week 30: here comes the color show
this week on the little dream farm
This week we began to notice the sun coming up just a tad later each day. The crisp in the air last night following an afternoon of rain stirred up all those feelings of fall and it won’t be long now before we’re doing all the take down of the flower patch and readying all the garden spaces and the farm for our third winter. It seems strange to even write that now, but here we are at the end of July and that’s feeling pretty strange too—how fast the time has blown by this year.
We’re already working on our list of all the things that’ll need to be done to get everything packed up and put away, though it feels like I just pressed my very first sunflower seed into starting mix just the other day. This week the sunflowers grew to be 10 and 12 feet tall, towering over me like giants.
So for now, we enjoy the color show!
We saw very hot, humid temps this week with much less rain and that combo seemed to send all the flowers in the Cut Flower Patch on another growth spurt—the colors are popping everywhere now and I stood out there a few nights ago and just had a really good laugh—it’s exactly what I was dreaming of, and it’s even more impressive in person than it was in my mind. How about that!
Sure, we’ve had some weed pressure and lots of Japanese beetles munching on the plants and perhaps a little too much rain for some of the flowers, but all in all, for the first year and for it being my first time growing flowers from seed and our first time doing large-scale cut flowers, I’m so impressed with the way it’s turned out at every stage, and the flowers just happen to be the wonderful icing on the cake of all the million and one little bits of knowledge and tasks that we learned this year to get to this place.
For the next two months we’ll be enjoying the flower show, spending lots of time in the Patch, taking a million photos, cutting bouquets for neighbors and friends, savoring the view of all those beautiful little flower heads atop an ocean of green with the big red barn sitting behind them.
To the degree that I can, I’m planning to save some seed for next year, too. Rather than harvesting every flower, I want to let as many of them as possible go to seed to save the ones that we can to grow true-to-form next year. With many flowers, you’d need isolation from varieties in order to avoid cross-pollination but I’m at least interested in learning how to let the flowers go to seed, how to harvest and clean the seed and then store it to see what kinds of germination rates we may get next year. More to come on all of that once we get there!
You’ll want to be sure to hang with us on IG this week (@littledreamfarm) as we’re expecting really nice temps throughout the week which means less scorching sun and less bugs in the Patch, so I’ll be planning to spend lots more time out there in the morning and evening, as well as in the Big Garden harvesting all the veggies that should be ready and waiting for us to enjoy!
For now, let me leave you with just a few of my favorite photos from this week’s Cut Flower Patch adventures…there are so many more to come!
