just mail ordered Guinea chicks and it was quite successful.  Guinea fowl have been our tick control for the last decade and they work wonders….no ticks on our whole farm since we got them.  Unfortunately, we've (unofficially) adopted 2 of our neighbor's dogs and one of them raids their nests and eats all the eggs and the other one has just started the bad behavior of going after the adults. So we have no natural means of reproduction anymore and the flock is a half the size it was last year, which is no bueno.  We're working to train the chicken killer but in the meantime we thought we'd expand the genetics in the flock.  First time doing a mail order of live birds and it was pretty successful. In case anyone needs some tick vacuums next spring . We got them from Cackle Hatchery.

 This week's lil niblet is a song called Rare Birds by Andrew Bird.  It's a nice background song for a peaceful project or maybe some time out in the garden.  I first heard Andrew Bird while driving away from Floret's farm to go backpacking in the mountains.  Mandy was assistant teaching a workshop there maybe 8 or 9 years ago and my brother and his girlfriend (now wife) met me for an adventure in the Washington mountains.  I had just cut off the tip of my finger as we rushed to cut every last zinnia we could for market before we raced to the airport. The doc wouldn't sew it back on, so we just wrapped it and got on the plane.  It was so hot and relentless at our farm and I was so excited to be in cool Washington that I didn't care anymore about the finger.  Mandy was ecstatic to be connecting with flower friends and helping at Floret and I felt the cool weather and a sense of freedom from work permeate through me.

  We drove through the beautiful foothills into the mountains and had one of those roadtrip days that you see in the movies…where everything is just good and easy, passing tiny towns that coulda been in a Cougar Meloncamp video…. windows down, air perfect, and you just randomly pop into a roadside shack filled with wood fired pottery from a sweet artistic couple who seem to be another version of you, just 20 years further along.  Deeper into the hills we stopped for burgers and shakes under the trees on the side of a quaint and sparsely traveled highway that wound its way up the mountain.  We felt collectively light and jovial.  A bit of a glow to everything and they played strange new (to me) music as the soundtrack to our day.  My smile grew bigger and I wondered who this beautiful whistler was with the uniquely creative and soothing approach to music.  Who was this man plucking away at a fiddle and crafting double entendre laden lyrics filled with charm and wisdom.  It was the ciliegina sulla torta as the Italians say…. the cherry on top.

  Wonderful memory of a great day. You may already know Mr. Bird, but if you don't, it's worth exploring his catalog and seeing if it scratches an itch you didn't know you had.

Have a great weekend!

Steve