Well, we’re finally moving forward with the cabin that was destroyed at the beginning of the year (You can revisit here).  An old friend who got his start in construction under the tutelage of Mandy’s dad years ago, went on to become a contractor and is going to come in with his crew and carefully take it down and set the salvageable lumber aside for me to re-use.   We’re both super excited to have some motion on this project.  We’re not 100% certain about the design of the rebuild (or even when I’ll get the time to do it), but we’re thinking either a full replica of the original, or possibly a 3 walled structure with the 4th wall just...

We’ve been getting afternoon showers again.  It was so dry for so long and despite the fact that our friends and neighbors were getting rain for weeks all around us, the drops avoided our soil for the longest time.  It seemed as though the clouds were taunting us.  Holding tight to their sprinkles until they passed overhead and then dropping them generously onto the neighbors’ fields while casting a wry grin over a shoulder in our direction.      The weather patterns here have so much more nuance than the ones I grew up with in Northern California.  It’s really interesting how much variation there is in just a half a mile out here.  Sometimes it works to our benefit (multiple missed...

We are so excited to be home and reconnect with the farm!     Mandy and I just had a heckuva trip to Italy.  We attended a family wedding in the region my grandparents are from, with cousins from Tuscany, Ireland, and Brazil.  It was fantastic!  The dance floor was filled for 5 hours with all generations of cousins and friends from all over the world and everybody was smiling, dancing, laughing, hugging and just all around having a wonderful time and soaking in this once in a lifetime experience to all be together.  I can’t tell you how much it warmed my heart and filled my spirit and I’ll forever be grateful to my amazing international family for making this...

Back in the early days of our life together, Mandy and I lived with my little brother in a big, old, poorly insulated, and seemingly always wet house, on a wooded north facing slope, with massive single paned windows, that was too expensive to heat during the cold months.  When it was 32 outside, it was 32 inside. There was a massive fireplace, but no matter how big the fire, the heat would all just escape up the chimney, or out the single paned windows.   After work each night, we’d put on our coats, grab our dinner plates, turn on some records, and pull our old couch right up to the fire and do our best to absorb as much...

                                  We’re back out in the fields, sweat pouring off us, making beds, pulling irrigation, organizing, laying out, digging in, and covering up our dahlias.  We’ve made surprisingly good progress in this heat.  Our team is good and getting better with each passing season.  The umpff we are losing with age, is offset by the wisdom gained from years of iteration.  Less vivacious, but more efficient. Cramping, tired, and sunburnt, we are excited to have thousands of dahlias successfully planted in raised beds.  When all is said and done, we’ll have about 8,000 in the ground.  Definitely our largest dahlia planting to date.     We’ve spent years isolating and multiplying the varieties that we...

We’re fond of mushrooms out here.  All kinds.  They are magical and wonderful and responsible for so much good in this world that they rarely get acknowledged for.   Did you know that though they were once classified as plants, fungi are actually more similar to us in one significant way than they are to plants?  Plants famously breathe in Carbon Dioxide and breath out Oxygen.  Conveniently we do the exact opposite.  But, so do fungi!   They form an interconnected network under our feet and are responsible for helping plants and trees grow.  They balance out nutrients in the forest, literally taking excess nutrients from one tree and sharing them with another tree in a more deprived patch of soil.  It’s...

Hello hello!  We have had a wonderful season of Spring flowers and are all super happy with how everything went.  Our crew has been fantastic, our days have been filled with so much beauty, and our customers have all been so kind and uplifting.  Such a great season for us and we appreciate you for helping it to be a success!   And so another beautiful Spring gives way and melts into the season of electrolytes and fireflies.  We’ve been hot out here, but fortunately and unfortunately we’re devoid of the humidity that generally accompanies the heat.  It looks like that may be coming on Monday though, so we are excited to be getting some real rain!   These temps punctuate the...

As I sit here wondering what on earth to write about, my kitchen table cluttered around me reminding me that there’s supposed to be life outside of work, the scent of Sarah Berhnardt peonies slides across the kitchen and into my nose and reminds me why the work is so compelling. I’m at the point in the year where Mandy is a little tired of hearing me complain that 7 day weeks for almost half a year straight is eroding my state of health.  She’s built tougher than me.  Thrives on the constant hustle.  It’s in her DNA and her upbringing.  Her people are constantly motivated and generally happy to have long lists of tasks to accomplish and she’s the...

One of the best parts of our job is the fact that we are the conduit for so many good intentions.  We work in the heat, the cold, the mud, and in what all told, sometimes feels like a Sisyphean effort to make a living by fostering fragile lifeforms through hostile conditions that seem to be getting more erratic year by year.     We live a fairly isolated existence and only see employees and delivery drivers most of the year.  In some ways, we are very disconnected.  But, it’s become more deeply impressed on us over time, how much the results of our efforts are directly tied to thousands of gestures of love sent from one person to another.     It’s like...

It’s safe to say that Mothers are the most frequently under-appreciated members of a household.  Having literally created another human from their own flesh and blood in what appears to be a great deal of discomfort for the better part of a year, they then endure for many more years, with herculean displays of patience, one or more tiny narcissistic sociopaths running around destroying things and pooping everywhere.    For the next 18 years (at least), the unending load of thankless work, lack of sleep, and all around self-sacrifice is often met with attitude and dismissive sass from a completely helpless and fully dependent person who is not only unappreciative, but is severely self-assured in their condescension despite not even having...