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.
Fall planting
I’ve had my hands in the soil. The fall planting of spring flowers is in. With the help of a stellar all-woman crew, we got all the plants that were started in soil blocks into the ground during the second full week of September, on track to have a good eight weeks of time to grow and establish strong root systems before the days fall below 10 hours of daylight in November.
Ageless
Early this morning, just before my daily run, I met a regular client in the parking lot of the community garden to hand off a bouquet with the season’s first dahlias. It would be a gift to a friend for her 40th birthday. In this year of distancing, I have done several such drop-offs.
Cool-season annuals
I have spring flowers on my mind. On the front porch are seed trays full of soil blocks planted with foxgloves and snapdragons and flowering carrot and scabiosa, hardening off to be planted in the next few days. They’ve been growing under lights in the cool basement for weeks, but now I’m leaving them out nights and sometimes have fans softly blowing on them so their tender stems will toughen up before they go into the ground.
Whitney & Clark’s wedding
Whitney called on a day in November about a June wedding and came organized and prepared with photos, a list of ideas and an open mind. Also with Clark, who was emotionally present and did a lot of listening, the kind of lawyer everyone would like to have.
Honest Tom
Caitlin sent a note in July with the subject line “Horse garland,” wanting to explain more on the phone. There was a Pinterest photo attached, of a horse standing conveniently at a white fence, head turned just right, apparently at ease with the floral wreath of eucalyptus with pink roses around its neck. The horse just happened to be the right shade of dove gray, too.
Roses & honeysuckle
Everything I know about this wedding is third hand, and I may get some of the particulars wrong. But in my imagination the setting and colors are clean, the participants mindful—altogether an alternative model for a wedding in our time, in this moment now.
Flowers this week
Now begins the second high harvest time for flowers. The first is in spring, May, when the peonies and the fall-planted spring annuals are at peak. But now it’s all zinnias, celosias, gomphrena and late-season perennials. Yet to come are the dahlias and the tall grasses of the meadow.
The scent of hops
Just returned from my annual pilgrimage to the hops farm, 45 minutes from here, where I bought 20 vines that are now laid out on the attic floor to dry. Mine was the first sale of the season. The vines along the outer ends of the rows were farther along in flower than the ones in the center, so the guys and Kansas Hops Growers cut mine from the north end.
Windows of time
Last night I carried out the crucial act of the first weeding of a newly planted bed—the majoram, which I allowed to grow a long time in soil blocks because it’s a perennial and slower to grow. I put it into a newly reworked row in the area where I have the perennial herbs, planting just after the new moon, an auspicious time, in late June.
Anatomy of a bouquet
I’m talking about a market bouquet—the kind you get at farmers’ markets or the grocery store, or the street markets in Europe. Not a wedding bouquet. Let’s say it’s mid-July. The peonies are long finished; they won’t be making a showing here. But any time of year, a bouquet has to include certain pieces and parts.