We’re finally getting some cooler weather again.  Spring came on virtually all at once and fully burst everything wide open.  Purple splashes of lunaria are starting to spot the landscape.  The anthocyanin rich baby leaves of the Japanese Maple are just embers of the fire they’ll soon be.  The blossoms have all fallen off the peach, plum, and pear trees. The winter honeysuckle is fragrant no more.  The grass is tall and the tulip poplars and oaks have started to bud out. Clouds of yellow pollen are being puffed out in big exhalations from every species of tree imaginable. The catkins are long and thick with it.  Our lungs are heavy with it. Eyes irritated and heads full. The solar panels are yellow. The greenhouses too. Dogwoods are flowering.  Wasps and carpenter bees hover, search and dart.  The poppies have eased off the throttle and the ranunculus are just speeding up.  The scent of chicken manure wafts heavily from the neighboring fields over the hedgerows that border our farm.  Huckleberry is hiding under the house and favoring his front right paw, likely from a fight with the neighbor’s cat.  The hellebores are already finishing their season.  We’ll miss the magical beauty they bestow upon our woods. Somehow it's already time to fix the rusty machine and mow and to start watching out for copperheads.

   Despite all that, frost is coming and we’re starting to brace what we can to protect all that’s vulnerable.  Peonies have already budded up…some to the size of marbles and they’ll need to all be covered to prevent from damage.  Same goes for the thousands of seedlings we’re growing for the plant sale.  About which I should remind folks that there is no big open house on the farm.  The sale goes live online on the 18th and pickups for orders placed begin at the Farm Store on the 22nd in your selected time slot.  Our Farm Store will be open for our regular hours from that point forward.  I know some of y’all have been missing your weekend visits.

   If I scared anyone by mentioning poppies have eased back, have no fear….they are still quite abundant and will be with us into early May.  They were a bit overzealous for a couple of weeks and have now corrected.

   Hellebore plugs for shipping were reserved with priority for folks on the hellebore wait list, but we just opened it up to the general public and orders will be shipped out next Tuesday and you can find them here!

   Poppy gift boxes went live and have had a great reception.  We sent our trial run to Brown Parcel Press (who designed them) and Floret (The Beyonce of flower farms) and were given the thumbs up. Floret gave it quite the review on IG stories, which ramped up interest, so we went ahead and listed them for purchase and quite a few of them are arriving at their destinations right now.

   We sent out over 100 subscription boxes this week and are so excited to share all of our favorite flowers of spring.  Some folks got poppies, some got hellebores and flowering peach branches, some fragrant daffodils and butterflies, and some ranunculus.  Each week will be different and we hope you love the bright brilliance of some, and the moody and complex nuance of others.

   We’re racing full speed out here, trying to keep up with all that spring entails.  For Mandy and I, the work of spring starts in late October and builds like a crescendo of 7 day weeks that get gradually fuller until it’s by far our busiest and fullest season and both fills us up and wrings us out.  Fills us up with beauty and busy excitement and wrings us out of youth and energy. We have begun to dangle the carrot of a good summer vacation in front of ourselves as motivation to keep going when the bones beg for rest.  We’ve found our annual rhythm and are doing our best to keep in time with it.  We’re happy with it.  Happy with this life.  Grateful for the beauty of nature that colors our days and for the good people that work out here and share their days with us.  Grateful to the good people who support and celebrate what we do.

Thank you all and have a great weekend!

-Steve