Happy Friday y’all!

It’s great to be back with the crew after everyone got some time to rest and recoup. I can honestly say that spirits are high and everyone seems a little lighter in step after some solid downtime. We’re all excited for a great spring and the plants are looking fantastic so far.

The mums are lush and green and so much bushier than last year.  We tried a few new techniques and dialed in our feeding approach and it sure shows.  They are doing so well, that we actually had to start taking cuttings this week. Happy baby chrysanthemums will likely be ready to find new homes in about 6 weeks! If you are on our mum waitlist, you will get first access to varieties that are currently sold out so do take advantage of that benefit….and if you’re not and that sounds good, go ahead and sign up now.  As much as we’re trying to increase production, a lot of these mums still sell out quickly.  Don’t get stuck waiting another year to get those varieties you missed.

We also have a waitlist for hellebores and we’ve got a lot of new varieties coming soon!  We’ve got 28 varieties total and almost half of them are brand new varieties in the Ice n' Roses series, which are by far the easiest and most rewarding types of hellebores on the market.  Not only do they produce tons of stems, flowers that face forward or upward instead of down, and grow extra fast, but they are also super hardy, disease resistant, deer resistant, and frost resistant!  They cannot be beat!  They practically grow themselves.  We just plant them once, walk away and we get flowers every year for beauty or for harvest and put in zero additional labor.  A lovely arrangement.

We’re really excited to get some of these new plants out into our woods. Greed and hoarding isn’t really our thing, but I don’t think those words pertain to an addiction to planting more and more beautiful varieties of hardy hellebores amidst the trees. Or any flowering plant, really. Why not make the world more beautiful and lush. Its one little thing we can control amidst the madness.

At the moment, a brief stroll down to our woods finds us greeted with floral bursts of color, carpeting the forest floor. Hellebores make a woodland walk so enchanting this time of year. Not much else flowers so early, so it’s always a welcome harbinger of a beautiful spring to come and while the rest of our spring flowers require 6 months of constant care and attention, the hellebores reside on the opposite end of the spectrum requiring nothing and giving so much in return. I almost feel guilty about it.

I’m sure all you growers in the Southeast are aware of the nasty weather slated (pun intended) to arrive this weekend. Ice is heavier than snow, so your tunnels will be at greater risk of collapse if it gathers. The good news is that it will happen in the wee hours of the morning, so you don’t have to waist your precious time sleeping (boring).

If this is your first incident like this with a tunnel, get an extension pole with a big broom head on it, warm clothes, rain jacket, headlamp, a can do attitude, and get out there midway through the storm to scrape it off, so your tunnel(s) don’t collapse and ruin your spring crops as well as your infrastructure.  Ice sheets can tear your plastic and cut you (says our friend Grace at Five Fork Farms in the frosty north) so be careful.  We’ve only dealt with snow…never ice like is in the forecast, so I can’t speak to the tearing and cutting.  Snow doesn’t cut.  It just makes a great replacement for cocktail ice and turns it into a delightful slushy.

If you can’t scrape the ice for some reason, you can try and brace your tunnel with lumber or metal poles. That’s a lot of work too though. Choose your own adventure.

We intend to fire up the heaters on some of our tunnels to try and melt off the ice. 9 tunnels is too many for 2 people to take care of manually (it’s a lot more exhausting than you’d think), but so long as the power is on, or the generators work, and the gas company comes, we should be good to go and will hopefully only have to do our 3 unheated tunnels by hand.

Gather your firewood, plug in your backup phone chargers, get batteries for your headlamps, store some drinking water, drip your faucets, have fuel for your generators, test them to make sure the carb isn’t shot, sharpen your chainsaws and make sure they work, and be ready for power to go out for a few days.

Wishing you all an uneventful weekend, wherein none of these preparations were required at all, and you remain cozy and stress free.

Steve