The In-Betweens

Apple blossoms

Just delivered week 3 of my Spring Subscriptions. One more week to go! This has been such a fantastic experience—I am loving it! It makes me so happy to share my flowers with people who appreciate them and are excited to receive them every week. It makes me very tuned in to what is blooming each and every week, as well, and where I have gaps to fill. Just for my own note-taking, it’s time I make a list of what I have had blooming each week so far, along with ideas for filling in more of those gaps.

I’m going to list the date from each Thursday, as that’s when I have been and will be cutting blooms for subscriptions. I put in all caps what I had the most of in a given week.

Week of:

April 9: Earliest daffodils (too small to harvest for subs)

April 16: Frittilaria meleagris—still pretty short, 8-10” (kept growing taller each week, until eventually 2+ feet!)

April 23: DAFFODILS (most in gooseneck stage probably 4-5 days earlier.)

April 30: Early tulips, fully open. (Would need to harvest earlier if to be used for subs/cuts—so maybe 4-23?). Still daffodils, hyacinths, and also grape hyacinths. Camassia? (Picked some week of 5-14, but most were done by then.)

** May 7: TULIPS—mid singles (all my orange, red, and yellows,) and early doubles (my purples). Lilac buds—just swelling and turning a pretty purple color. Last of the daffodils.

May 14: LILACS. A few late tulips, including parrots. First of the perennial bachelor’s buttons and early alliums. ORNAMENTAL PLUM, apple blossoms, pie cherry.

May 21: PERENNIAL BACHELOR’S BUTTONS. (Harvested 1 bucket, could have cut 5 or 6 more buckets full.) ALLIUMS (these were the big purples, most of the smaller haven’t quite bloomed yet but have buds.) Ornamental plum foliage (blossoms all dropping,) ninebark foliage. 1 early iris blooming (not enough for subs.) Catmint—too short for subs. (I planted ‘Junior Walker’ to fit into the allotted space better, but if I plant the regular ‘Walker’s Low’ next time, I’ll bet they would be long enough to cut.)

Speculation for next week: (May 28): Bearded irises—they all have buds. More perennial bachelor’s buttons. Hoping for wintered-over annual BB’s to start up production. Right now have 2 blooms open on those. Possibly the smaller white alliums, although their stems are still so short! Will try pulling them, like tulips, and see if that gives me long enough for subs.

Spring subscription leftovers: lilacs, ornamental plum, and a couple of short camassias!

A couple of thoughts:

Maybe next year I should offer a 4-week Spring Flower Subscription from the last Friday in April to the week after Mother’s Day, then give myself a break during this gap. I’m really hoping my irises will come through for me next week, but I’m going to be combing through the rest to find stuff to put with them. I may have to purchase from a fellow farmer to fill out the bouquets.

All of my peonies have many buds on them (!) but the only ones that even stand a chance of being ready for next week’s subscriptions are the Coral Charm out front.

Other flowers with buds right now: columbine (out front), salvia (still very short), clematis

Flowers I need to plant more of to fill in this gap are: bearded irises, alliums, and flowering shrubs. I have leaned pretty heavily on my flowering trees and shrubs for filler during these early times. I haven’t cut any of the fruit tree branches to put in, although I would consider it if we had several trees.

I also want to try again at growing anemones and ranunculus next year, in hopes of them filling in this mid-May gap.

My cool flowers have pretty much just sat in their rows and done nothing for the past 6 weeks. I need to figure out what’s going on with them, because I think they should be blooming right now to help fill in as well. At least some of them should be. That’s the point of planting them in April, isn’t it? So I’ll be very interested to see when they actually start blooming. They are getting bigger and finally look like they’re growing, but no flowers yet. I think those really hard freezes mid-April may have set them back quite a bit.

Also, when are my hundreds of Dutch irises going to bloom? Seriously! I was counting on them to help a sister out right about now, but I don’t even see buds on them yet. Maybe they’re waiting for an invitation.

p.s. We are heading out of town in a week. If my peonies and Dutch irises all bloom while we’re gone I will be fit to be tied!

** Spring Subscriptions started. Also, Mother’s Day weekend (5-10).

First and Last

Last of the daffodils for this year.

This was a great week for us here at Bluebird Flower Farm! Our Spring Subscription started last Friday. YAY! I’m always watching for what’s blooming, but last week I was watching everything like a hawk, I tell you! Particularly the tulips—as I mentioned, tulips blow open very quickly in the heat, and I knew we were going to have some warm days mid-week. I needed every tulip I could get my hands on for the subscriptions (x 3) plus 7 Mother’s Day arrangements.

So I was going out a couple of times per day to pull up any tulips that were ready and get them in the cool garage. “Ready” meaning “still closed but showing a hint of color.” I also cut lilac buds and harvested the last of the daffodils, and the first of the perennial bachelor’s buttons. Fun times. I did end up purchasing some flowers from a flower farm in Ogden that sells wholesale, which was great too! Tom grows such beautiful flowers and I was happy to be supporting a fellow flower farmer. I purchased a little bit of greenery from the regular wholesaler as well. I had a good mix that was mostly locally grown blooms. Just a note: as my subscriptions are a harvest share, I used all my own flowers and filler for those!

I had a lot of fun putting together arrangements again. I missed that in April! I put together a few for myself last month, but there’s nothing like making them for someone else and then seeing the joy they bring to that person when you deliver them.

This is the exact stage my alliums are at right now—just breaking open. This was taken last year, on May 19. We are a full week ahead of last year!

This week I’m looking forward to subscriptions again. It’s going to be a purple week! I’ve got 2 different types of alliums in bloom, both purple, plus blue violet camassias, baby blue camassias, and purple perennial bachelor’s buttons. I may even find a few grape hyacinths (purple and blue as well!) to add in there. My daughter and I experimented last week, tugging the grape hyacinths down at the base, so that they come off the bulb itself underground. That gave us another good 6” of stem, so I think they would be long enough for the subscriptions. For foliage, I will probably cut the ‘Dart’s Gold’ ninebark that’s so pretty right now, as well as some of my ornamental plum branches which are flowering.

I want to add in lilac blooms, but I need to experiment first and make sure I know how to keep them hydrated. So maybe this week I’ll cut some and try some new tricks I’ve learned along those lines, and see how long they hold up. Then I can add them in next week if they don’t wilt in 2 days. The lilac buds were awesome in last weeks’ bouquets.

We are working on getting permanent irrigation installed in the garden (pvc pipes underground that connect to removable drip tape in the beds). That will be amazing, once we get it going. Then we can leave on vacation and not worry about everything dying off while we’re gone!

All the starts I planted out the first week of April are growing, but very slowly. I’m going to give them some fishy fertilizer this week and see if that won’t give them a bit of a boost. I need those flowers! C’mon ladies—get a move on! I’ve got dahlias hardening off, and phlox and statice still inside, that I need to bump up to 2” blocks this week as well, so I can start hardening them off.

I have found, in our dry and windy climate, that the 3/4” blocks just don’t do well at all in hardening off stage. If I want anything to survive past that, they have to be in bigger blocks, or in a plastic cell that will retain the moisture. I have a bunch of starts in peat pots, as well, but I’m not a fan. They dry out so quickly, and I think they are wicking moisture away from the roots of the starts, since the peat pot doesn’t stay moist. Again, wind. So I have decided from here on out, I will just collect the plastic 4” pots to reuse in that instance.

Lastly, I need to purchase some Wall O’ Waters for my kiddos’ tomato plants. They are hardened off and need to go in the ground soon, but we are still having cold nights. Again, I don’t want one night of frost to ruin weeks of work keeping those beauties alive!

Always more to do, right?

What do you have growing right now?

Spring Blooms Update

Do you love fancy daffodils? Do tulips make your whole day brighter? If so, we could be friends!

Spring flowers are some of my most favorite blooms ever! Maybe it’s the long winter of nothingness, but when I see those bright colors and frilly edges, it just makes me so happy!

This year has been an interesting one for spring bulbs here at the farm. First of all, with COVID-19, I closed my floristry business for most of the month of April. April is daffodil and hyacinth season here. I had Daffodil Alley all to myself. I much rather would have shared the bounty with all of you! 
Such is life.

I mean, I enjoyed seeing those pretty little flowers every day, don’t get me wrong. I cut a few to bring inside, but for the most part, I just let them bloom on their own. Most spring bulbs do better—as far as coming back the next year—if you don’t cut them.

Daffodil Alley was a mix I planted 2 years ago. 
Also, yes, I need to weed and mulch this area very badly!

Of all my hyacinths out back, I had 1 small bloom this year, and for some reason—no doubt relating to the weather—it bloomed on such a short stalk that the florets were basically still in the ground. That seems fitting for life right now, in a way. Blooming in the ground. Anyway, I have found that a lot of what I do during the growing season is hedge my bets against the unpredictability of the weather (as the frost cloth post attests.) I need to learn more about why that happened so that I can prevent it next year, if possible.

So this week has been the week of tulips! During cooler springs, my tulips have lasted for more than a month. I’m thinking I’ll be lucky to get 2 weeks out of them this year. We’ve had several days in the 70’s already. Tulips come and go so fast in the heat. In fact, I’ll show you.

These pink tulips in the picture above are a variety called ‘Sweet 16.’ They are usually my first tulips to bloom. Even so, they aren’t generally in bloom at the same time as those big yellow daffodils—that’s a first this year. This picture was taken about a week ago. Now the pinks probably have only a couple of days left—if that—before the petals drop. The next wave, which are dark pink tulips planted nearby, have also already started blooming. If we get several more hot days, these gals will probably all be done and gone before Mother’s Day.

About the only way I know of to stop that situation from happening is to have a cooler. If you harvest the entire tulip bulb, while the flower is closed but showing color, you can keep it in a cooler for a long time—weeks—and then as soon as you’re ready for it, you cut off the bulb and put it into water at room temperature, and you get the same vase life as freshly cut. Alas, no cooler here yet. Also, I just barely re-opened for business yesterday. (YAY!) So, I may be purchasing my tulips from a fellow flower farmer in Ogden this year for Mother’s Day orders.

I have loved the Snakeshead fritillaries under my plum tree out front. Their flowers are little nodding purple checkered (!) bells. Or white. They come in snazzy purple-checkered or pure white, because they are the flapper girls of the spring bulb lineup. These were underwhelming last year, first spring after they had been planted. Now in year 2, they were fantastic! I wish I had been open and could have shared some with you in arrangements. I had 10 clumps out there, and some of those stems got to be 15-20” tall! It was amazing! In comparison, last year, my tallest stem was maybe 6”. They seem happy there, so I’m hoping they just keep multiplying and dividing. You know, all the math. Flapper math. 
(Is it past my bedtime? Probably. Ha!)

Anyway, what else? Oh yeah—alliums are sending up shoots and my big purples have buds on them again. Excited for those. All the new ones I planted out in the perennial beds in my cutting garden are still just green shoots.

Snowdrops were no-shows this year. I wonder if they got eaten by something.

Grape hyacinths are so cute! Also, way too short this year to use in any kind of arrangement, even the minis. It’s okay, though. My 2 year old keeps picking them and bringing them to me to put in a tiny 3” vase that we have. I’m thinking that once again, the heat wave is the culprit. I want to experiment with planting a whole bunch of them in the shade and see how they do.

My lilac bush is loaded with buds. I have yet to keep those blooms hydrated once cut, even with every trick in the book. Guess what, though? I recently cut some of the budding branches and put them in an arrangement. The buds stayed hydrated! I don’t expect them to open up or anything, but they made for some great texture in my arrangement.

Oh! One more note about tulips. The pale yellow and white tulips I had out front—I think they are ‘Jaap Groot’—finally have some decent blooms this year! Quick recap of their life story: Year 1—eaten by deer all the way down to the ground. Year 2: recovery year, with maybe 2 very short blooms. Year 3: (right now!) Probably 10-15 tulips blooming at a normal height! YAY!!

I know you’re going to ask—what did I do to keep the deer away? I will tell you my secret: plastic forks stuck around the tulip foliage, tines up. I’m not even kidding! The deer haven’t bothered my tulip flowers—they just love to eat that foliage as it first comes up. The forks give them a smart poke in the nose when they try that. So yes, I have forks in all my flowerbeds now, protecting my precious tulips!

**Bonus: find the fork in the tulip photo above! :)

All right friends, I’ve got to sign off before I say something really goofy. Good night! I mean, see ya. 

On Again, Off Again: Frost Cloth

 

Can we just talk about the weather for a minute? Hey—don’t roll your eyes! This is a farming blog, after all. Weather factors in to everything!

So, as to be expected in April, we have had some snowstorms. I grumble about those, but they melt off fairly quickly, and here in the desert—any water is good water, usually.

What I hadn’t expected this month was the super low night-time temperatures we’ve been having. I’m talking January-esque temperatures! There have been 2 different nights that we have gotten down to 15 degrees. Cold enough to kill a lot of plants. Several more nights have been in the low 20’s.

Mother Nature makes a rotten business partner! So what can you do to anticipate and plan for her mood swings?

First up—only plant things in the spring that can handle spring weather! All of the plants I’ve got out there right now are cold hardy annuals—they don’t mind a light frost, and laugh at a snowstorm. (Well, I assume they’re laughing on the inside.) Any warm weather lovers like tomatoes or basil are going to take a lot more work to keep alive if planted before nights have warmed up reliably.

Secondly, protect what you’ve got. While my snapdragons do fine with overnight temps in the mid-20’s on up, if it’s going to be colder than that, they need some help! One thing I’ve gotten on board with this year is frost cloth—specifically, Agribon-30. It’s all the white up there in picture, if you didn’t catch that already. Frost cloth keeps your plants a couple of degrees warmer than the forecast. It doesn’t sound like much, but it can be the different between slimy, frost-nipped plants, and healthy happy ones. Believe me.

A few of things to be aware of if you’re using frost cloth:

1. It lets rain through, but if you get snow on top of it, it can crush your plants. Rain—YES. Snow—NO! (Hey, that’s kind of catchy. Let’s make it into a rap! Or…you can do that on your time. Carry on!) I left it on through a rainy day last week, because the following night was going to get very cold again, but the one day it snowed I was out there pulling it off.
2. If your daytime temps get above 50 degrees, your little plantlings can get too hot under there, and that also will not be good. Off it comes.
3. It can be doubled up to provide even more protection, which is what I’ve done on those super cold nights.
4. It is quite difficult to put on by yourself if there’s any sort of breeze blowing. Just be forewarned.
5. Don’t waste your time with Agribon-19. It’s as thin as tissue paper and rips very easily, while not providing very much protection for your plants.

I am happy to report that nearly all of my plants survived our super extra cold nights so far this month! Have I been taking frost cloth off and on far more than I ever wanted to? Yes. Have I protected my investment from the wild swings in temperature? Also yes. The extra hassle of putting on and taking off the frost cloth has been worth it.

As a sidenote: I didn’t cover up anything that wintered over and they all also survived. So my parsley, Bells, the perennial cutting beds, bulbs—nope. I figured they’ve already been through a lot worse than this. They can take it!

I would love to get a cold frame at some point to help in these “shoulder seasons.” Another project for another day.

Time to Farm

Well, hello there! It has been a long month, hasn’t it? Since I last wrote, the coronavirus has swept through our nation and shut down all kinds of businesses in its wake. Including mine. My county issued a Public Health Order last week (seems like a long time ago!) asking all nonessential businesses to shut down. Not demanding—quite yet.

I had a hard decision to make. On the one hand, flowers are essential to me. On the other hand, I was having to go here, there, and everywhere to a) purchase the flowers and b) deliver them. I guess what tipped the scales towards “closed” for me, though, was that I’m doing this out of my home. There is really no way to guarantee that surfaces are sterilized. Not when I have my 2 year old climbing up to help and other children coming in and out every few minutes. Also, my husband works in the medical field, so the chances of him being exposed and then possibly bringing it home are higher than either of us would like to think about.

This one of the last ones I delivered last month, prior to shut-down.

So…until my temporary shut-down, I actually had taken 2 or 3 different orders from my Google listing and delivered them. That was fun while it lasted. I also have at least 2 people wanting to sign up for a spring CSA subscription (yay!), but I have told them we would just have to keep in touch on that. Here’s hoping I can start back up in time for that goodness.

Even though my floral design work has stopped for now, I have been using any and all extra time FARMING! It has felt good to get back out there and get my hands in the dirt again. I am happy to report that I have had some success with seed-starting this time around, as well. YAY!! I’ve got 2 trays full of forget-me-nots that I just potted up from 2” blocks to 4” peat pots today, in hopes of Mother’s Day sales, along with another full tray of petunias, and a smaller one of pansies for the same purpose.

I also have ammi hardening off, and rudbeckia getting close to being ready for that. I’m thinking maybe one more week for the rudbeckias and they should be big enough to put outside.

Just today I started 6 more small trays of various and assorted flowers: orach, more rudbeckia, 2 types of phlox, statice, and dahlias.

I also bought a whole bunch of starts from Plant & Grow Nursery in Clearfield. I had been debating about buying starts, but in the end, they had a great sale (50% off retail!) and I just went for it. So I have them to thank for my 2nd cool weather succession planting, which ended up filling 3 rows! One whole row of Ammi ‘Visagna Green’ (there were more than I expected of that one), Madame Butterfly snaps, 3 varieties of scabiosas (Red Velvet, Candy, and Raspberry Scoop,) and 2 varieties of dianthus (Amazon ‘Neon Rose’ and Amazon ‘Rose Magic’).

I’m not exactly sure where I’m going to put everything that I’m currently starting, but in the past I have always had bare stretches, so if nothing else, these can fill in all the bare spots out there. Although, I do believe I will have room for maybe 2 more long flowerbeds to fill up.

Other than farming, I have been doing about the same thing as you, probably: homeschooling my kids, hardly leaving my house for any reason, trying to get outside every day for some fresh air and sunshine. Keeping my distance and becoming even more socially awkward than usual with those who do want to chat (from 6 feet away, of course).

Here’s hoping we can get back to more normal life soon!

How are things with you?

Spring Fever

Since Saturday, we have had our first true spring weather around here. In fact, up until last weekend, I still had several inches of snow outside covering every flat surface. Guess what? It has melted off in 4 days!! I am thrilled! Even with more on the horizon. I laugh in your face, March snow! HA!

(Now please don’t hit me with a blizzard. Pretty please.)

 

Hyacinths are the scent of spring.

If this keeps up, my soil will be dry enough to plant this week! That will be a first since we’ve lived here. In fact, I planned all my seed-starting calendars based on the first week of April as the earliest planting date, because last year we had snow on the ground or wetness from the sky until then. I really want to get my first round of early spring flowers in ASAP: ammi, bachelor’s buttons, dill, daucus, buplureum, poppies, atriplex…. probably more that I’m not remembering at the moment. If I could get them in THIS week, just think—I could have flowers by May! That would be amazing!

I’ve also cranked up the seed starting machine. So far I’ve gotten decent germination on forget-me-nots, great germination on the petunias, okay for pansies. These are all flowers I’m planning to grow up big in time for Mother’s Day. 2 months away now.

I feel like a seed-starting elf over here—making a list, checking it twice!

It just feels so good to get out in some sunshine without even a jacket on! My kids are all wearing shorts. I had to make them go back and put on shoes this afternoon—okay kiddos, 50 degrees is not THAT warm! I’m feeling it, though. The fever gets in your blood and you just have to be outside! They had their first picnic lunch this week. It was awesome.

I can hardly wait for my Spring CSA to start up! Alas, I have 6 weeks to wait. Again, last year—no flowers until very end of April—so I wanted to be sure I would have something to put in these bouquets! Do you know what CSA even means? Let me tell you. It stands for Community Supported Agriculture. The idea behind it is that you lovely people purchase a subscription in the winter or early spring months, when farms are experiencing a slower time for revenue. Your purchase allows us to buy what we need to grow all the pretty things—seeds, irrigation equipment, weed barrier—all of that. Then when we begin harvesting, you get a share of our harvest. Yay!

I’m so tickled to share flowers! So this makes me excited. Here are the details for my Spring CSA Subscription:

1—Starts April 24, runs for 6 weeks until May 29.

2—Every FRIDAY I will drop off a paper-wrapped bouquet for you. It will be a mixed bouquet of whatever I have growing that week.

3—Delivered to your door…or the door of a friend if you’ve purchased it as a gift for someone else. :)

4—No vases. I’m not charging you for them, either. As I mentioned, these will be wrapped in paper. What I ask you to do, so your gorgeous flowers don’t die, is put a clean bucket or vase filled with water on your porch Friday morning for me to drop the flowers into.

Just think about it: 6 weeks of daffodils. 6 weeks of tulips. 6 weeks of alliums, and bachelor’s buttons, and grape hyacinths, and so many pretty flowers! It’s going to be so beautiful!!

In the meantime, get off your computers and get outside!! That’s what I plan to do, anyway.

Valentine's Day Flowers: A Recap

 Valentine’s week was amazing and busy! I ended up making 45 arrangements!! It was such a great learning experience for me, particularly in regards to systems and the business end of things.

Yes, you get to see my messy garage right here too. #keepingitreal or #toolazytocleanforapicture

The week before Valentine’s I counted vases (and bought some more), and made sure I had the hard goods that I would need.

I also put in my biggest ever flower order that week, by phone. That was a mental math problem that I grappled with for a couple of days, actually! There were so many variables to add in, namely: total number of arrangements ordered, size of arrangements ordered, types of flowers needed, numbers of stems of each flower type to put into each arrangement, number of stems per bunch from the wholesaler, and of course, cost per bunch. Then after all that, I got to move on to total cost vs. total budget and make them align. Fun times!

Added on to that was the fact that I am a very visual person, particularly when it comes to putting flowers together. I really prefer to go in person and wander the cooler, choosing what looks freshest and what colors will complement each other well. It was hard for me to get on the phone and work from a list. It was a long phone call, even with all my number crunching beforehand, as I tried mightily to picture colors and textures, and how they would work together. For this order, though, that was not an option. I needed to reserve the flowers in advance or I ran the very real risk of what I wanted selling out.

So after I got the flowers ordered, I went and picked them up the following Tuesday. Tuesday afternoon my oldest son helped me prep flowers for a couple solid hours in the afternoon. This entailed removing the plastic sleeves and rubber bands, stripping any lower foliage, re-cutting stems, and organizing them into buckets by color. In the past I haven’t organized them in that way, but with so many arrangements to do I felt like it would save time to have all of the same color in the same buckets.

I went back and forth in my mind between thinking “I spent way too much money on flowers!” to “I’m not going to have enough—I’m going to have go back and buy more!” Yeah, two extremes.

Wednesday was go time! The majority of my arrangements were orders from my BNI group (YEAH!) so those needed to be ready Feb. 13, Thursday morning, because I was taking them to the weekly meeting. So we homeschooled until 2pm, then I put my 2 year old down for a nap and started on the flowers! My oldest 2 helped me with several of the bud vases, which accounted for more than half of the total orders.

It was a little overwhelming at the beginning, even figuring out where to start. So I started on the arrangements that were going to be the most unique in terms of colors and flowers, then moved on from there. I started filling up our kitchen counter and table with the finished arrangements, which we then had to move aside to eat dinner. (Oops! Hey, at least I had put dinner in the crockpot early on, so I didn’t have to stop for that once I got going.)

From there I just kept going and going until they were done, packed into boxes for transport, and ready for the next day. It was very late/early when I got to bed that night.

At first I thought buying the purple statice was a mistake, but I actually loved how it played off the purple eye of the anemone!

Between Wednesday and Thursday I received 3 more orders by phone—from my Google listing! Yay! All 3 were for large arrangements. At that point I was thankful that I had built in a bit of a cushion in my flower order. I knew it would be close and I could always just go see what was left at the wholesaler, but I was pretty sure I could make it happen.

I was able to get those 3 orders done Thursday afternoon, which left Friday morning for delivery of the remaining arrangements.

A couple of things I learned from this:

1— I need to get back to work on building out systems for my business, including writing out specific, stem-count recipes for my different arrangements. I am reluctant to do it, in a way, because I don’t want to be tied down to a specific recipe—I like to make each one unique as much as possible. However, as my business grows, I am going to need that structure more and more. It can always be a jumping off point, but for figuring out how many flowers I need to either cut or order, I need hard numbers!

1A—If I ever get employees, this will be even more important! It was great to have in mind exactly what I wanted in the bud vases, so I could tell that to my kiddos.

2—Anything I can do in advance, should be done in advance! The right number and size of vases, all washed and ready to go; even labels pre-made and ready to put on boxes. Anything would be helpful!

3—I love the “everyday flowers!” It was so fun for me to deliver flowers to people and share in that moment of connection—even when it was just at the door for a moment.

3A—I need to rethink my delivery charges, in terms of TIME! I don’t think I’m charging enough for how long it took me, including packing the flowers for transport and actually finding the addresses.