Wedding Season on a Flower Farm
Greetings, friends!
We’ve had another hot week of farm work, and it’s looking like next week will bring similar weather. We’ve been hoping for more of the cool days we enjoyed last week, but it just doesn’t seem to be in store. This extended heat is hard on our crops, and we can definitely see it affecting our cool-loving crops, which we hope will pick up the pace in the coming weeks.
With fall wedding season swinging into gear, the demand from florists is high, and we’re doing our best to meet it. Florist sales comprise the bulk of Two Boots’ business, so wedding season is no joke around here! Each Tuesday and Thursday we send out a van packed to the brim with blooms for deliveries to Baltimore, D.C., and surrounding areas. This week we had orders from about fifteen different florists! We spend a lot of time putting orders together, making sure all of our blooms are in top condition, double checking to ensure that everything is in the right place, and communicating with designers about colors, varieties, shortages, and substitutions. On weeks with lots of big florist orders, we’ll sometimes find ourselves harvesting from 7:00 am to noon! We also do some wedding design ourselves, and have several coming up in the next couple of months.
We’ve been tying up loose ends around the farm and trying to get things spic and span before we’re bombarded with the double whammy that is pawpaw and wedding season combined. This week we cut back our peonies, cleaned up the greenhouse, weeded all over the farm, and unloaded 3,000 pounds of seedling soil that we’ll use over the course of the next year. It feels like we’re in good shape for the rush of the next month, and once September is over we’ll be able to focus on cleaning up the farm for winter!
It may not be glamorous, but seedling soil is one of the backbones of the farm. This is just a portion of the seedling soil we unloaded this week! Big thanks to Regina who went to pick up all of these bags by herself, and loaded each and every one into the van without a pallet jack! When she got back to the farm we unloaded it as a crew and were stunned that she’d managed to do it alone.
Between the high tunnels we’ve got radicchio, scabiosa and campanula with interplanted cover crop, and this week’s market lettuce
We’re back at the JFX market on Sunday from 7:00-12:00.
This week’s market stand will feature bouquets, bunches of celosia, dahlias, eucalyptus, millet, rudbeckia, sunflowers, and tweedia. The produce selection will feature edible flowers, spring mix, shishitos, and basil.
The flowers are stunning right now, and summer produce is rolling in! Stop by your local farmers market this week and pay a visit to your farmers.
Thanking for taking the time to read this and supporting our farm,
Amelia and the rest of the Two Boots crew
Cutting back the peony foliage. The plants go into a dormant period, and will reemerge in the late winter. Some people wait until frost to do this, but we do it once the plants start looking rough in late summer or early fall. We remove all of the foliage from the field so as not to foster disease.
Harry got his first haircut this week! We’re hoping he has an easier time seeing and hearing now.
Just a big toad, hiding out and keeping cool on a hot day.
We’ve continued our patio-side monarch caterpillar and chrysalis watch. There were two on an aloe plant today!