Quotable Sunday 09/30/2012


The Colors of Fall

After a long and very busy day at our market and a very late football game which we won,  I am just now getting to this blog. I am  sorry this is much later than usual and I am not feeling very inspiring, so I think I will let the colors of fall speak for me today. They are inspiring and truly colorful.  Happy Autumn!

 

          "The season for enjoying the fullness of life -- partaking of the harvest,
sharing the harvest with others, and reinvesting and saving portions
of the harvest for yet another season of growth." -   Denis Waitley

Flowers in the House


Another month has gone by and it is time for another flowers in the house party at Jane's house.  I so enjoy this day, because I get a trip around the world and get to peek in people's homes and see how they live, hopefully with flowers.  While we are waxing and waning with our flowers, I imagine the southern hemisphere is beginning to burst with spring time flowers.  So from our neck of the woods, we offer a few flowers that were leftover from a wedding and our farmers' market.  They might be a little ragged but still beautiful in our eyes.  

                                               A toast to the first days of Autumn

                                             A girly flower bouquet just cuz!

                      Mmmm... which flowers were left over from the wedding, I wonder.....

Join the rest of the party at Jane'sSmallButCharming house and see the world. 

Quotable Sunday 09/23/2012


First Day of Autumn

"Autumn is the eternal corrective. It is ripeness and color and a time of maturity;
but it is also breadth, and depth, and distance.  What man can stand with autumn
on a hilltop and fail to see the span of his world and the meaning of the rolling
hills that reach to the far horizon?
-   Hal Borland

A time of new beginnings....

And a time of things coming to an end....

                                       Just a little Autumn Color for your Day

Quotable Sunday 09/16/2012


Try One More Time

This is a bucket of Lisianthus, a beautiful long lasting flower that looks sort of like little roses. Have you ever tried to grow it from seed?  It is no picnic or piece of cake.  It is a tiny little seed that takes FOREVER to grow, clogs up the greenhouse and is started in November.  Now most folks get lizzie plugs, letting the experts get them started for them, but we being cheap, oops I mean thrifty, have tried to grow these from seed.  It has taken us THREE years of seeding and not getting anything to germinate or it grows SO slowly, it gets overlooked by our spring chaotic planting schedules.  We were also growing from seed because we had no idea how it would be received by our customers.

This is a tray of lizzies.  You have to look really close to see them.  They are the little green leaf in a mini block in a 2 inch block.  See, really tiny and these guys have been growing ( I say, sitting) for months.  It is at this point, I am ready to chuck them, they are clogging up space in my tiny greenhouse.  I don't have enough room for all the other flowers I want to grow. We are at a cross roads here, so after much debate, we decide one more time.  We will move them to the propagation house, they will become his responsibility and he will plant them out if they ever get to size.  Amazingly they get to a size he can handle and are planted in our hoop house.

I do not have high expectations for them but am secretly hoping that they will produce some flowers. Then we see other flower farmers on the internet showing their very long stem lizzies and we start to wonder what are we doing wrong now.  

Why are our lizzies so short?  Is it soil fertility, probably... is it light levels, not sure...too hot too cool... what is the answer?  But they grow some more and start blooming some more.  They are not growing in weeds, it is berseem clover a nitrogen fixing legume that will grow till it freezes.

Finally we have enough to cut for our markets.  But how will they be received?  What should the price be since they were so labor intensive to produce?  

We are happy to report that they were extremely well received, our customers loved them.  They said how much they loved them, how long lasting in vase they were and they hoped we will continue to grow them.  This weekend, we brought in our last two buckets of lisianthus and there are no stems left, in fact, there was a race to grab the last few stems by two ladies.  We are encourage by all the compliments and pleas to grow more and to expand the colors.  

So I have to say this, Farmer Tony was right (ack, his head is going to swell) and I was wrong(rarely ha ha). It was worth trying one more time,  believing this time it would work.  One more time, that is what flower farming is...trying one more time believing this time is the charm.

Never had any stems of lisianthus left over for me to play with, other than a few broken ones.  Just some pretties on our window sill.

                                 When the world says, "Give up,"
                          Hope whispers, "Try it one more time."
                                              ~Author Unknown

Quotable Sunday 09/09/2012


Squint, and It is a Box of Crayons!

I have an old camera, period.  No instragram, a tiny screen to see the photo and a rubber band to hold the digital card door shut.  Maybe a new camera will be in my future next month for my birthday.  Anyway, when I viewed the pictures via the camera, I thought, what did I just shoot, a giant box of crayons.  No reading glasses, no eye focus, squint; maybe it was a big box of crayons. 

                  Nope, not crayons, just 30 little posies of our flowers in a riotous mix of colors. 

        30 little colorful posies in search of the 30 mason jars that will grace a garden wedding today!  Go forth little flowers and be oh so colorful!



Red is passion-lit, orange is flowerageous, yellow is suntastic, pink is lipsensual, green is lifebursting, blue is skyful, purple is berrydancing, gray is cloudrainy.  ~Terri Guillemets

Quotable Sunday 09/02/2012


September is Here!


I use to be a school teacher many many years ago and even now the first days of September make me think of  firsts.  I think I reoriented to the first of September rather than the first of January.  There are so many more firsts this time of year.  First days of school.  All the new stuff:  new clothes, new sweaters, new shoes, new school supplies.  Seeing old friends, meeting new friends, football games, falling leaves, crisp mornings...Yummy apples fresh or in crisps, sweet pears, making applesauce, making pies, canning pickles, tomatoes both sauce and salsa... Dark mornings, early evenings, wearing a sweatshirt again, wearing fuzzy socks.  

The flowers that we have, are what we have; can't make any changes as this point. But the firsts of next season are coming.  The anemones and ranunculus bulbs are on their way. 
 Can't wait to be offering these beauties again.

 Next year's lily order has been sent.  Soon daffodils and tulip bulbs will arrive on our doorstep to be planted for next year.   We are busily building two more hoopity dos where our ranunculus and anemones will grow in. 

 The coming of fall, the ending of a season but the beginning of the next one. New firsts!

        September is here and fall is on our doorstep.   We love this time of the year! 

                                               "By all these lovely tokens
                                                 September days are here
                                                With summer's best of weather
                                                And autumn's best of cheer."
                                                         -  Author Unknown