Fruit & nut plants are here!
Last week we received our yearly delivery of fruit plants best suited to grow in our climate.
Many are at the farm right now, and are being transitioned to the hardware store in the coming week. If you stop by the farm stand tomorrow, you will get first pick of several varieties!
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The rain has made everything grow – weeds and crops alike. Here is our field most visible from Charles Street, with a variety of rows of seeded fall crops and biennial flowers that have germinated, along with a green haze of baby weed seedlings! Most of these weeds will die with frost though, so should be gone without us having to do the work ourselves.
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I spent the past ten days on the west coast (conveniently missing all of NC’s horrible weather!!) & spent last weekend in Skagit Valley, Washington, at a flower farming workshop. I learned so many valuable things about flower growing, the business side of selling to florists, flower wholesalers, and wedding clients, and had a BLAST harvesting and arranging flowers!
The twenty other girls attending the workshop and I were let loose to “pick anything we wanted” from Floret Flower Farm’s fields for our arranging lessons on the final day. I had so much fun getting to know women all across the continent who are farmers, florists, in the floral wholesale industry, &/or gardeners – all of us united by the common love of the beauty of farm-fresh flowers!
Out of the several hands-on design activities, my favorite was this “bridal bouquet.” I enjoyed working with so many ingredients that I have never even seen before – my ‘to grow’ list just keeps getting bigger!
Matt and I then traveled down the west coast for a week of vacation after the workshop. Along the way, we visited Swan Island Dahlias – a massive dahlia farm in Oregon that grows tubers for sale in their online store- many of the varieties I grew for the first time this summer came from this farm. It was incredible to walk through over 40 acres of these bright and brilliant flowers in bloom!
We also visited one of Baker Creek Seed Company‘s three retail stores. We sell a selection of Baker Creek heirloom seeds at our hardware store, but their complete collection took up an entire historic bank building in Petaluma, California.
Now it’s back to work and I am so happy, as there’s truly no place like home!
