June Notes
Greetings,
The flowers keep blooming and business is booming! We’ve been unbelievably busy this Spring, which is a good thing, but we also feel like we’re running around like chickens with their heads cut off. Every single flower we harvest seems to leave the farm almost immediately. It’s a wild time to be flower farming. We’re simultaneously thrilled and overwhelmed.
Somehow, in the midst of all of our busy harvests, we managed to get a lot done on the farm this week. We planted out our second successions of all of our summer blooms, did a fair amount of weeding, transplanted our field grown heirloom mums, and managed to do a bit of other maintenance here and there. There are few things that feel quite as good as checking off a long to-do list. Sure, next week we’ll have another one, but for the weekend, we can breathe easy. We’re looking forward to a verdant, productive June. Some visitors this week told us that the farm looks the best they’d ever seen it in all of the years they’ve been visiting. We have to agree!
Photo by Irena Stein
One thing on the to-do list that we’re especially excited about is hanging up birdhouses in the area surrounding our dahlia field! Dahlias are one of our most valuable crops, and so we spend an extraordinary amount of time caring for them. Unfortunately, they’re just as desirable to pests as they are to our floral customers.
We generally don’t have to endure too much pest pressure on the farm, but we find that we always struggle with cucumber beetles eating out dahlia blossoms. Because of the inevitable damage cucumber beetles do, we try to cover every single flower with an organza bag while the bloom is still in bud form. Then, once the bloom is ready to harvest, we’ll remove the bag and cut the stem. Covering and uncovering the blooms as we harvest every day takes an extremely long time, and it’s really a practice we’d love to do away with! That said, the quality of our flowers is of the utmost importance to us, and so ditching the organza bags is risky business. So, we’ve decided to try to do more to increase the diversity of wildlife surrounding the dahlia field, in hopes of eliminating, or at least easing, the pest pressure. We’re hanging wren houses now, and we hope that inviting more birds into the field will be a mutually beneficial relationship.
In other avian news, we welcomed these babies to the farm this week!
An example of what you could make at our Crafted Series event with Well Crafted Pizza.
A reminder that On June 9th, at 6pm, we’ll be at Well Crafted taking part in their Crafted Series and making floral arrangements. Tickets are $60 and participants will receive a lesson in floral design, make their own arrangement, and enjoy pizza and beer.
Tickets are available on Well Crafted’s website.
Sunday, June 6th, 8:00 am - 11:00 am: Johnny’s
We’ll be at market with arugula, sprouting broccoli, carrots elderflower, edible flowers, garlic scapes, radishes, spring mix, and hakurei turnips.
We’ll have loads of bouquets, in addition to bunches of peonies, poppies, campanula, nigella, and foxglove.
Take care,
Amelia and the rest of the Two Boots Farm crew
Finn would like to remind you to eat your carrots!
We’re at the tail end of foxglove season, but there are many more flowers still to come. In the background we’ve got feverfew, scabiosa, snapdragons, bachelors buttons, larkspur, nigella, and more!
