Heaven’s to Betsy it’s been busy. We are all running at max capacity all day every day at this point. Good problem to have I guess, but what the hell does heaven’s to Betsy even mean? Sometimes you write something down and are confused as to why you are writing it down. I could google the origins, but I think I’ll prefer to stay ignorant right now. Too fried to self educate.
So, “Is everything always perfect and easy over at 3 Porch Farm?”, you beginning farmers might be asking yourselves. Indeed it’s a veritable cake walk. (Has anyone ever been on a cake walk? What is a cake walk? Do you need new shoes or just a glass of milk at the end of it? It sounds nice, but also a little suspect…)
No, we falter and fall and flounder and fail and suffer disease, pest, pestilence and acts of man, woman, and God. We tend to bounce back quickly and recover well and always try to learn from our mistakes and apply that education immediately. That’s the best advice I can give to new farmers. Learn resiliency internally and it’ll be the best tool in your box. It’s the only thing that’ll serve you in all scenarios and lord knows anyone who gets a farm off the ground is gonna need a ton of it.
We’ve also learned from experience that reinventing the wheel is super dumb. If you’re just starting out, join ASCFG immediately. It’ll change your life. Maybe it’ll save it. Take Floret’s workshop as well. Go to conferences, do your research, learn as much about business as you do about farming. It’s harder to run a race on one leg. You absolutely need to be good at both and neither one is easy, especially when you are trying to do both at the same time.
It’s late Thursday eve, I’ve got a hundred emails and a mountain of paperwork of urgent nature to still get to, but I can’t seem to get off the farm and into the office to do it these days, so the night time is the right time. In this case its the right time to keep working until I fall asleep and that means I haven’t had a moment’s notice to think about what to write about this week, so you get to enjoy the ramblings of a brain that has been running full speed in multiple different directions simultaneously. Cheers.
Worth mentioning to my fellow North Georgians that we are collectively in the sweet spot. That time after the depth of the dormant cold and before the pain of the vibrant heat. The first buzzing of mud daubers and carpenter bees filled the air this afternoon as each were looking to adulterate our infrastructure in their own special way. The air is perfect and everything is beginning to leaf out and bloom and the fragrances are now so plentiful as to wash into each other and pleasantly confuse our noses as to whence they actually came.
This is that time where spring is first really being felt, but the pollen hasn’t absolutely covered the world as though two giant hippies crashed into each other during a celestial game of hacky sack and simultaneously busted their fanny packs filled with nutritional yeast, raining down their yellow powder on the rest of god’s creation. In the blink of an eye it will be beautiful out, but coated in an 1/8th inch of yellow. Right now though, it is beautiful.
Get out there. Look up. View a plant. A bird. A cloud. The wind moving a blade of grass. A trail of ants. Do nothing for just a minute. Leave your phone in your pocket. Soak it in. It’s the sweet spot. Don’t let it pass you by unobserved.
This week’s little tip is geared towards those farmers I talked about. Our friend Lennie Larkin of B-Side Farm has spent years working on synthesizing as much useful information about the business of flower farming as possible and distilling it down into a book that will help you sidestep a lot of the mistakes that most of us walked right into. I highly recommend picking it up and learning how not to become another do-gooder gone bankrupt. It’s called Flower Farming For Profit. Click here and go get you a copy!
Side note, Lenny and I have some wild overlaps. In my 20’s, I built an adorable straw bale hut and lived in it for 3 years on an organic farm in CA. I didn’t own it, I just lived and worked there in a small and lovely “ecovillage” without phones, computers, t.v.’s or really anything but a bunch of other young seekers, a few guitars and drums, and barely a dollar between us. A few years after I moved on, Lenny moved into my tiny earthen house. When she eventually moved out and started her own flower farm, she did it on the property of the man who first taught me how to swing a hammer, work on grapevines, and wire an outlet a decade before. Somehow I never met her until I lived 3,000 miles away and we connected at an ASCFG conference. Small world. Weird world.
Have a great weekend whatever you do. Be kind to a stranger. We’re all a stranger to someone and we all could use an extra smile. Don’t be shy to start that good chain reaction.
-Steve
