Happy Friday y’all!

Apologies for my absence last week. Mandy and I were on a business trip in Holland visiting some of the largest flower businesses in the world. Growers, breeders, seed producers, brokers, and the world famous flower auction.

The flower auction site is so massive, that it’s larger than the country of Monaco! Jaws dropped! You wouldn’t believe the flurry of activity in that place. It’s like looking into a beehive and trying to decipher whose going where and why…but ultimately there’s an insanely organized and beautiful dance, rich with purpose, whose meaning I get, but the specifics of it all are mesmerizingly bewildering and always just beyond the grasp of my comprehension.

The amount of infrastructure, robotic machinery, and AI doing the jobs of humans and nature is just mind blowing in all of these operations. We truly couldn’t get our heads around it. Acres and acres of indoor flowers. Rainbows of colors under artificial light giving surreal Candyland on acid vibes. All this natural beauty in ginormous manmade settings was somewhat dreamlike.

While it's good to know the scope of what’s possible and to see the other end of the spectrum of the industry that has become our life’s work, we don’t foresee any big changes on our farm. It's not the future for us in any way.

Greater perspective is always good to have, but no robots will be boxing your flowers or growing your plants that come from this farm. I don’t have tens of millions of dollars to scale up and am not particularly excited to detach from the rhythms of nature in search of greater profit. My mind was drawn towards the engineering of it all. I liked discussing the lights, temp controls, energy considerations, steaming protocols, and such with our liaisons, but merely from a place of curiosity as someone who has been heavily involved in troubleshooting mechanical issues and developing logistics and infrastructure for more than 20 years.

For my life’s work though, I prefer adapting to the ebb and flow the world creates instead of trying to create my own world inside a glasshouse. I find it more enriching on a human level. Mandy too. We’ll take full hearts over fat pockets any day.

Speaking of full hearts, we were invited on this trip, along with 48 other domestic flower farmers, by the team at Farmer Bailey.  Wonderful folks, who saw a gap in the market between those industry giants and us tiny domestic farmers and had the wisdom and foresight to fill it.  Individually we don’t move the needle in terms of being able to get access to niche varieties of flower plants to be able to grow for y’all, but collectively it’s possible.  Farmer Bailey became the connector between large breeders and little growers and makes getting plugs and starts of amazing varieties possible for us little guys.  Check them out if you garden or farm.

We met Bailey of Farmer Bailey at our first ASCFG flower farming conference over a decade ago when we were all still finding our footing. Our closest friends in the industry are still the friends we met that year. We’ve shared info and concerns via text and zoom over the years and ultimately just helped each other cope and grow. It’s been fun to watch how everyone’s farm businesses have grown into different niches. Bailey in particular had an inspiring trajectory. His Vermont farm had a short growing season, so the off months necessitated a need for other income. That coupled with his encyclopedic knowledge of everything in the plant kingdom, background in floral design, connections with domestic growers, and ability to make things happen, were the perfect ingredients for the now thriving and well loved business of Farmer Bailey. In addition to being friends with him and Thomas for years, we’ve been doing business with their company for a few years now too, and it was a pure delight to meet the rest of their team, who we’ve worked closely with via email for so long.

Side note: Thomas randomly gave Mandy and I a pair of tiny hands early on in the trip, much to our delight. They each slip onto a finger and if you slide your sleeves over your real hands, it looks like you’re a regular sized person with the hands of a baby. We had way too much fun and spent way too much time on this trip making ourselves laugh with dumb little videos and interacting with dutch strangers, with our tiny baby hands.

Oh, and we also got to have dinner and drinks aboard a super sweet boat in the canals of Amsterdam.  A real highlight for me was riding up front after dinner and bonding with the dutch driver over our shared love of Italian disco legend Pino D’angio, and bouncing around to his tunes as we slid under tunnels and observed the historic city streets sliding past us while we cut our way through the dark waters.

Anyhoo…I’ve digressed deep into the land of tiny hands and obscure disco legends, so I return you now to your regular broadcast.

The 48 other growers and designers on board were a delight to spend time with as well. All coping with various stages of jet lag and the occasional hangover, everyone was lit up with excitement and smiles the whole time. A lovely group on a whirlwind tour of some AI WonkaVision type realities, made for a fascinating week. We hope they all got a lot out of it and have great success with their farms and flower based businesses and hope to cross paths again. It’s always sad to say farewell, especially when a group of strangers all really start clicking and becoming friends, but we are also very happy to be back at the farm and still falling asleep at 8pm.

We just did a massive harvest of our biggest mum tunnel.  The whole thing was in bloom and stunningly beautiful and needed to be harvested right after our return.  The amazing and talented Rinne Allen came out and took photos of the whole team, harvesting and processing flowers in the near freezing and very windy conditions on Monday afternoon. A full tunnel of heirloom mums is peak photo fodder. It’s almost breathtaking and definitely compels everyone that walks by to whip out a phone and start taking photos.  It’s always a highlight of every year.

As we empty our 2 mum tunnels, more tunnels are being planted with poppies and ranunculus. I’m installing the brains for automated roll-up sides in the tunnels that will hopefully reduce human error and introduce the ability for us to go off farm for the occasional dinner or gathering without having to rush back and open or close tunnels constantly.

I realize now that this is kinda funny to introduce after my diatribe declaring how analog we intend to stay. I promise no AI is involved and no jobs are being replaced as this job has largely been mine for 14 years. And in addition to making it so we can all stay at Thanksgiving dinner, it will potentially allow me to regain an hour and a half of my life back on every cold day for 6 months of the year. That’s a lot of time I look forward to reclaiming. Besides, its not much more advanced than an expensive garage door opener attached to a thermostat and an app. No lasers or bleep bloops involved.

More importantly, gorgeous mums are being shipped out the door as I type this and our disbud experiment was a major success!  I didn’t anticipate how beautiful that would be.  More on that later.  I imagine Mandy will put something on IG/FB about it if she hasn’t already (I’m unplugged from socials and clueless).  Maybe we’ll eventually get time to throw up a tiny hand highlight reel at some point too.

26 degree weather took out our fields on Monday, so dahlias are decaying in the fields and tubers are consolidating sugars for us to dig out and store in the not too distant future.

Despite the first frost being a late one and a very deep freeze, warm days have returned. Warm nights are coming back too. The fall light is magical, and the breezes have been peaceful. I’m happy to be home.

Oh yeah….come to the Farm Store…tons of mums!!  They are gorgeous and only here for a blink in time, so we’re loading the store up with them!  Come make a cozy weekend of it on Saturday.  Get your warm cup of Joe at CoCoCo, your danish at the Comerian, your autumnal photo at the covered bridge, and your treasure hunting at Neat Pieces Antiques.  There’s also glass blowing and multiple pottery shops, the farmer’s market and a couple of cafes if you need a meal.  It’s the bees knees!

I hope y’all have a great weekend and get some moments outside to enjoy the nice weather if you’ve got it.

Steve