Greetings, farm friends!

This week has been busy, but the mild weather has made it such a pleasant time to work. After a long stretch of hot, sunny days, the clouds and drizzle are welcome companions. As August comes to a close, we’re really feeling the gradual shift into Autumn blooms, colors, and temperatures. It’s a wonderful time of year on the farm; pawpaws will be ripe at any moment, dahlias are about to hit their peak, and the fields are full of life. Walking through a bed of celosia you might see ten different kinds of pollinators at any given moment! We’ve done a great job of getting summer and early fall cover crops down, and for the most part they’re quite well-established and looking like they’ll do a great job of protecting and giving back to the soil. As busy as we are these days, it’s a pleasure to take a moment to slow down and appreciate all of the life on the farm.

Elisa is on vacation this week, so we’ve been hard at work trying to keep everything in good shape while she’s away. She’s entrusted us with some floral design work while she’s away, which had me nervous to do on our own for the first time, but I think it’s going well!

The crew is also working on feeding our perennial plantings and slowly getting them ready for winter. We like to give them compost and fertilizer every year in August/September, and again in early Spring. As we feed the perennials, we also weed and cut larger holes in landscape fabric where necessary. In some spaces, we’re considering removing landscape fabric completely, which will allow us to divide plants and then put down a nice layer of woodchips. We’ve found landscape fabric incredibly helpful in getting perennial plantings established, but several years down the line we’re realizing that it might be time to eliminate it in spaces where the plants want to expand and the weeds have been smothered for quite a while.

*Lovely bouquets full of marigolds and lisianthus will be available at market this week.*

We’re back at the JFX Market this Sunday, August 27th.

This week’s market availability will feature bouquets, bunches of dahlias, eucalyptus, lisianthus, millet, sunflowers, veronica, snapdragons, and of course, our build your own bouquet bar.

Don’t forget, we’ve got a floral painting workshop on the farm on September 9th with Patricia O’Brien!

Thanks for reading, and enjoy these waning summer days!

Amelia & The Two Boots crew

Late August Musings