Happy Friday y’all!

  Things are springing to life out here and it’s beautiful!  Bird song fills the farm and lately the frogs have been singing down in the woods.  Even the wasps have been floating around looking for new real estate. It’s been high 70’s and even climbed into the 80’s for us this week.  I know it’s unnatural and there’s ramifications of the unpleasant sort associated, but I’ve gotten to the point where I’m just gonna enjoy a beautiful day when I’m in one.  Even if it’s wildly out of season.  Better for the soul that way.

  Our new crew is awesome and things are going great on the farm!  All of this year’s tomatoes have been potted up for the Spring Plant Sale.  The hellebores are gorgeous out in the woods and Mandy spends many an evening out there with the dogs, cutting stems and enjoying the calm.  

  Mandy and Ty have been harvesting flowering peach and plum branches and I’m sitting next to a vase full of gorgeous peach blossoms as I write this.  It really magics up the room quite a bit.

  We’ve been getting so many heartwarming emails from first time buyers about how great the poppies are, along with photos and stories of happy gift recipients and it delights us to no end to know that more and more people are discovering how amazing these poppies truly are!  They really are just such an amazing flower on every level.

  We had our first big harvest of daffodils yesterday and the walk-in cooler smells heavenly.  The ranunculus aren’t blooming in earnest, but the first few stems have reared their heads and the plants look great!  Same with the butterfly ranunculus.

  In fact, all the plants in the tunnels look great at this point!  We, like all farms, always have a variety of diseases to contend with, battle head on, or dance around, and yet somehow this year they have held off. This paragraph may in fact be the thing that starts them off again (knock on head), but I felt it worth acknowledging our good fortune this year and my gratitude for it.  Less diseases is something I’m fond of just in general.

  Oh yeah!!!  The hellebore plugs are potted up and establishing stronger roots and once they do so to an appropriate degree, we’ll be firing up that second hellebore plug sale we’ve been threatening to offer for the last 6 weeks or so!  Keep your eyes pealed for that announcement! Or sign up for our wait list and you'll be the first to be notified when that sale goes live!

  Same with the mum cuttings.  Developing roots as we speak.  First offering soon to come:)

  For the sustainability minded shipping customer, I’ll mention that we just switched our carbon offset program from a forest preservation/enhancement project to a much more aggressive program, wherein carbon is actively extracted from the atmosphere, basically turned into solid form and buried deep in the earth.  In metric terms, we’ve switched from an approach with results in the 10-100 yr range to one that’s in the 1000 year range.  Basically a tree can sequester carbon for its lifespan (10-100 years assuming no deforestation/fires), but solidified and buried carbon is rated at 1000 years.   This adds no additional cost to your product or shipping cost.  It’s just something we feel strongly about covering ourselves if we plan to continue shipping (which we do).

  Lastly, for those of y’all who contributed to our fundraiser for Debora, she is doing so much better and is full of smiles and gratitude and regularly cracking Mandy up on the phone with her good cheer and good humor. Her roof has been up for a month now and Mandy and Ty both pitched in last Friday to help me to clear out her collapsing entryway porch and build her a new one so she can safely get in the house.  Again, we can’t thank y’all enough for your contributions.  You really dramatically changed a life and we’re so lifted to see how much people can still be profoundly good to one another.  Thank you thank you!

  Our thoughts are with y’all enduring cold and storms right now and we hope you get through it all without major incidents. 

  Be well y’all!

-Steve