So I got kicked out……     Starting this farm on a budget 13 years ago meant building every structure and repairing everything myself.  After the first 3 big projects I got so tired of inefficiently having to dig through a pile of tools to find what I needed and drag it out, only to have to put it back in a tight pile in the barn, that I decided to build myself a workshop. I had been wasting half of my time just finding tools.    I did the design, the grading, forming, concrete, framing, roofing, sheathing, trim work, electrical, and finally had a place to both store and easily find all my tools as well as a convenient...

Hi Everyone,    I’m here again and will pick back up with a weekly update on farm life.  I hope you’ve had a nice few months and have enjoyed a vacation or at least a dip in some refreshing body of water, even if it's just a baby pool.    We appreciate your patience with our absence on the newsletter front.  Sadly, Mandy’s father has been confronting some serious medical issues, so we’ve been focusing most of our energies towards helping out there and actually haven’t been living at the farm for the last couple of months.    Fortunately we’re only 20 minutes away from the farm, so we’ve taken to helping in evenings and the overnight shift, which has given us the...

Happy Friday y’all!   We are busy planting thousands of dahlias right now.  We’ll be planting them all through June. We stagger the planting so we can have a succession at harvest.  It’s important for farmers to succession plant a lot of crops so that they don’t get a huge harvest at one time.  That used to be the mistake of a lot of beginning farmers (maybe that’s different now with greater access to information).  You’d see them at market one week with a full booth overflowing with beautiful produce or flowers.  Then the next 3 weeks, they’d have almost nothing.  The result is that customers think you’re unreliable and start shopping elsewhere, and on the week you had a large...

Sad news in our sweet little community this week.    In the 70’s a group of do-gooders splintered off from Habitat For Humanity to continue humanitarian work and planted themselves right here in Comer GA.  They started Jubilee Partners and dedicated their lives and resources to helping the most marginalized peoples in the world.  They save the lives of refugees in the most war torn parts of the world and give them shelter, support, kindness, and a chance at a new life.    The stories I’ve heard are both brutally devastating and heroically uplifting.  The tragedies these refugees have suffered are unspeakable and the dangerous and selfless lengths these service workers have gone to to help others in desperate need...

Happy Friday y’all!    I’m just getting out of a meeting with the crew on how to improve everything behind the scenes for next year.  Our path forward is always dictated by our relatively small space, which can be a challenge, but has a silver lining of always pushing us towards greater efficiency and a lot of great plans came out of the spontaneous morning collaboration.  We’re looking forward to reshuffling everything and bringing more flowers and plants to y’all going forward in a way that supports our crew’s workflow.    Prior to that, we planted all the dahlia seedlings in the upper most field adjacent to the farm store.  It’s our favorite plot every fall, because we don’t harvest...

Happy Friday y’all,    My parents are in town for a visit and in a stroke of unfortunate timing, Mandy and I’ve been sick all week (long Spring finally caught up with us), so I’m not gonna write much today.  Fortunately there’s not much to say that hasn’t been said.  Our spring is officially over.  We have no flowers in the tunnels or the fields.  All has been picked clean.    The crew worked incredibly hard and efficiently in the cooler weather of this week to pull out tens of thousands of plants from the tunnels and make way for either cover crop or mum plantings.    Mum babies are still being sent out to all you growers and we’ve...

Happy Friday y’all.    It’s been a full and interesting week out here.  Mother’s day bouquet harvest, making, packing, and shipping is always enough to fill our plates, but this year we had 200 mum plant orders to add to it and a couple of crazy storms come through and throw a few wrenches in the gears.   There was talk of a hail storm on Monday, but we have a tiny microclimate where hailstorms historically never affect us.  Neighboring farms have reported hail multiple times over the years, but we’re always spared despite being 10 minutes away from those farms. We decided not to worry about it and after the crew left, Mandy hopped in the van to go...

 They have emerged.  The ground is littered with holes carved up through the hard clay, spotted like Swiss cheese.  The leaves and branches of every bush and tree are covered in vacuous chitinous shadows of earlier incarnations.  A never-ending crescendo of humming is the soundtrack to our lives.  Gently turning the volume ever upward.  When I reach into a bush to cut a peony, or stick my torso into a small pump house to fix a well, I’m greeted by orange eyes starting at me and orange wings humming past my face, occasionally landing on my clothes.  Bent over the carcass of an old greenhouse table this afternoon, I felt an unfamiliar and slightly prickly presence on the back of...

Happy Friday!    The lovely purple Lunaria that carpeted our world has all gone to seed but for a few stubborn petals holding out til the last minute. The snowball viburnum dropped all their bruised and faded flowers in the last rain.  The buckeyes’ new leaves look like a droopy, wet hat. The bamboo is ferociously aggressive and the new shoots are already 15 feet tall.  The Smokebush is beginning to flower while the nearby Pecans’ pollen is making us choke a bit and get red in the eyes.  The poppies are just about done for the year and the deer flies seem to love when I harvest the peonies. The love is not reciprocal. The honeysuckle is absolutely lovely...

Happy Friday y’all!    It’s been a sweaty week down here.  The seasonal cramping has begun as the days have been in the mid to upper 80’s, construction work needed doing, and the air smells like chicken farts.     We’re surrounded by 100 acres of hay fields and after mowing and baling, comes fertilizing.  They’ve got chicken houses, so it’s an in-house sorta deal.  They load a dump truck with the doo doo, then drive it out to the fields and spread it out. Feeds the grass, but it’s a little gamey in the nostrils for a minute.  Fortunately the nearest fields haven’t been graced yet, so once the dust settles, the fragrance passes and the sweet scent of roses...