How have two months flown by since our last farm update?
In May we had our first peony flower arranging class. It’s hard to think of a time that existed when the days and nights were cool and you didn’t sweat in places you didn’t know you had.
Some other awesome local businesses that have bought our flowers and microgreens are Forget Me Not Flowers, Hy-Vee, Growing Grounds, Kemp’s Upper Tap, Nightshop, Sugar Mama Bakery, Daffodil Lane, Chesterbrook Academy, and Green Top Grocery.
We are extending those feelers and developing those relationships to get people on board with the good ass stuff that we grow.
This year, it feels like we finally have a weed management plan down. And by weed management plan, I mean I wear gross overall bibs, a dorky hat, and force myself to go through each plant and weed everything by hand and with a colinear hoe. Chris keeps us on top of our spraying schedule. We utilize organic pesticides and fungicides to control insects, powdery mildew, and various disease issues that always seem to hit us here in Central Illinois.
Our BCS has proven time and time again to be the most excellent resource we have. Chris is able to melt through plants, turn beds over, and get another crop in. He just planted popcorn, so if you’re a close family or friend and have had our caramel popcorn last year – we will have more this fall/winter.
Our next project this week will be to build a stoop outside the flower workshop. So it will go from this:
To hopefully something like this:
When I showed Chris the sketch, he sighed loudly and walked away from me. Which pretty much sums up our marriage. 🙂
We have gotten better, but are still working on knowing when to stop working for the day. It seems as if we do a lot of our outdoor work during the day and then we’re catching up on invoicing, book keeping, inquiries, and email until 10 at night most nights.
It’s still worth it though. The blood, the sweat, the tears. This whole farm is still worth it and our passion hasn’t burnt out (don’t get me wrong, there are weeks where we wonder why the hell we started this thing). While weeding last week, I was thinking about how I wouldn’t be doing a job like this for anyone else and that weeding is probably the number one thing I hate to do on the farm. It’s awful and hot and kills my back. My hands hurt for days afterwards. But you only do something like that when you genuinely love and believe in something.
I love this farm and I believe in this farm.