Happy Friday y’all!  I hope you had a nice week.  No major news to report here.  We did ship out our first 3 flower bundles of the year though.  2 anemones and 1 pastel poppy bundle.  We’ve got a lot of cold weather coming, so I don’t expect a big flush of blooms anytime soon, but we may continue to trickle out a bundle hear and there as they present themselves.  There may be more snow upcoming.  Our weather apps are flip flopping from as much as 5” to as little as nothing.  I’ve mixed emotions.  Last week’s snow was probably the most fun we’ve had in years.  We finished our morning’s work, put on some velour track suits, opened up some premium mortadella and fancy cheese from Birdie’s, and popped a bubbly bottle of French something or other and watched the snow fall.  Nourished fully, we changed into outdoor attire, grabbed the speaker, a cocktail of choice that we chilled with freshly fallen snow (heavenly), a rope, a stick, and an inflatable swan that we proceeded to tow behind the golf cart to our own soundtrack.  There were more rocks and sticks in the path than the brochure suggested, but we were giggling too much to get hurt. Across the farm, past the neighbors, through the woods, until alas, the swan had its own swan song.  We eventually abandoned it’s flaccid plastic corpse along with the golf cart, atop a tall hill and walked down to the river in the wet sleet that followed the snow. Sleet isn’t quite as magical as snow, but we were in too good a mood to let it spoil the fun.

Cue fun movie montage music....

Until it did. Hence my mixed emotions. After dark, the freezing ice started to buckle and break trees everywhere. Power lines were snapped all over the region. We had a fire in the stove and the house was warm enough, but 75% of our farm’s annual revenue is in our tunnels right now and they're all being kept alive by heaters and circulating fans. No power means none of that. Fortunately we have a big generator. Unfortunately, it wouldn’t start.

Eventually, with some trickery, I managed to get it going and thought I was in the clear, so I traded the dark, wet, and frustrated cold for a dry house and warm fire with my sleepy wife. But I noticed a problem a half hour later. Things that were supposed to be working, were not working. The generator kept blowing a circuit breaker that powered half of our greenhouses. So I spent the rest of the night running around trying to troubleshoot and save everything. Nothing I tried was solving all the problems, so I ended up turning on half the greenhouses, then the other half, then back and forth ad nauseam. I assumed it was my fate for the rest of the night to stay freezing and exhausted by the screaming motor of the generator, toggling circuit breakers back and forth. To my great fortune though, at 1:30 a.m. the power came back on and the flowers and plants were again safe and I could relax, dry off and get to sleep. Many thanks to the amazing crews who brave terrifyingly unpleasant if not outright hostile conditions to restore downed power lines so we can have light, heat, and water. And Netflix. Truly an under appreciated line of work.

I slept and I was in the clear. Except I wasn’t. The next day, temps were set to drop into the mid teens, winds were high, and power went out again. The temps from the night before would have killed flowers and probably caused a fair amount of damage to a percentage of our plants, but these temps were extreme enough to kill everything for sure. Meaning: No spring flowers. So I spent the whole day trying to find solutions to prevent that from happening. I took the generator apart and replaced the carburetor with a brand new one and was pretty sure that would fix the problem. I did a trial run and it worked! Until it didn’t. The breaker tripped again. I spent the rest of the day running all over the place to try and find another huge generator. Everywhere was sold out until….I found a big ol' one sitting on an abandoned cart at Lowe's. It appeared that someone had just returned it and it hadn’t made it’s way back to the very empty shelf yet.

  Amazing good fortune!  I rolled the tank of an item to the electrical aisle and found the parts I needed to wire that much juice directly into my service panel.  Out the door and to the van (I paid first), only to find I can barely budge it on my own, when a good samaritan saw me struggling and helped me lift the behemoth into the back.  Back at the farm, Mandy had the tractor waiting with a pallet on the forks. We slid it out, set it down, and I spent the next hour wiring it up, putting it together, adding oil and fuel until the moment of truth.  Ruggaaaggaaa ruggaaggaa harumph. Ruggaaggaaa ruggaagaaa harumph.  Ruggaaggaa ruggaagaaavaroooooom! Huzzah!  Back up plan to a back up plan is now in place.  And of course, the power came back on.  We feel so much better knowing we’ve got back up backup plans.  So yeah….I love the snow.  And I’m scared of the snow.  Not mutually exclusive.  Speaking of which, our friends at Love is Love Farm just lost one of their greenhouses to that very same snow storm.  I can’t emphasize how much of an impact that is to a small farm.  So check them out and show them some love and support if you can.  Great farmers and great people over there.  Whatever happens with the upcoming snow or not snow, I hope you stay safe and have fun.

Steve