Well, Valentine’s Day is over, and man did it fill our hearts with the love of flowers! We worked together to craft bouquets and represented them up and down our little corner of the Shenandoah Valley and beyond. It was a complete team effort and left us all feeling like we nailed it together!
But the farm doesn’t stop nor do the plants, so while we weren’t looking, our mother stock of mums exploded with growth. The day after our Valentine's hustle, I joined the farm ladies as we began another aggressive round of cuttings for propagation.
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We have a fine-tuned approach to handing over these small starts to our propagation partners, Evergrowin Greenhouses. And also to systematically collect, inspect, clean, label, and count each cutting variety by variety.
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There is a lot of data collection happening at the farm to help us share better plants, flowers, and knowledge. Throughout this process, we are beginning to learn our thresholds of cutting production for each variety to better plan our focus crop for production year to year. The unknown varieties in the Fedex house are growing out, and are already a solid 12” in height and full of low-branching healthy shoots. It’s almost a pity they are unknown as the vigor they have would make beautiful cuttings, but since we don’t know what variety they are, we chose to forgo any propagations, and instead allow these plants to serve as our control group to the rest of the stock. This way we will be able to compare plants that haven’t been cut from to the ones that have.
Our main mother stock crop is almost overwhelming with the amount of growth and potential cuttings available from tunnel 5. We will be sending a healthy amount to our propagation team and filling you guys in on some exciting next step mum news you won’t want to miss it!
XOXO, Jess
