The Blue Morning Glory journal
For eight years I operated a flower farm, on the side, in a place I didn’t want to be.
For a couple of those years, 2020 through 2022—working for the university from home during the pandemic, in the most isolated place I’ve ever lived—I kept a blog on my business website and wrote about 50 posts that were sometimes hardly connected with flower farming at all.
Many of these are collected here. Some stand as instructive guides to growing. I know they were helpful because readers said so, and I have reposted them for that group. Other posts only use flowers as a point of departure; that was the approach I used during five years in my 20s when I wrote a column for a floral business magazine. I wanted to tell my own stories, and what I wrote was met with appreciation, and I didn’t know anything about business anyway.
I was disciplined in my posting during 2020–2022. My life needed structure. The subject matter rolled around in my mind all the time, and the actual writing of each post usually was done in one sitting.
Larkspur & orlaya
Flower growers in North America are seeding their trays indoors now, some just starting, some a few weeks into it, depending on the crops. Some seed larkspur, which to me is unthinkable, almost.
What we call beautiful
The last book I took from the shelf at the Lawrence Public Library and read leisurely in one of the stuffed chairs, in March 2020, was Sean Sherman’s The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen. It is a beautiful book, and reading it made me hungry.
To stand in this space
These mornings, I stop at my North Lawrence garden after my run. There’s not much to do. I’ve let the zinnias, celosia and gomphrena stand with the perennials, as cover for birds, the rabbit that lived here all summer, creatures hidden from my sight.
The meadow
Today we call Mom’s meadow a native prairie, just over 28 acres, surveyed by The Nature Conservancy, deemed to have international importance, and protected legally, in perpetuity, by a conservation easement.
Flowers this week
The first of the ‘Coral Charm’ peonies opened today. Just one. By the time I found it, the bees were all over it. A couple of rows over, a male ruby-throated hummingbird was filling up at one of the native red-and-yellow columbines that had come up from seed beside one of the roses.
Flowers this week
This is a glorious spring day, with bright sunshine, redbuds and elms coloring up the hills, and crews out in the fields of the county doing some last prescribed burning of their grassed meadows. The doe was browsing early in the woods behind the house this morning, and the phoebes are on the nest.
About dahlia tubers
Yesterday, at the close of a satisfying afternoon clean-up in the perennial rows and organization of the downstairs room where I grow the plant starts and do the design work, I was out with the last wheelbarrow full of stuff for composting when a delivery truck pulled up. The order of dahlia tubers I half-wished I hadn’t placed had arrived.
Seed sowing: Some textural crops
This evening in April is misty, and as I write in the upstairs study, the cat is settled on my lap and a votive candle is burning on the desk. Outside the south window, I see the redbuds in color at the edge of the woods on the hill at a little distance.
How we connect
The baseline question, in the conversation that led me to write this, was whether we need our businesses to be present on social media at all. Because the question came from a young woman in England, whose life I imagined to be a certain way, it kept me thinking.
Out of dark November
It seems as if the planting crew were all just here, leaning over the raised rows, working steadily in the quiet fall sunlight to get the peonies in. I had thought I could do it myself; there wasn’t that much left to plant—just 400 peony-flowering tulips and 100 new peony tubers.
Flowers this week
My state of mind on the vernal equinox this year is hopeful though not joyous. My condition has changed irretrievably with the loss my father, the experience of coming through a 100-year pandemic, a year of spending most days working alone in a rural setting. And other shifts in my situation. I feel sober.
Seed sowing: Late winter indoors
As I write, the temperature reads -11F, which is the coldest morning I can remember here. I have lived in this area much of my life, and I remember snowier winters as a child, but not this kind of cold for so many days running.
Seed sowing: February outdoors
If have your hands in the soil, you know the words “as soon as the soil can be worked,” meaning, not frozen. Meaning, a good, fine seedbed free of weeds. The outdoor part of my February planting can be done if the soil is right and the weather isn’t so frigid I don’t want to go out.
Introversion
In sixth grade, I laid out my garden: 10 by 12 feet, packed with annuals, some planted as starts from the nursery, some as seeds, with ‘Heavenly Blue’ morning glory against the east wall of the garage.
Seed sorting in January
High winds today, but they’re broken by the woods behind the house and barns. In the gravel driveway this side of the kitchen garden, juncos feed in their little flocks. The frost cloth over the fall-planted spring annuals is holding up, and in a couple of months I’ll be watching the plants and the weather for the right day to uncover them.
A sacred calling
I’ve been reading a little book by a Jesuit about the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius and the process of coming to recognize your one true name—your vocation. This book was passed to me years ago by a graphic designer friend who is spiritually inclined.
Zinnia seed inventory
This afternoon I tallied my seeds to make certain I had everything I needed for 2021, particularly zinnias. They are the backbone of the flower farm from late June until frost, the focal flowers that carry every piece, whether there are dahlias and roses or not. It’s the zinnias that keep an arrangement grounded, that fill it with color.
See the native land
Most of our place is an old hay meadow, a fairly rich one, with a mix of native grasses and flowering plants fast overtaking the introduced brome that dominated these acres just a few years ago. According to the deed, this is the last piece divided off from a much larger farm.
I have enough roses
I’m taking advantage of the mild weather to do a job I’ve been putting off that really should be done now: Pruning the roses. There are 65, planted in 2016 and 2017.