Happy Friday y’all!

   We had a lovely trip to my homeland of northern California, where we celebrated my mom’s 75th and just had a great time connecting with family and friends for two weeks.  It was a huge treat for us both and is always rejuvenating to get off the farm for a bit, especially to see loved ones and to have some laughs.  NorCal was cool to the point of being cold though, which made coming home to sweaty field work in the humid 90’s quite a shock.

   We’re out in the fields right now working on the thousands of dahlias we’ve got planted.  Weeding, laying down landscape fabric, driving in rebar stakes, topping the plants, etc….

   We are all sweaty muddy messes in this heat, spending hours each day working with and on black landscape fabric, which makes you feel like you’re in a convection oven.  Your whole body pulses, your brain cooks, you feel close to passing out each time you stand back up.  It’s delightful.

   The dahlias are looking good so far.  With this much heat and rain, you’ve got perfect conditions for rotting tubers, even if you did everything perfectly, so despite having our highest success rate ever with our dahlia plantings, we are keeping an anxious eye out for rot to take hold in our fields.  If you are growing your own, hopefully you raised your bed and have great drainage.  Even so, keep your fingers crossed.  Sometimes there’s nothing more you can do but hope.  It was an incredibly long and cool spring, but summer has arrived with a bang, so we all need to ride it out as best we can.

   We’ve got upwards of 9,000 dahlia plants in the ground, which is a new record for us.  The hope is to be able to offer more dahlia subscriptions since they all sold out last year and were a huge favorite with subscribers.  We’re trialing around 25 new varieties this year too, in hopes we can find a couple new favorites that can handle our climate.  We’ve also started Mandy’s seedling trials back up in hopes of developing our very own varieties of new dahlias that are uniquely gorgeous and can handle our heat.

   For you home gardeners, our seed sale is still going.  Now is the ideal time in warm climates to plant sunflowers, zinnias, cosmos, and celosia for late summer/early Fall.

   I’m gonna wrap it up, cause I have to get back out there, but the last big news in our lives is that we’ve almost finished our kitchen upgrade and I just installed the dishwasher and holy crap, we feel like we’ve made it.  I’m 47 and it’s the first time in my adult life that I’ve had a dishwasher.  We are over the moon.  Absolutely tickled at how easy it is to keep a clean kitchen now.  Big life upgrade over here.

   May your garden be rot free and your dishes be cleaned by a benevolent robot.

Have a great weekend!
-Steve