Flower farm update - October 2024
October is a month of transition. From summer flowers to thoughts of Christmas - including some workshops at Bluestone Vineyards - and more preparation for the 2025 season.
Encouraging orders of wreaths and table arrangements
I can’t bring myself to talk about Christmas until at least after Halloween, so it felt very weird to be making festive wreaths and Christmas table arrangements for Gastro Nick’s deli pop-up market on 3 November. I’m hoping people will pre-order for collection and delivery in December. They’re up on the website now and I’ll do some promotion on social media.
Incidentally Gastro Nicks have some beautifully-packaged Italian panettone, and do some wonderful hampers, if you’re after Christmas gift ideas.
Wreath workshops at Bluestone Vineyards
We’re thrilled to be partnering with Bluestone Vineyards this year to run both festive wreath making and Christmas table arrangement workshops. Bundles of foliage to play with, great company, bubbles, and a festive mini platter all make for a fantastic few hours. I only hope we get lots of bookings.
Wherever possible we use our own, locally-grown and British foliage. Where this runs short or isn’t available, we have to resort to imports, but try to keep this to a minimum. All foliage seems to have gone up in price considerably this year so I’ll be trying to balance making sure I order enough while trying not to waste any.
You can book on the website:
I hope to see some of you there.
A few tense nights
Usually, I can confidently say we’ll have dahlias until mid-October at least. This year, that was looking precarious when we had a couple of frosts at the end of September. Frankly, I can’t afford the flower season to end that early, so it meant putting 75 metres of frost cloth out overnight. Now here we are into November and the dahlias are still going strong.
Last summer market
We did our last Hampshire Farmer’s Market with our locally-grown flowers at Romsey at the start of October. These have been so much fun. The other stallholders are really supportive and the customers really lovely. Inevitably, by this one, we’ve really honed our organisation to make it as efficient as possible, and will probably have forgetten it all by next year.
We are doing the December markets though on 1st and 22nd. These will be all about the wreaths and Christmas arrangements.
And we plan to be back at Romsey again in 2025 on the first Sunday of the month from July through to October. We’re also adding Alresford on the third Sunday of the month.
The big clear up continues
Whenever we have a free moment, we clear a few more beds.
Anything not cleared before it gets too cold will get left until the spring. It’s good for the birds and the bees and it does no harm for the plants to die down and act as mulch for a few months.
I only do some now to plant and try and reduce the workload next spring.
Beautiful compost
We now have three large and one super large compost bays where we put all the flowers and foliage we clear. Roger is the compost king and has done a tremendous job. The stuff we’re getting out now is genuinely ‘black gold’. For anyone thinking of growing on any scale, prioritise making your own compost; it’s a real money saver.
Chrysanthemum trial
More of the late chrysanthemums we’re trialling in the polytunnel are flowering now. I wasn’t disciplined enough over the labelling so each one is a surprise.
On the up side, they are helping to extend the season.
On the downside, I definitely don’t think I fertilised enough. I should have disbuddded them to get just one larger flower per stem. And there are only really two of the varieties I grew that I liked: Tula (spiky purple, maroon and green ) and Lola Green (zesty green balls).
Every day’s a school day.
Dried flower arrangements
To have something else to sell out of season, I tried drying flowers this year.
I started in the shed which was a disaster. A leaky roof and cool nighttime temperatures kept things perpetually damp and meant nothing dried out properly.
After a moment of genius, I moved the willow obelisk I made into the pare bedroom and hung the flowers off that to dry, which worked fantastically well.
Now the problem is I have boxes of dried flowers taking up all the room in my office, waiting for me to find a few moments to do something with them. Watch this space.
Seed sowing and planting continues
I sowed my second succession of hardy annuals this month and planted out the wallflowers and sweet williams.
Nature obviously laughs in the face of us carefully sowing and nurturing seeds and plants. I seem have a veritable blanket of self sown Nigella. It’s even growing in the patches of soil left on the weedcloth.
Tulips again
Every year I say I’m not going to plant tulips. The bulbs I like are expensive. Even if I manage to save them from the squirrels, rabbits and rats, I can lose the lot to tulip blight. They bloom before the main flower season starts - and normally whenever I’m away from home - which makes them harder to market. And people expect to pay supermarket prices which just isn’t viable for a small grower. Yet here I am again planting tulip bulbs (a little earlier than usual which I hope isn’t a mistake).
They’re just too pretty at the end of a long winter to resist.
Finally planted the hedge
I meant to plant this hedging last year so we can eventually remove the wind break mesh, but only just got around to it. The Woodland Trust has some great subsidised native hedgerow packs, albeit more for the wildlife than for foliage.
I think catching up with jobs that should have been done well before now will be a recurring theme over the next few months.
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