Greetings, farm friends!

Spring is in full swing and we’re keeping very busy on the farm this week. It’s been a whirlwind of planting, potting up, and harvesting SO MANY FLOWERS.

Our newest employee, Wren, took on the enormous task of being solely in charge of tulip harvests, and she’s been dealing with tulips all day every day this week! The sheer quantity of blooms we are harvesting right now feels almost unimaginable for this point in the season. Ranunculus and butterfly ranunculus took us by surprise this week and suddenly became extremely productive. We began harvesting hundreds of stems overnight! Fortunately, this year’s butterfly ranunculus crop is stunningly beautiful- by far the best we’ve ever grown. We’re battling a fairly intense aphid infestation in our high tunnels, but most of our crops look fantastic. It’s chaotic trying to get everything done with so many blooms to harvest, but we’re enjoying basking in this early spring beauty.

*We are so grateful to have Wren working on the farm with us, and they’re doing an incredible job of overseeing the tulip harvest!*

*Meg and Karen, prepping additional lisianthus beds after we realized we had run out of space!*

In between harvests, we managed to get all of our Lisianthus seedlings in the ground, which is no small task. We planted about 4,000 Lisianthus seedlings this year, and we’re really hoping to have an excellent crop. If you’ve followed our newsletters for a while, you may recall our challenges with managing fusarium wilt in Lisianthus. We’ve revamped our planting methods to allow for more airflow, and we’re using new biological controls that we hope will make a difference. It’s an expensive crop to produce, and with our adjusted growing methods the crop takes up three additional beds now, which is a lot of real estate on a small farm like Two Boots. We sure hope it’ll all be worth it!

Next week we have to finish potting up all of our seedling sale plants, which is another massive undertaking. We’ve shared all of our efficient potting tips, got our playlists ready for lots of greenhouse time, and now it’s time to get the job done!

The greenhouse is beginning to fill up, and soon it’ll be overflowing with seedlings. We can’t wait to get them out the door and into your garden!

If you missed shopping for seedlings in our online store, worry not! We’ll be bringing seedlings with us to the farmers market soon, and we’re returning to Flower Mart and Cylburn Market Day this year.

*Crop Spotlight:* ***Tulips.***
We’re in peak tulip season and have hundreds of tulips in dry storage in our cooler at the moment! We’re able to store tulips out of water for several weeks, which means we’re able to strategically hold them for florists and events. That said, it gets a bit wild in a cooler filled with crates of tulips, and we have to be very careful about tracking inventory. It takes a ton of time and effort to harvest and store tulips.
We grow mostly double and parrot tulips, and a few fancy single varieties. No shade to standard tulips, but what we’ve got in our fields hardly compare. Most of the tulips we grow are fluffy, colorful, and giant. Another thing we love about tulips is that they have an extraordinary vase life, and continue to look more beautiful as they age. Some people dislike the way their stems arch and stretch as they age, but we think it makes them all the more interesting.

*Last week’s bouquets— we were shocked by how many ingredients we had to work with!*

We’re back at the Baltimore Farmers Market this Sunday, April 14th, from 7:00- 12:00!

Did I mention we have tons of flowers this week? It looks like it may be a gray and chilly farmers market on Sunday, but our stand will be full of brilliant blooms. Please swing by and pick up some floral sunshine for your home!

We’re planning to bring bouquets, anemones pussy willow, poppies, butterfly ranunculus, ranunculus, tulips, and anything else we can find in the fields!

Thanks for reading, and we hope to see you at the market!

Amelia & The Two Boots crew

Springing into Action