Happy Friday y’all!  Some of y’all are struggling with candy hangovers and others with boozy costume party hangovers.  Hopefully all had fun and are recovering well and looking forward to a nice weekend.  Perhaps the last calm weekend our nation will collectively have for awhile, so soak it in.  Hopefully not for too long awhile….hopefully.  Spooky.  I blame social media.  Let’s all remember to be nice to our neighbors.  Perty please.

  Out on the farm we are doing lots of work in the greenhouses.  Once again I’m struggling with our gigantic archaic steamer, which is essentially a large boiler that I tow from place to place, while dragging huge tarps and hundreds of pounds of trucker chain all day.

The tarps go over a section of newly made, amended, moistened, and composted beds.  A huge diameter, 50’ reinforced rubber hose goes under the tarp and connects to the steamer.  The trucker chains make a full perimeter around the tarp to hold the edges down and the steamer fires up, generates super hot (melt your skin off hot) h2o steam that pumps under the tarp, which inflates, then forces the steam deep into the soil, organically killing all pathogens and weed seeds that have been building up for 2 years.  It’s probably my least favorite job on the farm, but it keeps our crops so much healthier and happier than they would otherwise be.  Taller stems, bigger flowers, less disease, weed, and insect pressure.  UGA studies we were a part of, showed that we had the lowest pathogenic nematode load of any farm tested.  Nematodes are a big problem in greenhouses.  Not a problem for us though and no nasty chemicals are injected in the soil.  The whole process usually takes me a month in between everything else that comes up in the fall.  I tip my hat to Steve at Sunny Meadows Flower Farm in Ohio for turning me on to steaming as an option for organic growers.

The areas that have been steamed this year or last (I generally steam each bed once every two years), are ready for planting, so Mandy does a final Nitrogen amendment and bed shaping and then we lay drip tape irrigation, wet the beds, and the ladies start planting.  We got our first spring flower beds planted this week!  Anemones, pastel poppies, and godetia.  A whole lot more to go, but it feels good to have started.

  After steaming and planting, we put bird netting in place around the perimeter of the tunnels to keep the guinneas from dusting in the fresh beds….wherein they kick out tons of baby plants and potentially contaminate the sterilized soil with pathogens from another part of the farm.  It keeps dogs from running through and tearing beds up too.

 In the other tunnels, where the mums are beginning to get pretty for their upcoming Southern Living photo shoot, Rachel and Sarah have been going through and supporting the heavy flower heads from leaning over with hortonova netting and systematically finding and spraying aphids with insecticidal soap.

  I’m also trying to find spare moments to begin repairs on all the tunnels that were damaged by the high winds of the hurricane.  Many of their roll up end walls need to be completely replaced after being battered and torn during the storm.

  Sarah and Grace are teaming up to make educational mum content for all of you growers. We had to tap into that Gen Z energy to upgrade our video content, cause us Gen X’rs find we are better with shovels than we are with software.  They’re filming videos of the different varieties in bloom and sharing the unique details and attributes of each variety and why we are drawn to each.

Amazingly we still have butterflies amongst the dying dahlias.  It’s been a pleasant Fall so far on the averages (hurricane not included).

I truly hope you all have a nice weekend and that we can all maintain our collective dignity and decency in the weeks to come.  Better together y’all.  Be well.

Steve