Happy Friday y’all!  Sorry for the absence last week.  Mandy and I were at the SOWTH conference speaking to other farmers about the importance of newsletters lol.  I didn’t write a newsletter, because I was talking about newsletters.  The gist of the presentation being that a newsletter is so much better at connecting you with your community than social media is these days.  Social media has degraded significantly in so many ways and we’ve found these newsletters to be a more wholistic way to share a bit about life on the farm with people who are curious and engaged vs. the social media world which feels like a desperate competition for the attention of people who are hypnotized into frantically scrolling through a platform designed to draw you in and make you simultaneously inflamed and numb.  It has it’s place.  It’s just no longer the best way to connect with your community.  It’s like the difference between a first date and a solid marriage. On a first date, you’re trying to win attention, approval, and ultimately sell somebody on the value of paying attention to you.  A solid long term relationship is more grounded, honest, humble and hopefully more reciprocal.  Less peacocking and more hand holding.  I don’t know.  The whole thing just feels more genuine and calming to me than social media.

Thursday night or Friday morning, Mandy and I generally chat about what’s happened of note on the farm.  Sometimes I know what I wanna talk about, but more often than not, she gives me a list of everything I’m oblivious to and I go “oh yeah! I forgot about that.” Then I just sit down and spill out whatever spills out.  I try to share notes of value for other farmers and gardeners.  I try to share glimpses into the beauty of the seasons, the hardships of the lifestyle, the lessons learned along the way, and random musings that float by.  Y’all sometimes write back to make note of something you found value in or had a follow up question to.  If I annoy you…you simply unsubscribe.  No muss, no fuss.  No need to do special dances to win attention  (If I do the occasional St. Patrick's dance, that’s solely because the spirit of my ancestors have taken ahold of my feet and my liver and my wife thinks it’s funny). We really really love this connection so much more than social media and appreciate y’all sharing this journey with us.  Enough talk about talking…

Mandy caught Covid from the conference and was pretty ill the early part of this week, but has turned a corner and is doing much better. I’ve managed to magically fight off all but the faintest of symptoms, but to avoid infecting the whole team, her and I have been holed up in the house doing all the admin stuff that otherwise takes a backseat.  One of our new employees (who we had no contact with) also is out sick with a high fever, so be wary that all the crud is still spreading.

The bright side of this is for the first time in our 14 years of running this farm, we have such a strong support team that even though we were out for 2 days last week, and all of this week, the farm has still been running strong without us.  We never imagined that possible (a short coming of our own making) and are really so relieved and grateful to our managers for taking the helm this spring and filling in where needed to help keep everything going smoothly in our absence.  Part of my chest just relaxed for the first time since 2011.  It means a lot.  A big thank you to our managers Rachel, Kali, Sarah, and Naw and also to their support teams who by all accounts are doing an excellent job!!

The Ladies working on mum cuttings and the first tray of cutting for the season!

Mum customers, the process of taking cuttings and initiating the slow rooting process has begun. Your babies are being born!

Sarah’s got the whole expanded operation mapped out and running smoothly and we’re enjoying the more sophisticated set up this year.  That’s probably one of the more delightful parts of the farm is observing the leaps made in each area from one year to the next as we take the previous year’s observations and retrofit systems for greater efficiency and success each subsequent year.

Kali’s been training the new studio team and getting all the flower bundles assembled, pampered, sleeved, boxed, labeled and out the door onto the Fedex trucks to make their way to you or your loved ones.

Rachel’s been heroically filling in for everyone that’s been out this week, to make sure things keep running smoothly.

We tried to catch and stop all the orders people placed to areas that had bad weather, but if an errant storm effects your delivery, let us know and we’ll do what we can to find a solution.  It’s always best to not send flowers to a freezing or stormy location, so please check your weather reports before sending those flowers.

Speaking of flowers, we’ve made a big improvement to our website and are now offering flowers up to a month in advance, so you can more effectively plan for your event without stress or worry!  You’d be surprised at how much fiddling needed to happen on the back end to make that an option that wouldn’t crash our website…not to mention the challenges of predicting flower harvests a month in advance, but we’ve leaped the hurdles and now have a much friendlier user experience as a result and it appears a bunch of you have already found it to be handy.  For all you local growers, do note that we’re leaving springtime and dipping back into winter with temps in the 20’s so mind your fragile plants.Wishing you a happy and healthy weekend!

Steve