Happenings at the Farm: April Insider Journal
It’s April! This month is a DOOZY for flower farmers in our grow zone.
It’s a happy time, but a super super busy time! And it’s even crazier having had a broken toe. I have spent the last 2 weeks literally crawling or scooting on my bum around my field transplanting, fixing lines, etc because mother nature waits for precisely NO one😂
I am real happy to say I am now hobbling around well enough that I’m mostly functional again. It has been a good lesson for me in remembering how grateful I should be for a body that is typically healthy and that can walk around wherever I need to.
When your job is 100% manual labor and you can’t walk, it makes you realize how fortunate you are that you usually can. Things I usually take majorly for granted. It was a good lesson for me to remember gratitude and an abundance mentality, and also to slow down a bit and not rob myself of the joy of this whole thing in the first place.
pictured: 2 rows (well, 3 in each) of delphinium babies freshly transplanted. We have 45 of these 50-foot long rows just of cool season flowers!
This past month we have been so busy doing not super fun but yet all the super important things. The jobs we’ve had to do have made me remember the story of the Little Red Hen that my mom used to read me as a kid. Basically, if you don’t put in the work doing the not-so-fun stuff and effort now, you don’t get the reward later. We are at the not super fun part now😂 But at the same time I love it because I know what it will bring!
This month we’ve focused on:
Hardening off our cool season seedlings, which basically means taking them in and out of the greenhouse 4920189 times a day/week getting them slowly acclimated to the harsh outdoor world so they don’t get shocked. By the time they’re ready for the field we are ready to more or less punt those little guys out there to fend for themselves because we get so sick of babying them so much as we harden them off 😂
Finishing bed bed prep: spreading compost, laying irrigation and burning the rest of the holes in the landscape fabric for the rest of our cool season flowers being planted out. I have spent many hours this month bending over with a blow torch in hand, slowly walking the rows and measuring either every 6 or 12 inches and burning thousands of holes to plant in. My little 5 year old twins love this, because their job is to follow me around with their boots on and stomp on every hole I burn so that the burn stops and doesn’t spread too big. They think it’s so fun.
Transplanting thousands of those cool season seedlings out to the field (we are 95% of the way there and will be done with this bed tomorrow!!)
And lastly, our other main focus for this month has been starting all of our warm summer annual seeds inside. We start these 6 ish weeks before our last frost which is anywhere from May 1-10th or so, and then transplant them out then.
Hand in hand with that has been making the last of our dahlia cuttings (cloning the plants) and potting up the ones that are growing bigger so they have room for growth before we put them out to the field. That takes a lot of time, too! I love this job though, because it feels rhythmic and grounding and I just sit in my quiet little greenhouse working away at it. Time flies when I get in the zone and it’s one of my favorite types of work to do. The warm 85-90 degree greenhouse doesn’t hurt, either!
Did I mention here yet that I’ve partnered with my friend Amanda Heath from Heath Flower Farm, and we are doing a massive dahlia field this year? MASSIVE. I am so over the moon about it and it’s also meant both of us have been pedal to the metal doing dahlia cuttings to be ready by mid May! We are shooting for 1500-2000 dahlias!!!
It’s been a huge month, and especially huge with how much not being able to walk much has slowed me down. I’m pretty glad to be on (close to) the other end of that.
Looking forward:
We have our tulips just about ready to burst for our spring bouquet subscribers (the incredible double-petaled peony-like ones like above) and I cannot wait for them to bloom and for the subscription recipients to enjoy them!!
Shortly after the tulip bloom we will get a big load of ranunculus, followed by the rest of the spring flowers. Here in Utah the ‘spring’ season for flowers extends well into almost the end of June.
Now that almost everything has been seeded inside, we will now lay landscape fabric on our summer beds, burn those holes, and lay those drip lines to prep for transplant of these seedlings in another few weeks.
Our outdoor tables are being delivered this week (!!!!!) so that we can host you at the farm for the first time this summer!! This has been the thing I’ve been most excited for this year - to finally be able to have people come and experience it here.
After the irrigation and parking lot are done, which are starting this week and next, we will shift our attention to overhauling the barn.
I am trying to stay super focused on all the work that needs to be done at the farm right now since its all so crucial to the rest of the growing season this year, so a lot of other things have been tabled for now. I’ve paused bouquet work and custom orders for the next few weeks (outside of our spring bouquet subscriptions of course) so that every spare minute I have can be spent getting this farm up and humming as good as it can be this year.
I really want to focus on U-picks and growing that side of this whole thing, and that means a lot has to be in place for it all!
I think it’s going to be magical and so so worth it.
And remember- when those U-pick dates open, they will only open here first, to you insiders. You will also be the only place I give some discount codes for them as well! So start watching for those.
We hit 1200 Beck Farms Insiders today. Last November we had 200. That is beyond crazy to me. I’m not sure why anyone thinks anything I have to say has much value😂 and kind of feel like a major imposter, but I’m glad you’re all here for the ride while I learn to figure this all out.
Thanks for being here!
x
Kailin
