Hey hey y’all!   Busy as usual out here.  This week we have cut back the old leaves of thousands of hellebores peppered throughout our two acre woodland, divided thousands of dahlia tubers in stacks of crates in the basement, weeded the peony plants on one of the terraces down below the store, finished painting the cabin, built tons of racks and started making preparations in the propagation house for all the mum cuttings we’ll soon be taking and worked on various other odds and ends in the fields and tunnels.   We’re also running around taking inventory of all the billions of bits and bobs we need in order to be prepared to get through the busy, busy spring.  Of course...

Happy New Year y’all!!  We’re gearing up for a beautiful flower filled 2023 and are looking for a couple of special people to join our team from February through June.  One very organized person to lead our flower bundling/shipping operations and one person to be a Jack/Jill of all trades on the farm.  The first position is largely indoors, while the second is largely outdoors.  Both require great physical health, mental acuity, and a positive and kind attitude.      These are paid positions and not internships.  We are very much looking for people with real work experience and a strong work ethic.  It is a fast paced work environment with tight deadlines, but a completely friendly and supportive atmosphere.  It’s critical...

We’re nearing the end of the year and our employees have all stepped away for a couple weeks to take some much deserved time away with friends and family.  The farm is a wonderful place to spend your days, but a solid chunk of time away from it always refreshes the spirits.    Speaking of refreshing your spirits, we hosted our employees and their families for a year’s end appreciation party and it was a lulu.  Naw Dee Poe and Eh Plaw showed up with about 15 young kids we weren’t expecting and it quickly upped the fun level.  We made them break into teams and put them in either funny wigs, or funny glasses.  The winners of the 1st round...

  When the pandemic initially hit, lockdown happened, and everybody in the world sort of stopped for a bit to try and figure life out in this new paradigm, something beautiful happened out here. All our neighbors, from different walks of life, religions, political views, ethnicities…all started looking out for each other in ways I’d never experienced in this life. For the better part of 2 years, Mandy and I didn’t go to a grocery store. We grew vegetables and fruit and plants for gardens and shared them with our neighbors.   Frequently, different neighbors would bring us 20 lbs or more of sausage and beef, or 4 flats of eggs. Others would bring us gallons of milk. Always, we were checking...

  It’s another rainy day in North Georgia.  When market customers would lament rainy conditions with me, they would often catch themselves and say, “oh, but I guess it’s good for you.  Farmers love rain right?”   I guess that is partly true.  We probably appreciate rain more than the average person, but once the aquifers are replenished and the plants are hydrated, its appeal diminishes significantly.  Too much rain makes it impossible to use a tractor. It also makes working in soil on foot incredibly difficult and messy, and actually compacts the soil which is bad for microorganisms and plant health. With shorter and colder days, fields often don’t dry out during wet winters. If it’s super wet for months at...

    I hope y’all avoided significant damage with this week’s storm.  It was a rough one.  We scrambled to get our heads away from the window when the thunder started booming in an unsettling fashion during the wee hours.  We’ve both spent time in the hospital from electrocutions (her from lightning, me from a downed power line), so we have significant respect for lightning and do our best to get in safe spaces when it strikes close by. Fortunately we incurred no damage this time around.  Just mucky fields.   We’ve been frantically digging up all our dahlia tubers this week to try and get them out of the field before even more rain comes next week.  It’s already tough enough...

Happy Friday, happy Native American Heritage Day, and happy belated Thanksgiving!  Today is an appropriate day to make a book recommendation.  I highly recommend getting your hands on 1491.  A fascinating book on the Americas prior to European settlers.  Truly mind-blowing on so many levels.  A really expansive, yet in-depth, complex and nuanced portrait of the thriving civilizations that proliferated on these 2 continents for so long.  It’s hard to overstate just how profound the information in that book is.  Okay. Back to farm talk. Our crew is all off for the latter half of this week spending time with family.  Our niece is visiting from Mississippi and is currently out with Mandy collecting Cosmo seeds before the rain and...

  This week at the farm we’ve been harvesting and processing tons of beautiful mums, prepping and planting more beds in our tunnels, troubleshooting problems with our heaters, playing with puppies, and spending some much appreciated time with my family who are visiting from CA.     My whole family was out in the woods on Monday cleaning up the landscape, moving bushes and logs, and building a roof over the old porch at the cabin.  Wednesday my dad and brother helped me to start building a second porch on the cabin.  This one will be around back and will give us the perfect space to just sit in the woods and take it all in.  No view of the farm or work...

  Some of you may be reading this for the first time because of Floret’s recent Instagram post about our mums. If however, you love flowers and don’t know of Floret, you are in for a treat.  Arguably the pinnacle of the the family flower farmers in the U.S. she (Erin Benzakein) has been a friend and a mentor since the beginning for us.  Mandy met Erin at her very first workshop many moons ago and the two have stayed connected since.   Floret was the tip of the spear in the farmer/florist phenomenon that swept its way through Instagram this last decade and changed so many lives.  We didn’t even own smart phones until she convinced us to get on Instagram...

The first of Spring’s flowers are beginning their journey here.  The tunnels are starting to get planted with ranunculus and anemones. It’s a long process to getting the space ready so that the beds are perfectly shaped, weeded, and amended.  We often steam the beds to eliminate soil borne diseases and nematode pressure.  It’s quite laborious and time consuming, but pathogens build up quickly in soil in tunnels and there is no other good organic solution to eliminating them.     Conventional farms use synthetic chemicals to kill pathogens in the soil. They can be pretty nasty.  For instance Methyl bromide is a broad-spectrum fumigant that was widely used to control insect, pathogen, nematode, weed and rodent pests in strawberries.  We grew...