week 7: little seeds, big dreams

this week on the little dream farm

Friend! How lovely for us to meet here on a Sunday. How has your week been? What’s new in your corner of the world? Catch me up in the comments at bottom if you’d like.

This week…the third week of February, we’re talking about all-things flowers!!

Even if you’re not super into gardening I think the lessons about it surely can apply to us all.

I started out here on the farm as a total newbie gardener—this farm was the place where I grew my first fruits and veggies and flowers in the ground.

Back when we lived in Philadelphia, I tried growing lots of potted container plants outside the front of our row home, but people kept letting their dogs pee all over the plants. After I found a slice of pizza shoved into our window boxes among the plants, I gave up trying to make the front of our home look pretty and moved things to our tiny back yard.

For three of the four years we lived in Philly, the lot next to us was a vacant property that never got mowed (in the final year we had the joy of living next to a house being built). So in the summer the weeds in that lot would grow almost as tall as the fence around our yard and the mosquitos and bugs were terrible—it made it a very unenjoyable place to spend time. Add to that, in addition to cats (Black Kitty, Black and White Kitty, and a few others over the years) the groundhogs, opossums, raccoons, squirrels, mice, and rats that frequented our yard, and my dreams of growing a quaint little raised bed veggie garden felt futile.

For the time we lived in the city, we grew some tomatoes, peppers, salad greens, and herbs inside in a little AeroGarden my mom had gotten us one year for Christmas that we placed in one of our deep-set window sills that the cats couldn’t get to.

Fast forward to us moving to the farm, and I spent the first winter learning as much as I could about growing fruits and vegetables. I decided to buy all-organic starts, or transplants, from a nearby local garden center since I was feeling really overwhelmed about trying to start seeds and learn to grow food in the same season.

Those starts went in the ground on Memorial Day weekend and our first year of edible gardening was a banner year! We had a ton of success, very little pest pressure, and almost zero growing issues.

Some of our later season harvest.

It got us absolutely hooked for more!

In our second season, we’re planning to grow many of those same starts and doing much the same in the fruit/veggie garden, save for rotating where we grew everything last year.

And now that we know what we’re doing with the edible garden…I’m ready to dive headlong into flowers!

In year two here on the farm, my priority has shifted from settling in and creating routines to now creating and surrounding ourselves with beauty.

From the porch in summertime.

From sprucing up all the structures on the farm to creating more pretty spaces, my sights are now geared on continuing to make it our own and creating beauty all around us as we go.

Just behind the Big Garden is a nice big open space for flowers. I didn’t just want to create a bunch of growing beds around the farm since I’m as new to flowers as I was to growing fruits and veggies last year—a total newbie.

Instead, I wanted a place to be able to spread out, try new things, experiment, and learn along the way. And if that space happens to erupt in beautiful flowers and looks like a floral oasis and attracts all the pollinators, even better!

Looking down into the Big Garden during our first growing season.

I’m planning to grow the space similar to cut flower farm production. Yesterday Chris and I headed out to the space and measured a 60’x60’ plot, or 3600 square feet, that I’ll be starting in. Initially I plan to start with seven, 45-foot beds, and one of my neighbors up the road is coming down in April with his tractor to help us get the space ready for building the beds and planting beginning in May.

The beds will each be 48 inches wide with slightly more narrow walking paths between. I’m laying some landscape fabric and a friend of mine is helping me make some jig templates to burn holes into the landscape fabric so that we can uniformly space out and plant a lot of flowers with minimal weed pressure. While I’d love to lay some drip tape and have automatic irrigation to the site, that may have to wait until year two, so this year we’ll likely be hand watering the flowers.

If none of this is making any sense to you at all—know that that was me too just a few weeks ago! I didn’t really know about any of the things I’ve mentioned above, but have spent my early mornings and evenings learning it all in the last couple weeks as I’ve been making my plans. I’ll take you along with me as I go, anyhow, so you’ll get to see it all come together along the way!

In terms of flowers, I’m starting with lots of easy things—sunflowers, zinnias, rudbeckia, cosmos, amaranth, strawflowers, asters, celosia, bachelor button, snapdragons, and a bunch more.

The difference this year is that I’m diving in to seed starting and growing all these flowers from seed!

Our season in Upstate New York (we’re zone 5a) is so short—May 15 to October 1—are our last frost and first frost dates. So, in order to get a jump start on the season, it helps to start seeds inside.

This has been a huge learning curve for me!

Ideally, we’d have a big, beautiful, heated greenhouse. Or, we’d have a nice big basement or garage or root cellar for seed starting. Since we don’t have any of those things, I’ve purchased a set of shelving, a handful of shop lights, a few heat mats, and a bunch of seed starting trays, and I’ll be setting up shop in our guest bedroom to keep everything away from the cats.

I’ll begin seed starting in about mid-March for some varieties, and a few weeks after for others. From there, we’re off to the races with a first year of flowers!

I don’t have any plans to sell the flowers and depending on how it goes this season I may donate at least some of them. One thing I’m very interested in learning more about is seed saving, so I want to be able to set some blooms aside to begin learning specifically about the wild world of flower seed saving (which is very hard to find information about, by the way!).

So that’s where I’m at with this flower adventure for now—lots of fast and furious learning to get ready for the coming season, and the expectation that all my best-laid plans will likely go out the window…and that is a-okay!

I learned from last year’s garden that when it comes to something new, you just have to get started and take off all the pressure to succeed or be perfect right out the gate. We learned so much from last year’s edible garden, and this year’s flowers, I know, will be a wonderful adventure full of lessons, too.

Gardening, getting my hands in the dirt, spending more time outside, placing tiny starts in the ground and watching them and nursing them as they grow, sitting among the potential that is hundreds upon hundreds of seeds, and getting lost in the dreams of beautiful garden spaces…it has been so soothing for my soul. Hopefully through the sharing of our gardening adventures you get to experience some of that, too.

Before we go, I thought I’d leave you with a “before” photo of the site where I’m looking to grow the flowers.

A ‘before’ photo of the space where the Little Dream Farm Flower Garden will go.

Read this below and do me a small favor? Once you’re done, take a moment to actually close your eyes to take in the visualization:

Take a nice deep steady breath in and let it out slow. Imagine this space, filled with rows upon rows of beautiful flowers. Feel them swaying in a summer breeze. See the monarch butterflies flitting around from one flower to the next. Hear the bumblebees buzzing about. Feel the sun warm your cheeks. Stretch your arms out and tip your face back to the sky. Breathe in the smell of the flowers as you run your hands along them down one row. Spin around and take in all the beautiful blooms around you. Stand among the flowers in wonder at the magnificence of them all as they’re doing exactly what they—what we—were all meant to do…to bloom.

This visualization…sitting up on the porch, looking at that space, and imagining it full of flowers, is what planted the little seed for me to want to spend more time this year with flowers.

Sometimes all it takes is just the planting of a tiny little seed to help to help us grow our biggest, wildest dreams.

My hope is that this year’s Little Dream Farm Flower Garden is the most beautiful and constant visual reminder of that for us all.

I’ll happily answer any and all questions about the LDF Flower Garden you may have, so go ahead and ask away in the comments!

I absolutely can’t wait to take you along!