Happy Friday!
Birds are singing, cows are mooing, and Chaos, seemingly oblivious to yesterday's neutering, is puppy scampering about with Mandy's shoe in his mouth. The Lunaria are splashing exceedingly welcome bits of purple throughout the carpet of green in the landscape. Snowball viburnums are just beginning the transition from subtle green foliage to explosive white beauty with the first few petals going white at the tippy tops of the plants. The Japanese Maples are red with anthocyanins, the Loropetalums are going full Jackson Pollock, and the grass is tall enough to impede bipedalism in various places.
The blossoms have all rained off of the plums and the last of the peach blossoms will wash away with today's rain. The daffodils in the landscape are mostly gone, but are still blooming and giving fragrance out in the peony fields. The hellebores in the woods are mostly harvested, the generous mulberry tree is leafing out and fiddleheads are unfurling on the forest floor. The River Birch still drips it's overeager transpirative drops on the team at lunch (particularly Sarah for some reason), the wasps have begun their takeover of everything, and the slow persistent blanket of deciduous and coniferous pollen has begun its suffocating reign of the kingdom of the south. Take your phone out of your pocket for a minute out here and you'll notice a thin yellow film has already staked it's flag on your screen. Discussions of Dayquil, Claritin, and Flonase permeate the air almost as readily as the pollen.
It's a beautiful time of year out here and life is doing it's thing in every form imaginable.
The biggest farm news is that our Spring Plant Sale is going live tomorrow! This is for local pickup only. Nothing from this sale will be shipped. Check out our Instagram to join our Hellebore Plant Giveaway. There will be 3 winners that each get 5 hellebore plants. You can enter by clicking here!
If you're new to our plant sale, we've got herbs, veggies, and flowering perennials and you just pre-order what you'd like, select a pickup day/time, and we put the order together for you and have it waiting for you on arrival day. Easy.
Food news for folks traveling to pick up plants…Comer Coffee Co in downtown Comer is running special hours and making focaccia sandwiches for your snacking pleasure to go along with our plant sale. You can find deets by clicking here!
For more local plant adjacent news, our friends have gone live with mulch deliveries in the Athens area. We'll have some bags of it on hand at the farm store as well, but check them out!
Mulch is great for pathways and perennial gardens, but do remember not to surround tender annuals with it as it will rob them of nitrogen.
For those asking about mums, yes indeed, we have begun to add more inventory. Important to note…..our mum inventory is dynamic. If we are sold out of what you want currently, that's okay. We will likely add more in the coming weeks. If you'd like to know when we add new inventory, you can join the mum cutting waitlist. We'll be continuing to produce new cuttings and announce our updated inventory to our waitlist each week or two. This will continue into May, so if you missed what you want initially, it's okay, you've still got time.
Dahlia tubers will begin shipping next week for those who missed the shipping information on the dahlia pages. Keep an eye out for our shipping email with your tracking info over the next few weeks. As we mentioned on the sales page: “We will begin shipping orders the last week of March through mid-late April.”
Today's tidbit to share is the 3rd installment in our series of book recommendations that I collectively call, the Business, the Beauty, and The Science of flowers. You can review the last two newsletters to see the Business and the Beauty, but this week we talk of the Science.
Dr. Allan Armitage (who was actually Mandy's former professor) planted the seed that grew the modern American flower movement. Without his studies, books, and influence, you wouldn't see a 3 Porch Farm or really any of your beloved local flower farms in their current incarnation. He informed the field so fully that most of us aren't even aware that we are swimming in the ripples he created far upstream in the headwaters of a dying U.S. flower industry. If a modern flower movement would exist at all without him, it would most certainly look a lot different than it does now and none of it would be for the better. His latest book “Field Guide to Specialty Cut Flowers - A Growers' Manual”, written in conjunction with Kelly Garcia is an incredibly concise compilation of all the info a grower needs for every flower of significance in the industry. Save time. Don't reinvent the wheel. Stand on the shoulders of giants. This man is a giant of the industry and this book is a must have for aspiring flower growers.
Alas, I must go. The mums complex irrigation system is all set but for the electrical work, so time to make some sparks. Have a great weekend y'all!
