Happy Friday Y’all!

Welcome to all you new subscribers who just found us through Southern Living, Flower Magazine, or Garden Gate!  The heirloom mum revival is so refreshing and wonderful.  There’s something extremely satisfying about these mostly forgotten gems of a flower getting their day in the sun again.  They deserve the attention and appreciation they are once again getting, and we are grateful to these publications for featuring them.

If you haven’t perused our older blogs/newsletters, they tend to meander between a behind the scenes look at daily life on the farm, inside scoops and first dibs on upcoming sales, informational bits and tips for gardeners and farmers, and general musings on the rhythms of nature out here.  It's free flow though, so it kinda goes where it goes, and I just follow it.

For an understanding of how we came about and why we do what we do, you can scroll though “About Us”, but as a brief overview, I’ll say that we are very much a principals driven operation.  True north for our farm’s compass is happiness, and we know you can’t truly be happy without maintaining good relations with the land, your coworkers, your neighbors, and your customers, so we strive to do so daily.  Harmony and integrity is the goal, and though we are fallible humans, we’ll keep doing our best to keep doing our best for as long as we’re physically able.  Thanks for following along.

Dahlias looking gorgeous in the cooler temps and fall sunshine!

Dahlia season is fast approaching its end.  To celebrate that fact, we are doing a sale right now!  If you’re new to the idea of shipped dahlias or are aware of the industry wide fact that “dahlias don’t ship well”, that is not true in our case.  Dahlias, though stunning, have a shorter vase life.  Traditional wholesale dahlias spend pretty much their whole vase life in transit, going from grower to multiple middlemen, before they arrive at the end user.  As a result, they are mostly or completely dead upon arrival.

Our dahlias are harvested at optimal timing, processed in cold storage, then immediately shipped priority overnight direct to the end user, so our customers get the full vase life. You can’t get em fresher.

So it's not that dahlias don’t ship well, it’s just that traditional flower industry shipping practices have too many stops and take a long time from end to end, so their lifespan is used up on the trip.

Do note that dahlias tend to get a little smaller towards the end of the season, so although we have 20 stems listed, we’ll actually put in 26 stems to make sure you get a very full box of flowers. So you’ll get lower prices and more stems! Perfect for spreading in multiple vases around the house, or sharing with friends or family.

Dahlias just coming in from the field to be bunched, packaged, and delivered to you!

The changing of the seasons keeps our work interesting, but at a certain level, we are performing processes that we’ve developed over time and are repeating from one year to the next. It’s a rhythm that is comforting in its familiarity. Each season an old friend that comes to visit once again and brings with it its charms and challenges that are all very familiar. 

It’s the novelty of discovery, when nature unfolds and a mystery reveals itself in new forms, that really excites us though. We’re in the midst of one such period. A favorite period of ours each year.

We’ve trialed hundreds of different dahlia varieties for 13 years now to try and find dahlias that are not only beautiful, but that will grow well in our hot and humid climate, where dahlias aren’t supposed to grow. We’ve had a lot of struggles and ultimately some great successes in not only discovering varieties but also techniques for how to improve their viability in the south. You can read through older blogs to find many such discussions.

What really excites us now though is our breeding program. Instead of harvesting all our blooms, we let a lot of them go uncut so that they’ll cross breed. We extract the seeds of these flowers and plant them the following year with great anticipation.

Our seedling patch is full of magical surprises right now!

What really excites us now though is our breeding program. Instead of harvesting all our blooms, we let a lot of them go uncut so that they’ll cross breed. We extract the seeds of these flowers and plant them the following year with great anticipation.

In these benevolently cooler autumn evenings, we find such fulfillment in walking the rows of plants and marveling at these new varieties. Amidst the butterflies and golden webs of the Joro spiders, we’re greeted by flowers at once familiar and simultaneously magnificently new. We can often tell who pollinated who. We can see a Peaches N' Cream that bred with a Hamari Gold, or a Cafe Au Lait that pollinated a Sweet Natalie. It’s magical and joyful and just typing about it is making me smile. We select for beauty, strength, height, upward facing blooms, and production. The ultimate goal is to get more beautiful varieties out into the world for southern growers. The process is incredibly delightful. So much of what we do is racing to keep the lights on and focusing on processes and margins, but this project is really about the interplay of humans and nature and the love of that connection.

We do sell dahlia tubers for folks who know exactly what varieties they want to grow. For those who might enjoy the excitement of the new and unknown flower in the garden, we do also sell these seeds, so you too could participate in growing and saving never before seen varieties born of our tried and true southern approved parents.

Steaming tunnels continues as we prep for planting!

I’ve got a tunnel to finish steaming in anticipation of ranunculus plantings, so I need to quit typing and get back to schlepping. I’ll discuss the how and why in a future writing.

For you locals, the Farm Store is open and will have plenty of dahlias in it as well as other endless delights.  If you are new to our store, please note our days and hours of operation. We are open Thursdays & Fridays 10a-3p, Saturdays 9a-3p, and this weekend we have decided to open up again on Sunday as well from 10a-1p. We are doing a big sale in the store too!  Buy 2 dahlia bundles and get 1 free!!!  Come on by!

Buy 2 fresh cut dahlia bundles and get 1 free in our Farm Store this weekend!

I hope you have a wonderful weekend and find a moment of peace in nature, or with a loved one, or just away from a screen. Have a laugh, share a smile, be kind to yourself and others.

Cheers!

Steve