What a busy few weeks

What a busy few weeks it has been. Lots of change, and excitement. Let me do some ‘splainin.

A new job – I started full time work on the farm. This has been a roller coaster of extreme excitement, self doubt, and apprehension. I think this is normal, and each day brings a stronger confidence in the direction and choices that have been made. Every day starts early, but with a purpose. A social media post that came up on my feeds today was GRIT – Get Really Intentional Today. That has been the way that each day starts. By midmorning I can look back and see a number of things that have gotten done.

Lunch usually starts between noon and 2, and is usually a pretty small lunch, followed by a quick nap – I do enjoy the nap.  The afternoons are usually very physical, which has been a great diversion from sitting in meetings day in and day out.

Our big projects have been to improve drainage, including adding culverts like the one above, and field preparation including cutting down tree’s which shade the fields.

So change 1 is a new boss.  He is a hard taskmaster, but I like him.  He usually looks me in the eyes at the end of the day, and lets me know I’ve done a good days work.

Change 2 is an intentional focus on getting the flowers ready and in the ground.  We’ve put together a temporary seed starting station.  That station will allow us to prepare about 2500 seeds at a time.  We have a good portion of it on solar power, and will be moving all of it to solar powered when we move it to the greenhouse.

That intentional focus includes adding hoop houses in order to extend our seasons.   Our existing greenhouse will be devoted to seed starting and potting, while in the back field we will be adding two hoop houses in the coming weeks.

Finally, I’ve been reading everything I can get my hands on regarding flower farming.  There are a lot of great materials online.  At the end of the day though, there is nothing like experience, and dirty hands.