week 15: I feel the earth move
this week on the little dream farm
The Carole King song was stuck in my head all morning long…
I feel the earth
Move
Under my feet
I feel the sky tumbling down
I feel my heart start to trembling
Whenever (you’re around)
Likely because there were moments when I really could feel the earth moving as the chisel plow and then the tiller made its way through the ground as my neighbor helped us create what will serve as the cut flower patch this growing season.
Thursday evening my neighbor passes by me on the road while I was out on a walk and says, “Hey, I was just headed your way to see if you wanted to get the flower patch going this weekend…the weather is great, the ground is dry enough…I think we’re ready to begin!”
Thank God for good neighbors…we’re so grateful he was willing to take on this work for us!
Chris and I shifted around our schedules and planned for 8 a.m. on Saturday morning to get this big project started. Originally we had it pegged for the first or second weekend in May, thinking it may either still be too cold or too wet to till a new growing space.
This early start gives me quite the head start to get the planting area ready, to prep the landscape fabric and lay that over the patch, and to hopefully get some drip irrigation going before the seedlings are ready to be planted into the ground.
When he pulled up in the tractor and got right to work, the farm was really feeling like a farm with the tractor roaring in front of me and the big barn, the corral, and the big garden all in its background. It’s such an awesome feeling.
This was a three-part process to get the flower patch ready.
First, my neighbor used the bucket on his tractor to move the donkey manure pile. Some of it had spent plants and larger branches in it, so we made a new home for that so it can continue to cure. The remainder of it—about half of the pile—he ended up using the back of the bucket to essentially pull it back over the grass where he’d be tilling. This will make for a great amendment to the soil and add lots of nutrients the flowers will need and love. I never thought I’d be so grateful to have so much donkey poop from Molly-Max and Dominic—all that shoveling sure does come in handy for the free compost it makes for the gardens!
Once that was all said and done he then took the chisel plow through the patch, which is like a big wide-tooth comb on the back of the tractor that essentially tears through the ground. He had a hunch that there may be a lot of rocks in the area, not knowing if it had ever been used as a growing space before. If there were a lot of rocks, it wouldn’t damage the chisel plow (as opposed to the tiller), and then Chris and I could walk through the patch and pull them out before he came back in with the tiller.
Originally I’d planned on a larger space, but between the seed room only allowing me a certain capacity of seeds to start at one time, and also since this is my first go at growing flowers at scale (oh…who am I kidding…this is basically my first stab at growing annual flowers in the ground!!) I figured that perhaps a little smaller of a patch is better for this year, and then we can always continue to expand in subsequent years if I want to!
So, I took a measuring tape and gave him some dimensions to go off of—I wanted to be able to plant eight 4-foot-wide rows with 2-foot walking paths between each row. I wanted each of those rows to be between 20-30 feet long. And with our corners vaguely marked, he got to work with the chisel plow!
Fortunately, there weren’t a ton of rocks in the space, though we walked through it with a bucket and picked up any smaller ones we did see. With the space measured out and chisel plowed, my neighbor then rode his tractor back up the road to his place, swapped out the chisel plow for the tiller, and made his way back down to our farm.
For the final step, he went through the whole patch with the tiller to comb through everything the chisel plow broke up and turned it into a nice, fluffy, fine, smooth patch that the seedlings can be perfectly transplanted directly into.
I couldn’t be happier for the help of our neighbors (of course we did pay him for his time and work—fuel is so expensive these days and everyone around here is always busy with a zillion projects of their own on their own farms or homesteads!). The whole job from start to finish was about an hour and a half, and it turned out exactly the way I was envisioning it.
Now the next step is to prep the landscape fabric (it has to be measured, cut, and then I’ll burn the planting holes into it with a propane torch), lay that onto the patch to create the eight beds, and then wait until we have the right weather conditions to get all the seedlings into the ground!
I’m about four weeks into starting flowers from seed and so far the process is going really well! I have another small round of seeds I’ll start in about a week, and the rest will be directly sown into the patch in early May.
I stood out on the patio Saturday night just looking out over the Big Garden and the Cut Flower Patch behind it. Just one year ago I was scared of that Big Garden in front of me. I was worried I’d kill everything in it, or that I wouldn’t be a good gardener, or that I wouldn’t have what it takes to want to stay the course.
I’ve shared this before via Instagram, but Chris at one point before last growing season said to me:
“Unlike every other area of your life, treat the garden like the one place where you literally cannot fail. Put aside all your expectations, the need for it to go perfectly, and try and keep yourself from obsessing over what goes right or wrong like you tend to do. Allow the garden to be the one place in your life where you can just be.”
Boy does he have my number! And man did I need to hear that back when he said it. His words seeped into my bones and have stuck with me since. It helped me take the pressure off myself then and it gives me great encouragement now.
Diving into something new is exciting and exhilarating and full of so much energy and learning. It can also be scary and intimidating and make you second guess and doubt yourself a whole lot, too.
The lesson, for me, is that I’m so glad I didn’t let the discomfort I was feeling last year about jumping into something new, something as big as the Big Garden (a huge growing space for a total beginner gardener), stop me from starting. Had it not been for all the experience, the lessons, the successes and failures, I certainly wouldn’t have had the mind to dive next into cut flowers.
Aside from talking to neighbors and friends, just about everything I’ve learned for getting this cut flower patch in motion came from blogs, YouTube videos, a few books, and a whole lot of Pinterest-ing.
Hopefully it serves as a reminder for us all that we can try, learn, do, and be anything. For as many horrible things as there are going on in the world right now, to me, this is still one of the greatest times to be alive. We have the world literally at our fingertips and you can learn anything you want to know or try with just a few taps. How awesome!
And so in this 15th week of 2023 we tackled the start of a new big project here on the farm!
While you’re reading this, Chris and I will be packing up some coffees, waters, and a bunch of tools and headed to take down the used greenhouse we’re getting for the farm. Another big project we were looking forward to tackling!
We’ll load up all the pieces onto another one of my neighbor’s flatbed trucks (again, thank God for good neighbors!), haul it back here to the farm (thankfully the woman selling it to us lives 15 minutes from us), and depending on how much patience we have left after that, we’ll work to get it set back up here on the farm today or maybe even tomorrow.
Wish us luck! We’ll be sure to share that project via IG Stories as well, so come on over to our Instagram “@littledreamfarm” and you can catch that project in motion.
What, if anything, are you growing this year? Fruits? Veggies? Flowers? Indoor plants? Curious to hear what you have going in your gardens and growing spaces and looking forward to seeing your work in motion too! Feel free to message me photos anytime via our Instagram. I don’t always get to it right away but I do read and try to reply to every message we receive—always love seeing and hearing what’s going on in your world, too!
I haven’t started with my outdoor flowers yet, typically here it’s late May to start with those. But I am very excited to be rooting a piece of a plant that was my great grandmothers! I can’t tell if it’s a type of pothos or a philodendron heartleaf but it’s so pretty 💕
I bought flower bulbs including Dahlias, which have always been special to me because that’s my grandma’s name. Last time I tried they didn’t grow. I live in an apartment and the balcony is at a weird angle for the sun, plus it’s in Puerto Rico which may be too far south for them... so I have a lot going against me. But maybe I’ll have better luck this year!