It was a close call with frost this Monday and Tuesday.  We woke up to 34 degrees and concern that we may have lost our veggie plants and possibly some mother’s day flowers, but I guess we lucked out.  All survived. I hope any of you living a little further north or higher in elevation were able to protect your precious veggie babies. It’s always a tough blow to lose your plants to frost and we’re not supposed to get any after April 15th each year, but we all know how that goes.     We did lose some of our favorite peonies to that real deep freeze awhile back.  Not the plants, but the flowers.  They are always the first to bloom and each...

  We’re a little run-down, so I don’t have much to say or share this week.  Cotton is doing great.  The snowball viburnums have been blowing our minds.  The weather has been perfect and we apparently live in a bird sanctuary.    Lunaria flowers have carpeted the landscape for more than a month now and kept us in a constant backdrop of beautiful purple, juxtaposed against the reds of the Japanese maples and greens of fresh grass and foliage.  If you have a yard, you should consider planting Lunaria.  I love it.   Spring is my absolute favorite season, but I’m always a bit torn by it.  Each year I grow to love and appreciate it more deeply, yet each year I long to experience it more...

  We’ve got some cold nights coming!  Tonight and tomorrow are both going to be in the 30’s with potential for frost, so please consider protecting all of your fragile garden starts by either bringing them inside or covering them with a tarp or some other insulative material. Make sure to fasten down your tarps too, because it's going to be a bit windy and that wind has been known to blow away good intentions and kill many a plant.   We’re wrapping up the plant sale out here, but there is still a little time to place an order for those plants you missed!  The sale ends tomorrow at noon, so head over to Our Plant Sale Page to order your tomatoes, peppers, and...

  We’ve started a new tradition at the farm.  Friday Bocce games with the crew!  If you don’t know, bocce is an old Italian game kinda like lawn bowling.  Mandy’s Dad Tony, who is a talented wood turner, gifted us with a gorgeous and painstakingly crafted set of bocce balls from hard wood he got from our farm.  The amount of time and skill that went into making these is mind blowing to me. I can’t overstate my gratitude to him.   I previously mentioned that my dad’s parents were from Ireland in the St. Patrick's day story, but my mom’s parents were actually from Italy.  My mom’s first language was Italian.     When I grew up, we spent our 3 weeks of vacation each summer up...

  Hey y’all!  Not much to say this week.   Or rather, not much time to say it.  We’re just racing around trying to get it all done.       Rachel has been organizing the plant sale and brought in Abby and 2 new helpers (Laura and Rex) to organize all the orders and make sure they are ready for y’all to pick up at your appointment.      Naw and Marry have brought in Naw’s sister in law, Eh Plaw, to keep up with all of the flowers steadily growing in the tunnels and fields.  Eh Plaw only recently arrived in the U.S. after the genocidal military campaign against their people ramped up in Myanmar.  She’s smiley and shy and...

  It was a 4-leaf clover day at 3-Porch Farm yesterday.  After chores were wrapped up, everyone gathered for a glass of Guinness, a nip of Baileys and a touch of Jameson’s.  We listened to reels and jigs and had a lot of laughs while sharing stories of some of my wilder Irish relatives.   St. Patrick’s day was always a thing at my house growing up.  My grandparents on my Dad’s side grew up in Ireland.  My grandfather was a bagpiper named Patrick, born on St. Patrick's day in a thatch roof home in rural Glencar Ireland 116 years ago.  As kids, we used to watch him play pipes in the parades in San Francisco.   He and my grandmother both fled an oppressive existence under the...

   For you North Georgians who aren’t watching the weather….it’s coming!  Strong winds and cold weather are happening this Saturday.  We’ll get into the low 20’s if not the high teens tomorrow evening, so bring in your fragile plants.  If you can’t bring them in, cover them up and consider tying down the cover because the winds will be strong.   Out here, we’re taking a few last grateful glances and sniffs at all the flowering trees and bushes that have been delighting us with their colors and fragrances recently.  Those blossoms will be frosted off in short order.   If you are going to brave the weather and head to the Athens Farmers Market this Saturday, consider swinging by Lazy Summer Farm’s booth and purchasing...

  It’s been beautiful out here lately.  These warm days have been a bit intoxicating to the point where it’s been increasingly hard to stay inside for admin and packing flowers.  Yet, that is increasingly the reality of my role on the farm these days.   Peach and Plum trees are bursting into bloom, cherry blossoms exploding pink against a deep blue sky and luscious green grass, maples are waking up, daffodils fill the air with fragrance, the hellebores are a brilliant sprinkling of color throughout the woods, and the tunnels filled with flowers are almost fully awake with poppies, anemones, ranunculus and butterfly ranunculus.   It’s a hint of a fairytale out here during the spring, so in my jogs from the office,...

Abby (left) and Mo (right) working on curing Hellebore stems!  The farm is starting to pick up steam as the days get longer and warmer.  I got my first mosquito bites 3 days ago and we got our first wasp in the house yesterday.  Spring is coming.   So, as we begin anew, it seems the perfect time to introduce our new crew members, since they’ll be playing such an important role in the flower side of all of our lives.   Mo is coming to us from…everywhere really.  She’s been living on the road for the last 2 years, traveling the country in an R.V., hiking, exploring, and working remotely in the insurance world.  She recently bought a home just across the river from us...

    We had a wild week getting our first real blooms of the season out to all you lovers and we really appreciate all the enthusiasm for our sustainable flowers grown here in the U.S.  We wish we could get flowers out to everybody, but are pleased to have gotten the early blooms we did. Thankfully, we are seeing more and more signs of life from the tunnels and fields and will be able to send out more abundant beauty as each week carries us out of winter and into spring.  Soon, we’ll be swimming in a sea of flowers that we can send in all directions. Meanwhile, here’s a few fun facts about the flower industry:    The U.S. used to...