So, if you read these weekly, I recently told the story of our first market with the strawberries and HoneyPops half a score ago.  Truth be told though, that actually wasn’t our first market as 3 Porch Farm.  The winter prior, Mandy taught her mother and I how to make wreaths and we did a few holiday markets to get a little bread money to keep us fed through the winter.  

   Everything for me was viewed through the lens of stress colored glasses at that time, so that colors my memory a bit, but when you take the whole “our entire future depends on this” vibe out of the equation, the process was really quite lovely.  We walked the farm and surrounding woods looking for items of beauty.  We gathered tons of cuttings of evergreens. We collected dried flowers and pretty feathers.  We scavenged bird’s nests, pine cones, and twig galls.  We even pulled wasp nests from all the rafters in the barn and under the solar.  Anything of visual interest that naturally occurred on the farm and would last for a month or more on someone’s door, we collected.

   Bundled up in down jackets and beanies, with crappy lights, no heat and a tiny speaker, we listened to songs, cracked jokes, and worked for hours and days with a cup of warm whatever as much to warm the fingers as anything else.

   Despite the fact that we almost lost Mandy’s mom when a hunter shot a deer that she was directly on the other side of, the process was quite wonderful.  And really, as scary as that was, it facilitated a necessary meet and greet with a neighbor.  You gotta find silver linings.

  So fast forward to 2020 and blah blah blah and of course, now we don’t attend markets and we also have a smaller staff.  People want their wreaths still, but we aren’t set up to make them at scale and have no means of safely distributing them to our customers.

  Our grand idea was to expand our reach and to finally give up all the techniques and secrets that we closely guarded for a decade by sharing them in a video course for anyone to access.

Now, instead of making wreaths for a local few, we are empowering people nationwide to expand their skillsets and natural creativity, while creating new traditions and memories with friends and family.

  In my family, the holidays was always about food and drinks and music.  Since Mandy came into my life, all those things remained, but now the whole family goes for walks in the woods and on roadsides and collects pieces of nature to bring back to the house and decorate our space with.  Everyone is engaged and there is a new excitement for the whole experience that never existed before.

   I know it's a little early to be thinking of the winter holidays, but we’ve been getting lots of requests for wreaths lately, so we wanted to put this on our website and let the early birds know that it’s available. Fall wreath are as equally fun to make…if not even more fun. 

  My hope is that you’ll benefit from Mandy’s infectious love for creating from nature as much as my family has.  You can check out the preview here to see if it’s something you’d like to make a part of your fall and winter traditions.  Just be mindful of hunters :)