Bare Mtn Farm

Quotable Sunday 05/06/2012

Taking the Good with the Bad.  Always learning....

What a Great year for anemones.  This was our first year growing them in a hoop house in crates and it was wonderful.  We started cutting on them on Feb. 22 and we still are cutting on them this May 6th.  They grew with very long stems, huge flower heads and bright cheerful colors.  They are still putting out great stem length but the heads are getting smaller.  The colors are still vibrant and now are perfect for my little vases. 

The bad news is the ranunculus are finished and we were not able to cut them as long and hard as we had hoped.  They also were grown in our first large hoop house.  On the weekend of April 21st, we had three days of 80 degrees,  the hoop house was warmer, and they all went to bloom at once while we were at the market.  Thousands of stems of glorious colors went to waste.  The temps cooled, but the plants were done.  Lessons learned.... have a backup plan in place when the biggest day for flowers (Mother's Day) is still a week away and plant less dense and vent the hoop house way more.

So now the ranunculus come out and hundreds of heat loving celosia are going to go in after a bit of soil amending.  We are growing about a dozen different types of celosia and they were all started in our mini soil blocks.

These will be transplanted this week to bigger soil blocks and moved to the propagation house to get bigger and hardy for the hoop house.

These celosia were planted on Thursday and germinated on Saturday,  boy they are ready to grow.

The  big fig tree is setting on many little figs.  They are really tasty but too many can upset the tummy.  Sometimes during the summer we will get a dust devil wind blow through and the ready figs will go flying.  Maybe that's where we get the saying: "Don't give a flying fig." 

We are excited about a new tomato variety we are going to try this year.  It is called Indigo Rose and it is a purple tomato.   Rain Drop Farms here in Corvallis grew this beautiful little plant.  Can't wait to get it planted. 

The downside to our veggie garden is we don't have much planted, some strawberries and spring peas.  With so much to do with the flowers, we got to make time for the food side.

We have some beautiful flowering cherry trees, which are very large and can be seen from the road.  They are a beautiful pink color and for a few days are just lovely.

Then the spring rains come, the wind blows and the petals go flying.  We have tried to capture the pink snow with our camera but the evidence is on the ground, on all the plants, the roof, the car,  the greenhouse.  It becomes a brown slippery mess that takes a few weeks to clean up.

So now we are in that transition time where our spring flowers are coming to an end and our summer flowers need sunny warm days to grow and flower.  So we don't have a lot of flowers to offer but I still had a few left for my windowsill.

Hoping you all have a cheerful day in May.

"You've got to take the good with the bad, smile with the sad, love what you've got, and remember what you had. Always forgive, but never forget. Learn from mistakes, but never regret." -unknown-