The Blog Is Back! (or Beauty Will Save the World)

“Whatever happened to your blog?”

When we turned our small, 1600 sq. ft. flower garden into a 2-acre flower farm back in 2020 we set out to write a regular blog with regular posts about flowers and food (because feed your body, feed your soul with beauty), our family traditions and explorations in homesteading, and musings on the good life.

So what happened to that?

The short of it is covid—many of the things we anticipated writing about were closed or couldn’t happen; sound relatable? After the pandemic, we got busy with other things 👇

We took our flowers off-farm, and it was absolutely wonderful to be received so warmly by everyone at the Broome County Regional Farmer’s Market and East Hill Ithaca Farmer’s Market—our fellow vendors, the staff, and core raving flower fans all embraced us and really founded our Flower Tribe in the spring of 2021 when we showed up in the freezing cold to sell tulips. We still remember a guy squealing his tires to stop and buy a bouquet (then squeal off) at a rainy May East Hill Ithaca Farmer’s Market.

In our veggie garden we grew the sweetest-in-the-world pepper with seeds from Ukraine, taught our junior beekeepers how to rob a hive (other things too!) and bottle-feed bummer lambs. Charles and our two oldest boys even walked the Camino to Santiago de Compostella last August!

We ate our first-ever, all-local Thanksgiving meal and hosted our first flower U-Cut for Mother’s Day. We got Kunekune pigs, and they had babies—we had a couple of babies, too! We took a Kunekune piglet to the Ithaca Farmer’s Market wearing a flower collar while Dana was wearing our littlest piggie, Leo 💙 Charles invented a bourbon/blue Curaçao/amaretto cocktail he calls a ‘Leo.’

Our oldest daughter went off to college, but has come home each summer to cut flowers and help Charles capture bee swarms in our apple orchard. Two of her childhood friends are getting married this fall, and we get to do their flowers! We’ve done two dozen weddings for the absolute sweetest 🤍 couples, with eclectic styles from flower crowns to pheasant feathers, a red Serrano pepper boutonniere (that was super-fun to grow!), peacock feathers, birds of paradise, and more—from early spring tulips and narcissus to late fall dahlias and chrysanthemums, and we’ve been here for all of it! One of our favorite moments ever—and we hope you’re scrolling the carousel, was a tender moment between a bride and her sister.

Back on our farm, Charles really dug into canning and fermenting—canned hot summer squash, hot peppers fermented in honey, you name it! We planted some Christmas trees that we plan to pot and rent, and Charles tamed a goose. Our flower doggos, Lovey and Amos, had a litter of 10 puppies (relatable!!) so we got to take the cutest family Christmas photo of all-time; Charles says we were like the Starks of Winterfell, though. They each went home to a wonderful home, guarding turkeys and chickens, sheep, and a fruit orchard!

We became full members of the Ithaca Farmer’s Market last year, and we’re trying to make every single Saturday market in 2024. Maybe we’ll get a permanent booth for 2025 and make Steamboat Landing one of our Flower CSA pick-up locations! We made fermented honey garlic, from our own honey and garlic! Tulip cutting has become a favorite warm, spring day family tradition. And—we got a trio of alpacas! They just got their first haircut, and we plan to offer a blend of Finnsheep and alpaca along with straight alpaca yarn this fall!! Our yarn is flying off the shelf at Red Bird Fiber Arts in Owego. If you’re local, you should check it out!!

We’re now booking weddings in 2025, but a couple of weeks are still available this year. We’re back to exploring all the gorges, climbing our favorite 6-story treehouse (IYKYK), an annual visit to the Museum of the Earth, visits to West Point, and more!

Writing it all up just fell by the wayside, but we plan to bring back the blog in 2024. Starting June 1, we’ll to rotate through flowers, food, family traditions, homesteading, and the good life, and hit “publish” on a blog every two months.

For our comeback blog, we thought we’d catch you up on what we’ve been up to—how our farm has evolved, and where we think we’re headed.

Evolution

As we grow and consider what kind of flower farm we want to be when we grow up, one moment that’s shaping the vision is our Mother’s Day U-Cut last spring.

Bringing people onto our farm and seeing how spending a few unhurried moments with loved ones or on their own, cutting flowers and experiencing a few of our animals, deeply affected us.

We think people need more of that—more beauty.

Just turn on the news and notice how anxious or angry or sad or hopeless we get—like almost immediately, but visit a beautiful flower farm and it melts away.

This year we lost almost half of our tulips to tulip fire (Botrytis) and had to be dug or tilled in. On top of that, the weather has been so warm, so we probably won’t get to do a U-Cut again this Mother’s Day weekend.

But we’re absolutely committed to moving forward with bringing people on our farm to experience beauty. So we’re doing it early, May 4-5 with times in the morning on Saturday and afternoon on Sunday. If you’re interested in this, visit our online store to purchase tickets.

And once our ranunculus bloom, we’ll do it again. When the fancy sunnies and dahlias start, we’ll do it again.

We want to give our Flower Tribe this throughout the year because we think Dostoevsky was right when he said, “Beauty will save the world.”