Hi everyone, it’s good to be back!   Mandy and I have been on a holiday that started out with an adventure.  I’ve mentioned that my paternal grandparents are from Ireland and in 2018, my pops took us all back and had the cousins tour us around to see where we are from, where our folks lived, worked, and socialized and where they had brutal encounters with the Black and Tan, which contributed to my family moving here.    We walked the roads and saw the deep green fields and clear black streams that cut through them from the local mountains and visited the sites where our elders are buried.  During that time, we learned that the Kerry Way is a long...

Howdy friends!      A couple acres of beds are made and I’m a little sunburned from hours of shoveling in the sun, but already a couple thousand dahlias have been planted by the ladies.  It’s always interesting to see how your mind responds to adding order and geometry to a field that was previously filled with grasses or cover crops.  You’d think it would feel alien and unsettling to take a “natural” space and add row after row, but instead it's quite calming and pleasing in appearance.  Perhaps it's subconscious satisfaction gained from a temporary victory over entropy and an erroneous belief that the second law of thermodynamics doesn’t apply to you.  Or maybe it's just that parallel lines...

                              Farmy Stuff Happy Friday y’all!    It’ll be brief this week.  Long day’s got me tired (it’s Thursday night) and I’m re-watching “Growing Floret” Season 1, before I watch the new release of Season 2.  Anyone who likes flower farming enough to read this every week, would love her show.  It’s like going from stick figure farm stories to virtual reality.  It’s beautiful, inspiring, and possibly more importantly, very honest.  So much of the project/business based shows you see are almost like a montage in an 80’s hero movie.  Everything goes smoothly, gets done in a week, and looks seamless and beautiful at the end.  It’s mostly b.s.  Life rarely works like that.  It’s so much more compelling to see the...

  Just before midnight on Wednesday, I took the old truck and picked up my brother and sister in law at the Airporter in Athens and we made the rainy drive back out to the farm.  We were all exhausted.  Mandy and I in the prior evenings, had gutted the two bedrooms, pulled off the molding, the doors, removed ceiling fans, ripped out carpet, rotted sub flooring, scraped ceilings, re-framed the joists, installed new sub flooring, and painted the walls and ceilings just in time for the wool carpet installer, who showed up late and finished at 7 p.m. on Wednesday.  We hurriedly hung doors, reinstalled ceiling fans, re-installed moldings, re-furnished both bedrooms, and caught a shower just in time to...

   Okay, that title only works if your British, but I’m writing this near midnight and I’m bad at titles, so let's just get into it.        A year’s worth of planning and over half a year’s worth of work has all culminated this week into 5 Fedex vans full of bouquets and flower bundles heading off to Moms and loved ones around the country over the last 3 days.  One of the best parts of this job is to be a conduit for expressions of love, gratitude, or even sympathy from one person to another.  It truly is a fortunate place to be.  A real honor and it definitely fills our hearts.    This week is always intense for us and there...

   Hello hello.  It appears that the last glorious days of true spring are upon us here in North Georgia and the great southern calvary of mosquitos riding on the backs of cicadas will be here in short order.  It has been a fabulous run and despite almost being in the 90’s back in March, it’s been surprisingly cool through April into early May and actually hit 38 yesterday.   We’ve appreciated every minute of it, but I guess an El Niño summer is a coming, so maybe send a fruit basket to your HVAC guy just in case.    The honeysuckle that’s been generating deep heartfelt smiles are just about done blooming, and the roses are becoming my go to fix...

  Happy almost weekend y’all!  A little rainy lately, but the cooler temps have been delightful.  I for one am happy to work in a light rain in April with temps in the 60’s and 70’s even if it means heavy jeans and soggy socks.  It feels like a gift to have a real shoulder season, unencumbered by immediate and persistent heat and mosquitos.   I’ve been spending part of each morning and evening harvesting the peonies in what is the most gardeny portion of our farm.  You can see a bit of it from the window of our farm store.  This section of the farm slopes down almost in the shape of a bowl, down towards the woods and if you...

And so it goes.  The maples have all turned green.  The lunaria’s purple flowers have turned into silver dollars studded with partially formed seeds.  The viburnums’ snowballs have melted. The ranunculus are breathing their last.  Butterfly Ranunculus too.  (Speaking of which, I saw our first monarch the other day.  Always a treat.)  The carpenter bees are attempting to undo 13 years of my efforts, rafter by rafter.  The dogs and cats are adorable as ever.  The guinea that found itself tangled in bailing twine from the neighbor’s field is doing quite well.  I guess I should tell that story.   Last week, Kali saw a guinea that looked like its shoelaces were tied together.  Being expert biologists, Mandy and I knew...

  My dad’s parents grew up in county Kerry Ireland and that beautiful green island holds a special spot in my heart.  My grandfather, Patrick O’Shea, was born on St. Patrick’s day and spent much of his adult life as a bagpiper and a cable car driver in San Francisco.  I’ve been listening to an old record of him singing an a cappella song about longing to visit the cottage he grew up in.  He did eventually go back in the 60’s and took my dad when he was about 10 years old.       My dad took us to that cottage in 2018 and it was beautiful.  We found out while there, that his grandmother used to grow...

...Continued from 1/21  Time to head south. Our final tour dates were both in GA. Our dear friend Nicky had set us up with her friends...one of whom was Mandy.     I grew up in the suburbs of Sonoma County and knew a lot of Italian ranchers, but Mandy was the first peer I ever met who was farming produce. It was an abstract concept before meeting her.     She rallied a big crowd in Athens to come see the bus and brought sweet potatoes she had grown that we diced, deep fried, and passed out. We then took the fryer vat and poured it into our fuel tank and started the bus for dramatic effect and so they could...