This winter has been less of beautiful blooms and more planning for 2020, sowing seedlings, dividing dahlia tubers, and planting out baby plants. But mostly anxiously waiting for spring time to come and beautiful blooms to bless us with their presence again! It's always rewarding after spring and summer season to rest and rejuvenate our spirits but after a few weeks of being away from the flower field the itch for spring comes. The excitement of pulling tulips, cutting daffodils, waiting for the first ranunculus and anemone bud to form after weeding their beds all winter.
The biggest project we have taken on this winter is dividing all of our dahlia tubers, it might not sound like a big job, but with only my mom and I working for the business and only me dividing them its challenging to not feel completely overwhelmed. With washing, dividing, storing, and closely watching them to ensure they don't rot due to temperature and too little or too much humidity in the air is not an easy or desirable task. This definitely took up the majority of my time during Christmas break.
After we finished "farm stuff" for the day, at night most of our time was consumed with planning the 2020 season! It's intense work planning for an entire season of flowers, especially since we need constant blooms and not one patch of flowers will last the entire summer season for us! It's small groups of consistent planting that ensure we will be a able to provide blooms all summer long. Its funny because I always say when you are a flower farmer you are always thinking about the next season. One day we are weeding ranunculus and the next we dreaming of summer- zinnias, lisianthus, DAHLIAS (which we have so many new varieties coming and can't wait to share), celosia, gompherna, amaranthus, and sunflowers! We are taking inventory of our current seed supply for summer and making decisions about when we want flowers to bloom. We can plan all we want but there comes a point where you have to let go and let God and pray that they bloom when we want. The weather is the biggest factor in; if a batch of sunflowers will bloom in 60 days (like the package said) or if in the heat of summer they decide to make an early entrance and bloom in 40 days!
Behind the scenes of it all, I have been working really hard to revamp our website and spent the week I came up to school early to dedicate my time to that. I had to come up to Sonoma State the week before my official LAST spring semester starts because I am taking a beginner floral design class at the Santa Rosa Junior College. My mom and I are mostly self taught and so I am excited to get some formal training under my belt and implement it in our business. Our website was not as user friendly as I would have liked and so my goal is to make it super clear and easy for everyone to use! If something is important I want our customers to be able to see it!
Growing flowers in the Central Valley is great for so many reasons but one of the best reasons is that we are surrounded by a great community of other flower farmers! We were so thankful to be invited to lunch this month with a group of local farmers and chat all about flowers. I wasn't able to be there but my mom went and had such a great time! She said that Primos in Ripon had amazing food! Now I am excited to try it when I come back home and it makes me hungry as I am writing this post. I am also excited for another lunch date soon, hopefully when I am home! :)
I hope you all had a wonderful January! We are excited for 2020 and all the wonderful flowers it will bring! We have so many wonderful things planned so be sure to follow along! Thank you for supporting our small farm, we appreciate our customers and supporters so much!
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