Happy Friday y’all!

It finally happened! Kinda. Part way at least (no rain still). But we’ll take it! We are no longer stuck in the high 90s. We got 3 glorious, life affirming, ain't it good to be outside farming, kinda days this week. So nice. So nice. We’re getting back into the high 80s, but that’s still a welcome change, especially with nights getting cooler as well. What a relief.

Our first 90 degree day this year was in March. After an extended and deeply cold winter, our outside spring crops were devastated and many of our tunnel protected crops were too. Hellebores, daffodils, flowering fruit branches, and most peonies were a complete loss due to the ice and cold followed by immediate heat. Ranunculus, anemones, and butterfly ranunculus were mostly lost due to the early heat. More recently we’ve lost about 75% of our dahlia crop due to extreme and constant heat and drought. All the recent rainstorms have missed us entirely.

All the loss was due to climate extremes that are only increasing in intensity. The core premise of farming is the ability to predict nature’s seasonal trends in your region and work within them to cultivate fragile life. Its like holding a toddler’s hand while crossing a busy street. They wouldn’t make it across the street on their own, and you wouldn’t try and take them when traffic is rushing and the red hand is blinking. You wait for the green stick figure walking dude and work within that short window to get your tiny loved one safely across.

If the streetlights all of a sudden become erratic though, green for 2 seconds, then red again, and traffic comes rushing at you when you’re halfway across, well, it certainly becomes a different scenario. That’s what getting a crop from seed to harvest is like and that’s what we and all other farmers are dealing with right now. It’s been a hard year for us struggling through losses and doing much of it in difficult temps for 10-14 hour days of physical labor, but we are not alone and we are not even dealing with the worst of it. Since I started writing about our current issues, we are hearing so much feedback from other farmers around the country who’ve had far worse years than us due to accelerating weather extremes. Massive floods that decimate whole fields. Huge windstorms that destroy greenhouses, homes, and processing facilities. Wildfires that erase a lifetime of work in a day.

All that to say, we hear you, and we’re sorry for what you’re experiencing out there. A hard profession just got harder, and all we can do is keep finding ways to adapt and hope our customers and communities understand that we’re doing our best to thread the needle and keep our farms alive and our employees paid and healthy.

We just had an interview with the charming ladies who produce The Dirt on Flowers podcast and the conversation kept going back to big transitions…how challenging, how scary, how do you know it's right, how do your customers respond, etc.  It’ll be worth a listen when it comes out in a bit if you are struggling with these things and want a window into how we address them, but ultimately we’re just dancing to the beat of nature's drum.  You gotta pay attention to when the rhythm changes and alter your dance steps, or it's not gonna be pretty.  You either adapt or shut down.

We’ve decided to cut back, or eliminate completely, some crops that have been staples for us for around 14 years. Some folks will be bummed. The drumbeat changed though. If we try the same steps for another year, we’ll get kicked off the dance floor.

Farming is like life. The main rule is to adapt to the reality as it is presently. Not as you’d like it to be, or as it once was. As it is. Adapt accordingly, make the best of the present moment, and try to still find ways to be grateful. In this context, it doesn’t hurt to minimize your carbon footprint either. Though the real impact there is the folks in power, and they do what they wanna do while making sure we’re distracted fighting each other so we don’t notice their hand in our pocket.

So you got a summation of our year, a glimpse of climate change’s impact on our farm and other farms across the country, and my take on the best way to move through difficult and unwanted changes. Not sure it's what you wanted to read and it's not what I set out to write, but it is what happened when I touched the keys. C’est la vie.

The bright news, we’ve got about 80 flower farmers from across the country coming for a tour of our farm next week (part of why my mind is where it is), and we’ll get to share tips with each other, a word of support, and maybe just take comfort in the real knowing that we’re not alone in our struggles.  Our cohort is quite small and scattered broadly across the country.  You don’t often get to be in the company of people who really get what your daily reality is like.  When you do, it is comforting.  Instead of chests being puffed in competition, shoulders are dropped in the comfort of community.  At the core of most people is a desire to be understood.  That sense seems to permeate a space filled with disparate small scale flower farmers who somehow found their way into the same geographic space.  Usually thanks to ASCFG.

The other bright news is that the dahlias we’ve been breeding for the heat are beautiful and doing much better than all other varieties previously selected for heat tolerance. We’ve been short on harvests 'til now, but are finally filling all our dahlia subscriptions each week and will begin to have some extras to offer over the next 3 weeks. At best our dahlia season will be 3 weeks long, so if you see them offered, don’t wait.

Breeding has been a bright spot for our farm. The weather is changing, so we are trying to change with it, and there have been some beautiful silver linings as a result that we are really excited about. We’ll share those details soon.

I know I haven’t been the best salesman for the idea of starting a flower farm, but I have been an honest one.  If your heart is still pulled in that direction, you might have just the right disposition for the job, so do note that Floret is offering a scholarship to her online workshop on how to become a flower farmer.  You won’t get a better or more well rounded education elsewhere, so we highly recommend it.

I’ll leave you with another Linda-ism: “Don’t borrow trouble.” (Don’t worry excessively about the future).

Cheers and happy weekend!

Steve