April-
April was a blur! At the end of March we decided it was in everyones best interest put our business on pause due to COVID-19. We weren't selling flowers for about two weeks until we found ways to allow contactless delivery and figured it was safe to put out flowers at our self serve stand. We found so many customers upset and stuck and home wanting to brighten their homes with flowers. It was heart breaking to have to close for those two weeks but were so thrilled to open back up and be able to provide people with beautiful spring blooms during this challenging and unknown time (especially during the height of ranunculus season.) While we limited our exposure everywhere else, we spend most of April in the flower field planting, deadheading, and planning for the future. Although it was not the ideal situation, we were so thankful that our business grew so much during this time. We had so many new followers who supported us along with so many of our regular customers. We broke 2,000 followers on Instagram and broke 1,000 on Facebook. It has been so rewarding to see our business grow like this and we couldn't do it without the support from our local community! We couldn't believe the huge boom in our business almost instantaneously. While this means we wished we would have planted more for spring time, instead we just ramped up production for fall. This was a true test of our patience since we were in such a weird place in-between flower seasons towards the end of April/ beginning-middle of May. We desperately wanted our dahlias to grow faster and start producing as soon as possible! We survived though, and now that we are swimming in dahlias the struggles then seem so minor now.
May-
Oh my goodness! June is here and gone and I can't even believe it! I have been such a slacker on the blog posts and I sincerely apologize! I love writing these blog posts but time got away from me and the blog got put on the back burner! I promise I will try to be better about it in the future.
Here we go! May flew by in an instant. Honestly as I sit here and write I can even begin to remember what happened during in May. We had so many amazing flowers bloom during this month.
Mother's Day was crazy in the most amazing way. Thank you everyone who came and supported us that weekend by purchasing flowers or dahlia plants or even sharing and posting about it on our social media feeds. Funny story, last year's Mother's Day was our first major flower holidays after we started our farm in the summer of 2018. Valentine's Day we didn't have flowers blooming and Easter wasn't that big for us because not many people knew about our business at that time. Well Mother's Day of 2019, we went out picking flowers at like 7am and picked for a few hours and came in ready to make arrangements. Little did we know that at 10am we would be bombarded with customers eager to get our Mother's Day flowers. We knew we were in for a busy day so we called my grandma in a panic and sent her to our house with tons of buckets to pick midday. We took orders and told people to come back in a little while and then later send them off with their arrangements. We apologized to every customer we saw that day because we were so unprepared and completely blindsided. It definitely taught us a lot and we learned our lesson so this Mother's Day we took pre-orders two weeks before so we could try and prepared better for this year. This allowed us to pull together an awesome crew of friends to help wrangle the Mother's Day task, that would be way too much for me and my mom to handle on our own! We are so thankful for the sweet friends that quickly learned how to make vase arrangements and mixed bouquets to help us fulfill our orders! It was so fun to give them a little glimpse into our farm because sometimes explaining what we do doesn't fully encompass it all like actually experiencing it for yourself does.
Besides a crazy amazing Mother's Day our very first dahlias started to bloom and that made us more excited than ever! In addition to that, we had an a small batch of peonies that we grow at our house bloom and it was so magical. It makes us what to spend way too much money in peonies. They are so beautiful and the fact that they make their debut in what feels like the blink of an eye makes them even more magical. I am pretty sure when it comes to my self control with peonies I am uncontrollable.
It seems like this is the case every season with with some flower. Last season we went overboard on dahlias (which I don't regret one bit) and now the peonies! Our uncontrollable love for flowers really beneifts out customers though so it is definitely a good thing, right?!
