Dahlias And Lilies

Right now we are cutting dahlias and lilies.  Here are our two bouquets for Jane's flowers in the house at SmallButCharming.

Check out Jane's house and see flowers from around the world.   Thanks Jane!

Quotable Sunday 07/29/2012

Planning

We are the point in the season where it is time to shift our focus to the future.  Pretty much everything is planted that is going to be planted for this season except a few more sunflowers.  So now we turn to the next season of flowers which need to be ordered and some will need to be seeded and planted this fall for next season's flowers.  Can you imagine deciding what to purchase for tulips, daffodils, callas, lilies and dahlias with an eye for what folks will be excited about, a whole year in advance.  If I could get all the beautiful choices of flower bulbs I would but I can't so I am now at the point of making a guess on what will be popular.  I need a crystal ball to see into the future of what brides will be wanting, what colors will be popular and what the popular flower will be for 2013.  This is where you can help us.

LILIES  -  Orange was really popular last year but not so much this year.  What do you think, hot or not?  Yellow lilies seem to move real well,  yes or no?

 How about fragrance?  The two above are not fragrant but the one below has a lovely fragrance.

  Is fragrance a positive or negative?

How about Mini Callas?  Last year we grew a variety of colors and they seem to sell really well.  We increase our calla order a tiny bit and they aren't as popular as last year.  We figured out how to grow them with a good stem length but are brides interested in other flowers?

Dahlias-  For years it was purple dahlias but the last couple of years it is orange and coral dahlias.

So what is the most requested dahlia besides Cafe au Lait.  We have it but need to expand the number of plants we are currently growing.  What dahlias to you like?

I am interested in everyone's opinion!  I have finally made the choices for daffodils, tulips, and ranunculus and they are on order.  Now I need to choose my lilies, dahlias and mini callas.  Please help, even if it is to say your favorite color is pink or white or your favorite flower is a sunflower or a dahlia.  My choices are endless but my resources are not, so all ideas will be helpful.  If you are a designer, please look into your crystal ball and give me a hint of what the trends are for 2013.

"Planning is bringing the future into the present so you can do something about it now"
-Alan Lakein-

Quotable Sunday 07/22/2012

A Birthday Wish

Today is Tony's birthday!  He is fifty+ and doesn't care.  He enjoys life, loves what he is doing and likes being out in nature.   He jumped on board when I said I want to be a flower farmer and he works damn hard to produce a beautiful flower.  Or a whole cooler of flowers.

 Yesterday at the market, it was an incredibly busy day of bouquet-making and brides asking about future flowers and open dates from me.  Tony made some incredible bouquets and added flowers to our customers' designs just like I would do.  With confidence, style and humor, he creates some great bouquets!  He just says he is paying attention to what I do?  Gee, you gotta love a guy who says he IS paying attention.  So.....Happy Birthday Farmer Tony!

"We fight, we make up, we share secrets over a coffee cup. Sometimes you're my friend, sometimes a guide, you are the person in whom I take pride. Happy Birthday."    -unknown-

"I Would Love Local Garden Flowers For My Wedding"

We had another request for locally grown garden flowers for a small garden wedding this week.  Any flowers, any color (except orange) and designed for the mason jars.  We love and appreciate folks wanting to purchase local and sustainably grown flowers. We are getting many requests and think that is really great to support local flower growers!

                           So the following is a pictorial of some of the flowers we used.

                                       Snowy white feverfew and purple-pink spray dianthus

                                                              Drum-stick alliums

                                                                Mini Calla lilies

                                                         Bupleurum- a beautiful green

                                                                           Dahlias

                A table of assorted flowers from penstemons, lilies, lavender, phlox and rudbeckias.

Around and around the table I went creating garden style, country chic, summer vintage or whatever you would like to call them, locally grown and carefully made summer bouquets.  Four proconas later, I had a bunch of beautiful bouquets ready for the jars.

When they were delivered, they were exactly right, just what she wanted, amazing!!  All the words we so love to hear!

          A wish for a beautiful wedding and a long and happy marriage to the bride and groom!!!

Quotable Sunday 07/15/2012

The Season of the Mason Jars!

We are having a fun time this year making floral arrangements for weddings and other special days.  Saturday was just such a day. We did the floral arrangements for a Bar Mitzvah.  The request was for garden flowers in mason jars with two large special floral arrangements to be placed in special vases.  We love doing these types of flower arrangements where we can choose the best flowers we have for the day and I have so much fun putting them together.  The woman who ordered the flowers said that she wanted them to be local flowers only, she wanted to support local farms and to say that they came from the beautiful Willamette Valley.  We LOVE hearing that and we made sure we did our very best!

                                                        Fifteen jars to fill with lovely flowers.

          Here are the first 5 jars completed with flowers.  Dahlias, mini callas, snaps and even some sweet peas.

                                         Lavender and sweet peas, what a heavenly fragrance!

Here are the second set of 5 jars.  Couldn't have them all posed together because it was very hot  while I worked on them.   Off to the cooler for them.

                          The last set of 5 jars.  All a little bit similar and just a bit different. 

The order included two larger bouquets that would be placed into very special vases.  I hope these bouquets were special enough.

I love doing special bouquets and vases of flowers and I especially enjoy the simpleness of the mason jar.  It lets the flowers sing and be the stars.  

Love is to the heart what the summer is to the farmer's year - it brings to harvest all the loveliest flowers of the soul.
-- Author Unknown

Quotable Sunday 07/08/2012

Life (Really!) is a Bowl of Cherries!

About twenty years ago, we planted a tart pie cherry tree here our home.  We have always been big on veggie gardening and putting food away via canning and freezing.  This was to be a dwarf tree so picking would be easy.  Well you have to wait years for the tree to really produce.  Time passes and the tree gets bigger, and bigger and bigger yet but not many cherries.  It is tricky to get cherries here in Oregon, when the rains ruin pollination.  We got a few pounds off the tree in the past but not recently.  For many years the birds got them all and one year we found a mother raccoon and her babies stripping the tree clean and breaking lots of branches.  But this week, we spied something red in the trees.  OH, yea there are cherrries!!!  So instead of mowing or planting flowers or anything else, we had to get those cherries. It turns into a two person job.

The problem with this effort, the cherries are about 15-20 feet in the air and we don't have a fruit ladder.  The tree is planted on a slope and the guy on the ladder is wobbling so a few quick photos and back to hanging on to the ladder.  No broken necks here.

This is the low hanging fruit so far but the cherries are most abundant at the top.  So maybe if we could hook a branch and pull it down a bit, we could pick some more cherries.

A tool is fashioned and it seems to work pretty well, so higher he climbs while I hang on to the ladder and pull down the branches with the new tool.

  

Hey we have a full bowl of cherries.  Took awhile, probably should have been planting flowers.  But oooh, ahhh, such beauties. over ten pounds of these beauties!

                We decided to make sour cherry jam and freeze some cherries for later.

Ta daaa..... The bounty of nature's wonderfulness.  The jam tastes like cherry pie, I added a little almond extract and cinnamon to the cherries.  

Tony is saving some of the pits. He thinks he can grow more cherry trees.  Not sure about that but what the heck if you don't try, how will you know if you can or not.

We always squirrel away our freshly canned products for a fall or winter day, when they will taste like a summer afternoon.  But I love how there is always a smidge left, not worth rolling the canner again.  These are the little jars we enjoy now and know that is was SO worth it to climb that tree for some cherries.

"Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life.   It turns what we have into enough, and more.  It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity.  It can turn a meal into a feast,
a house into a home, a stranger into a friend.  Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow."
-  Melody Beattie 

Wedding Flowers

We were asked to do 3 wedding reception vases of flowers.  The request was for mostly blue and purple flowers with white flowers and it should be natural and wild.  How did I do?

                                               We delivered them and she was very happy!

Quotable Sunday 07/01/2012

Its Still Raining....

For the second week in a row, our Saturday Farmers' Market was rainy.  Last week it was just showery but this week it Rained.... its June 30th for pete's sake.  While the rest of the country is so very hot, we are wet. It was warm and humid for us.  I forgot my camera but you would have seen canopies filling with water and massive waterfalls splashing down on people, tables and flowers.  I know the flowers like the rain but the rain kills a market day.  God bless all the people who came out and bought from us drippy farmers.  At the end of the day , everything and I mean everything is now trying to dry out.  The cube van has all 3 canopies drying inside.

                                     All the tablecloths and the banner and our windsocks  are drying inside

I have loads of wet laundry and there is work to be done in the fields but it is raining again.  After being rained on all day, an evening of a nice dinner and warm coffee is planned.  Tomorrow we will be out planting again.  Hopefully not in the rain.

                                                           Whether the weather be fine,
                                                           Whether the weather be not,
                                                           Whether the weather be cold,
                                                           Whether the weather be hot,
                                                           We'll weather the weather,
                                                           Whatever the whether,
                                                           Whether we like it or not
                                                                   ~Author Unknown