A quick tip on keeping your corms organized while getting them ready to plant. We use mesh bags for all of our anemone and ranunculus corms. Happy planting! 🌱
Here’s to a spring made abundant by plenty of rain and seeds sown by friends who make my busiest days better and brighter.
Farm-girl manicure. 💅🏻 Pro tip: there’s nothing like a good power washing from a hose bib opened all the way up to get every last bit of dirt out from under your fingernails. No soap or scrubbing needed. Works every time. 😉 💦
Into the ground they go! As of yesterday afternoon, all the butterfly ranunculus are planted and we’re on to the next thing: getting seeds ready to go in with next week’s cold front. Stay tuned! 🌱
Prepping the butterfly ranunculus for planting, part 2. Ranunculus can be a little fussier than some of the other flowers we grow, but they’re worth all the trouble. Compared to traditional ranunculus, butterfly ranunculus are *much* harder to get, and the corms are as much as ten times the cost of traditional ranunculus- but they also have a longer season, better disease resistance, higher heat tolerance, and a breezy, wildflowery form: unlike traditional ranunculus, butterflies bloom in sprays. Can’t wait for you to see this year’s crop! 🌸
Soaking another round of butterfly ranunculus in the shop today! This is the second round of about 2,000 butterfly ranunculus corms that we’re planting this year. Butterflies have a longer season and are more heat-tolerant than traditional ranunculus. This quality coupled with their breezy blooms and extra-long vase life (up to three weeks!) puts them at the top of my list of favorite crops. 🌸
His name was Cosmos, like the flower, and of all the chickens in my flock, he was my favorite. Early this morning, a coyote killed him just outside the safety of the chicken house. He was “just a chicken,” but I am sad just the same. These are the days when I am quite sure that God did not make the tender hearts the strongest. Mine breaks way too easily.
Wild Olive, aka Nacahuita, is a favorite of hummers. I have watched them pass up sugar-water feeders in favor of these papery blossoms many times. In fact, our patio feeders have been quiet this year since the wild olives are full of flowers. They absolutely love them. Bonus: wild olive is locally native and thrives in our hot, subtropical climate. Want more hummingbirds? Plant yourself some Wild Olive. ✨
The summer has been too dry, too rainless, too hot, too long. I am too tired, brooding too much indoors & hiding myself in dark, shady places like a toad. There are no fall leaves, no cooler temperatures, no shift in season coming soon. The autumn-themed swags & wreaths & cider mugs in shades of pumpkin & rust that are suddenly all over store shelves feel out of place to me in the relentlessness of heat & dust. This summer has tested my mettle like no other before it. There is beauty here though, & I know it, will myself to see it: the textures in the mounting piles of brush along the roadsides, the sparse lines of weeds turned to sun-scorched sculpture in ditches & fields. The huge, filigreed trusses of dried palm blooms, stiff now & long since exhausted of their flowers. These are the ‘fall leaves’ of the Rio Grande Valley, our harbingers of summer’s end. This is the architecture of a hard season, laid bare by summer’s extremes. Rogelia & I have spent hours gathering it up & bringing it into the flower barn. Wild currant tomatoes, sun-dried & scarlet on their vines. Roadside sunflowers spangled with silvery seedheads. Clouds of tiny blooms from a flower-field weed, delicate and brittle. We collect them into loose garlands & textural clouds around the barn, our own homage not to autumn, but to this season in this place. He has made everything beautiful in its time.
Even the drought-damned weeds.
Even the scorching afternoons.
Even the spent and shattered blooms of late summer.
I will be grateful.
In other parts of the country, the shift from late summer to early autumn is heralded by the trees coloring themselves shades of scarlet and orange and gold. To me, traditional “fall leaves” decor feels more than a little inauthentic here in the Rio Grande Valley, where the live oaks and palm trees are always green and the honey mesquite and ash drop their leaves without any seasonal fanfare. This year I have decided to embrace what we *do* have in these waning weeks of a too-hot summer that won’t cool off anytime soon. The peachy oranges and fiery pinks of celosia. The muddy greens and maroons of amaranthus. The blazing, bronzy reds and browns of Mahogany Splendor hibiscus and the green points of sunflower discs that have lost their petals. I’ve also developed a bit of a fascination with the beauty and color and texture of things that have succumbed to the heat and drought of this hard season. The fiery rust of a dead wax-myrtle branch. The parchment tones of last spring’s peppergrass. The tiny, burnished balloons of love-in-a-puff dried on the vine. I find myself regarding them as our local reminders of late summer and early autumn, of cooler days and longer nights to come, and of all the new flowers that will come with them. I’m ready. 🍂🍁
Whiteflies. They come with the territory of late summer in the Rio Grande Valley. As the cotton fields are defoliated, they settle elsewhere, and their population explodes in private gardens and our little flower field. While there are pesticides that will kill whiteflies, they’re not worth the risk and effort for the typical home gardener. Most of these pesticides will also kill beneficial insects already working to keep the whiteflies in check. A safer option is ordinary dish soap. Add a generous squirt and some plain water to a gallon jug or a hose-end sprayer and pour over affected plants, taking care to hit the undersides of leaves where whiteflies hide. This drowns the whiteflies, but leaves no lasting residue that might harm any good guys. It will only affect adult whiteflies, not their larvae, and you’ll need to repeat the process daily while whitefly activity is high. Another option? If you don’t have any high-stakes planting happening in your garden, do nothing and just let nature take its course. Plants usually recover from whitefly damage, and with time- and maybe a good, hard rain- whitefly populations will eventually come down and we’ll all move on and forget about them. Got questions? Drop them in the comments. 🌱
PS- that beautiful cotton in the photo was grown by my cousin at SRS Farms in Mercedes. Thanks to @stsparks for sharing. 📸
When I started teaching at @staepiscopal, Hayes Duffy was a 5th grader & already establishing himself as a talented musician. He would play guitar & lead us in Matt Maher’s “Hold Us Together” in chapel, which I came to regard as the school’s unofficial song. His mother was my principal, & it was her assurance that I needed to pursue this flower dream & could always come back to teaching if I needed to that gave me the courage to walk away from the safety of my career at the end of my 7th year at St. A’s. On my last Last Day of School as a teacher, I started my car to leave & that song was playing. It picked up at the beginning of the bridge: “This is the first day of the rest of your life…it’s gonna be all right…” And so it was. Tonight, Hayes, now a grown man & an undeniable talent, played to a full house at @themarketatwildaugust. I snuck out of the flower barn for a few minutes to visit with his mom, my former boss, on the Market lawn & listen to him. We both marveled at how God has brought it all full circle in ways that were unimaginable to us during our many, often tearful, conversations just seven short years ago. I am grateful for all of it. That last Last Day really was the first day of the rest of my life, & I see with more clarity than ever that through it all love really does hold us together. ❤️
🌸PEONY SEASON IS OFFICIALLY HERE!🌸
We just received our first batch of Oregon peonies and they're every bit as glorious as we'd hoped 😍
These gorgeous girls are up on the site in maroon, light pink, pink, and white, so order now before they're all gone! All peonies not preordered will be available for sale at @themarketatwildaugust tomorrow night!
Peonies will be available for pickup during @themarketatwildaugust tomorrow night, 6-9 PM
See you at The Market! 💕
#wildaugust #wildaugustflowers #peonies #peonyseason #summermarket #flowermarket #flowerfarm #localfarm #localflorist #shopsmall #shoplocal
