Happy Friday y’all!

It’s a beautiful blue sky day with little puffs of clouds and bigger puffs of pollen. The forest has burst forth with plumped up pollen bearing catkins, and you can actually see plumes of yellow dust billowing off the trees when a strong breeze sweeps through the woods.

Also inhabiting the trees and decidedly more desirable is the Carolina Jessamine vines that are in full bloom. Like a botanical second line marching up the branches of our conifers, these little flowers look like a thousand trumpets that delight with scent instead of sound and subtly remind me that I want to get back to New Orleans at some point.

The Lunaria is still waking up, and I’m hopeful we’ll get that abundant electric purple carpet that it blankets our landscape with on the best of years. A weed-eater incident awhile back sadly diminished the Lunaria in our landscape, so we’re eager to replenish it for the fleeting but magical 2 weeks of purple landscape it can provide each year. I absolutely adore it.

We are swinging all over the place with this weather. 4 nights below freezing and a few decidedly nippy days required us to move all plants into heated and covered locations to protect the babies nightly, and now we’re heading back into the upper 80s for the next 3 days. Not ideal from a grower’s perspective because those dramatic swings are quite stressful for the plants.

The deeper than normal cold of this winter delayed initial flowering, followed by these blasts of intense early heat which hasten retirement, have really shortened the lifespan of our plants. For you more northern farmers out there waiting for your first blooms, you might be surprised to know that we’re already done with 2 successions of ranunculus this year. They came and went in barely a month.

For the non farmers reading this, “succession planting” is what we do in order to have the same type of flower available week to week for months at a time. If we planted everything at the same time, you’d have a pretty short harvest window. Production would peak at one time, giving you temporary bounty followed by a lot of sad customers and an empty farmer’s market booth for the rest of the season. To address that, we’ll often plant the same crop 3 separate times over an extended period in order to stagger the harvest and maintain as steady a supply as possible. It creates a buffer and a steady flow in most years, but weather can help or hinder that plan.

The first 10 years of our farm, we’d still be harvesting our first ranunculus succession this time of year, but seasons have become more erratic and those norms are no longer consistent or dependable. The deep cold followed by intense heat has definitely shortened our harvest season, which results in less flowers overall.

We lost our daffodil season all but entirely and as little thought of as they might be, we love daffs. So many cute varieties and enchanting scents. They’re not our most commercially relevant crop but are definitely one of our annual joys on a more sentimental level. We need the sentimental successes as much as we need the commercial ones. We gotta pay the bills, but maintaining the motivation to run this demanding enterprise comes down to the more intangible rewards. Keeping our hearts in tune is the core of this whole operation, so that’s why we find the Lunaria, plum blossoms, fragrant daffs, Jessamine and other delights to be so valuable
 and integral.

On the brighter side of winter, the mum plants are loving the warmer temps and aren’t phased by the cold nights, so they’re doing fantastic and our first mum shipments just went out on Wednesday.

We’ve actually just listed some of our favorite mum varieties as “ready to ship” right now!  “Ready to ship” is kind of our bonus offering, because a lot of the faves are sold out months in advance.  “Ready to ship” comes about if our production levels surpass our projections and we have a last minute surplus that we list in real time, giving folks the opportunity to kinda cut the line and get instant access to previously sold out plants.

We’ve also restocked on a bunch of Ice N' Roses hellebores, so if you missed out on your favorite varieties, they may be back in stock and as I mentioned last week, those burgundy, plum, and red tones are an amazing complement to any spring focal flower in a bouquet.

For you folks that have been driving down our road this last month, eager to get into the Farm Store, the time has finally arrived.  We officially opened for the season yesterday and will be open every Thursday through Saturday for the duration of spring.  It is as enchanting as ever with all sorts of new surprises and delights created and crafted largely by women-owned and sustainably-run businesses.  Garden tools, seeds, candles, Linda’s brilliant pottery, fragrances, and all kinds of cuteness you didn’t know existed are bursting at the little store’s seams.

Comer Coffee and Neat Pieces Antiques are both open all the days we are open now too, so you don’t have to wait for Saturdays anymore to hit all 3.  Check out our full list of things to do in Comer if you wanna make a day of it.  There’s some cool things happening in our tiny corner of the world.

A happy belated St. Patrick's day to all yee Irish out there. Naomi, who is doing an incredible job in the studio bundling and packing your flower orders, made us some delicious green rice cripsy treats to celebrate the occasion. Apologies to those hoping for another Guinness infused jig on my part on the old Instagram. Mandy and I have been working north of 80 hours each week, so the time (and energy) just wasn't there this year…and I'm all outta tricks anyway. Just click here for last year's jig. It's still pretty funny.

Anywhoooo…I’ve gotta go and put shade cloth over our greenhouses, so that’s it for me today, but I hope y’all have a wonderful weekend. Get out for a walk in the woods or botanical gardens in the morning while it's still cool and crisp, then hop in the drink as we slip into an early summer.

Be well!

Steve