Happy Friday! Thank you all so much for your support through this incredibly busy spring season. We spread so many flowers and baby plants across this pretty country, and it always feels so good to know that we get to be a conduit for other people’s love and good will. Your best sentiments of condolences, congratulations, gratitude, and romance are made tangible by sending the flowers we have the good fortune of growing every day. Your plans, hopes, and dreams for a small part of your gardens and farms are made tangible in part by the tubers and cuttings we nurture throughout the year. In a world where animosity and fear are so prevalent, we feel incredibly fortunate to be...

Happy Friday Y’all! Feels good to be closing out another busy week and edging towards a slower season on the farm. Summer is our time to regroup and recover at 3 Porch. Our employees pare back their hours, take trips, tend their own gardens, nap in the a/c, and as best as possible, avoid as much of the intense stress that farming in a Georgia summer exacts on your body. There will be some brutal days in the fields doing all that’s required to prep and plant 9,000 dahlias, but they’ll be exceptions and not rules. I swear I’m much older than I would’ve been if I didn’t spend a decade laboring all day, 7 days a week, in the...

Happy Friday y’all! I’ve been wearing a sweatshirt this week. I feel like I’m somewhere else or somewhen else. A chilly May in Georgia is more welcome than it is common. I’ll keep my beanie and my hoodie close at hand and be grateful for cooler temps as long as we get 'em. Maxine's peonies after 7 days in the vase with her smart refrigerator trick! We got an email from a customer yesterday with 3 photos showing how beautiful her peonies looked 7 days after receiving them. Now, peonies are inarguably some of the most beautiful flowers in the world, but they aren’t known to last forever. In her case, she was tickled with the fact that hers still...

Happy Friday y’all! It’s been a lovely week out here. Some afternoons have climbed into “too hot and muggy” territory, but outside of that it has been beautiful. Mornings have been cool, dewy, and welcoming, with a slight breeze carrying us blissfully through the lunch hour. Evenings in the shade have been magical to be outside working. The crew is taking the day off, so it’s just you and the leaves and the birds as you go about your chores in the perfect weather. Mandy physically cannot be indoors if the weather is anything other than terrible, so she’s always working on something outside “after” work, and I do all the peony harvesting 3 times a day for about 6...

Happy Friday Y’all! Exciting news for us!  Mandy and Rachel have been working with the good folks at Brown Parcel Press for almost a year now to really elevate and beautify our seed packages, and they are finally ready to share! Introducing our new seed packet designs! We never really intended to be a seed company, but so many things changed for us during the pandemic, due to significant family medical issues that kept us from returning to markets. When we shifted away from farmer’s markets, we stopped growing tons of beautiful varieties of flowers that don’t ship well. Most of them were grown by seed, so we had a ton of seed sitting around at the same time that...

Happy Friday y’all! We’re heading into a stretch of mid to high 80’s now. Time to fire up the a/c a bit. That section of spring where every single thing is bursting with freshness like you’re living in an 80’s commercial about mint gum or Irish Spring has come and gone. Beautiful plants are still emerging from dormancy, but all around them, things that were recently dripping with crisp freshness are now showing the other half of life. The hard truths we all must grow to swallow. Snowball Viburnum dropping its petals! I’m fascinated by people who utterly embrace the beauty of decay. Floral designers who treasure an arrangement in all stages – who love the dropped petals and wilted...

Happy Friday y’all! I’m looking forward to this weekend because we gots stuff happening in this Mayberry of a town we call Comer. Fourteen years ago when we drove across country with all of our belongings (mostly tools and bee boxes) in 2 trailers. It was a harrowing adventure. We got a flat tire on a trailer just leaving the driveway. That set the tone for the whole trip. 5 flat tires, 2 failed fuel pumps, a faulty ignition switch, some electrical problems, a trailer that almost flipped, a jack that busted and almost dropped the whole car on my leg, and much of that in the dessert Southwest during the heat of late summer. We slept nights in the...

It’s Thursday evening and I’m sitting outside in the faint breeze with a couple of the neighbor’s dogs. It’s been a muggy day, our first of many, and the breeze and shade of a Japanese maple are kindly taking the edge off. It’s quiet, but for the occasional sighing exhale of Chaos, the birds chirping, guineas cacophonously being guineas, and Kali and Naomi laughing over in the studio while trying to film a video for Instagram and realizing the absurdity of all the little details required to do something like that in a way that seems effortless to the viewer. Everything is blooming on the farm! We are smack dab in the middle of Georgia spring here. Dogwoods blooming, spirea...

Happy Friday y’all! The mornings have been beautiful out here. The snowball viburnums are bursting with crisp whiteness, the purple lunaria is springing forth from the undergrowth, daffodils are still popping, the first iris has sprung up, the witch hazel continues to be fragrant, the mulberry tree is full with green fruit, the pineapple pears are already thumb sized, and the world is bathed in pollen. Butterfly Ranunculus sparkling and shimmering in the tunnels! Our butterfly ranunculus are having a moment in the tunnels right now, and I highly recommend them if you’ve not had them in a vase before. A lesser known flowering delight, whose super power is that it is covered in buds and every single one of them...

Happy Friday y’all! Spring and winter are swirling together lately. Some days are so warm that we are sweaty and uncomfortable and then we’re hit with strong winds and freezing nights. You can tell it is later in spring, though, by the radiant effect of the earth. A warm day after a lot of cold is extra refreshing, because though the air is warm, the earth itself and every item of mass (trees, rocks, buildings) is radiating cold. That differential is what feels so refreshing to me. It works in reverse too. A fresh cool breeze while the earth is radiating warmth is so much better than a cool breeze on a cool day when everything around you is cold....