Spring on the Farm
Hello flower friend,
Spring is a tricky time on a farm. Weather conditions go back and forth between sunny and blizzards, and the tender young plants must be kept safe from the lowest temperatures and the cold winds. Because it’s such a watchful time, I have all my spring plants in my backyard space rather than in the community garden, although there’s plenty of work to do there too lately. I cover my raised beds with plastic to keep them warm, but on warm days, the plants will fry from the heat under the plastic in just a few hours (that was a hard lesson a few years ago!) It’s a lot of raising and lowering plastic, connecting and disconnecting hoses, and checking the weather.
Even with this “constant vigilance” (Harry Potter reference anyone?), it’s an exciting time. Watching the plant’s foliage go from microscopic to a leafy bush brings much needed relief from the long dull winter days. Here are the adolescent plants that will hopefully bring you some beautiful bouquets in a month or two! My little garden gnome Ferdinand (another children’s book reference to a certain flower loving bull!) wanted to jump in the picture to give you some scale.
Ferdinand enjoying himself in the ranunculus and anemone bed a couple weeks ago.
At this point it’s hard to trust in the buckets of blooms that my winter flower math predicted. Everything looks so small, especially without access to a greenhouse, and it all suddenly seems very real that I need their bloom times to align with each other to sell mixed bouquets! It helps to remember those lush days of summer when I have to weave my steps through vines and heavy branches just to get to the back of the garden. Bounty will come.
Growing anything, children or plants, is such an exercise is letting go. It’s easy to dream that your garden will be drowning in flowers when it’s the middle of the winter, but in that messy middle of spring, when the adolescent plants seem capricious and the growth seems to pause for some new problem every week, it’s harder to trust in that ultimate reward. Whether it’s our plants or our kids, those little gestures of care we give when their future seems uncertain keep our hearts in the present, which is where they belong anyway. Future flowers can wait. Right now we celebrate the little victories and hold these tender things close through the little setbacks. We won’t be getting spring back once it’s gone.
I’m excited to get our flowers to you! For now, may we keep trying to settle into whatever sort of spring our lives give us, and take time to appreciate the quieter, gentler side of growth. If you’re eager to support this endeavor, the best thing you can do is send my website to two friends here in Colorado Springs, and tell them they can sign up for this newsletter if they want to be connected to a small local flower farm. I’d be so grateful. Until next time.
Your flower farmer,
Meredith
