April Showers Brought Mother's Day Flowers

The season of my people is here. The birds are twittering constantly in the trees, sometimes keeping me up at night as they sit by my window. There are days I can drive down the road with my window down, and going outside barefoot feels like a luxury I can afford. It's one of my favorite times of the year, watching everything warm up and the outdoor activity explode around me. The farm is buzzing with work as we try to break records on how many plants we can get planted in a day. We are harvesting flowers by the armload, and the final round of mum shipments are making their way out the door.  It's a flurry of business everywhere you look right now, but it feels so good to see so many of our well-laid-out plans being implemented.

The belle of the ball right now is the peony field as it wakes up just in time for Mother's Day. We always look forward to the magic of the peonies. There's just something spectacular about watching these nondescript buds open into the most impressive flowers you ever dreamed of right. And, oh, the colors! They are heaven-sent! I can't think of more saturated-colored flowers than those of the peony; they are just breathtaking. But they do make me work for it! I have to harvest this crop every couple of hours when it's in bloom, so I end up tethered to peony watch. But is it really that bad? With such beautiful blooms, it’s easy to get distracted from all the other goodies on the farm like the stock crop, but I'm equally head over heels about this little beauty too.

We work so hard to grow our stock crop. One seed equals one stem, which equals one bloom. One chance to get a flower. It's even temperature sensitive; too cold, you stunt the crop. Too warm; it's quick to bolt to seed and is not good as a cut. It requires a high tunnel to protect the delicate blooms, and to time it for Mother's Day is a really hard risk to take, but we did it beautifully! Our stock is fantastic and spot-on for Mother's Day bouquets! The soft, sweet clove scent of these dream spikes of ruffly color will knock the socks off of any mom come next Sunday, and I'm proud of our farm team for executing such a technical crop!

We also have tons of fun novelties going into bouquets like our Bells of Ireland, our upright Clematis, Lupine, Sage, and Viburnum. It’s all that special stuff that makes these bouquets feel different than the same ones you see cranked out year after year. They represent our land, our growers, our producers, our designers, our community, the beauty they’re just right here, each and every spring.