June Recap

How are the months flying by like this?

In June the dahlias start out with a bang!

It's so fun seeing all the new varieties bloom. Its so interesting because I don't know how many people know this but when we buy our dahlia tubers we know certain ones people/other flower farmers love! But the places we get them from have such a variety that we sometimes will take the chance and buy some more uncommon ones and see how they grow and do a trial of our own. Dahlia's grow in so many different heights and stem lengths so we like to grow them to see for ourselves. Some are better for cut flowers than others so on occasion we see a beautiful bloom from the wholesaler that looks great but in reality when we grow it, it grows like 2 feet tall and produces like 5 short short stems. Totally not ideal for cut flower production!

Then on the other hand there are super popular varieties that the wholesalers don't have and that forces us to search other wholesale places for the ones we want or shop the tuber sales other flower farms have. These tubers are normally pretty expensive for just one but this is a great way to get the tubers we want but slowly multiply our stock over the course of a few years.

We have like a continuous list of "bucket list" dahlias that we would love to have in our field someday! Each year we slowly find more of the ones we want and sometimes we buy some from the wholesaler that are so bad we just throw the tubers away. Sometimes what happens too is that we order a certain variety and label it and some of the tubers are totally wrong! This happened to us this year with two varieties. We order this really nice purple ball dahlia and it came as like this pink/peach dinner plate dahlia and we only two plants ended up being the ones we ordered. The other one was a really cute pon pon dahlia named "Chimacum Davi" and it ended up being this weird orange and pink ball dahlia. Totally not what we expected! Other times it turns out amazing though, another example this year was we got the dahlia named "Peaches." Well 3 plants came out as something different and it was the most beautiful white ball dahlia with pink edges. That was such a happy find so sometimes it works out great and other times not so great, but its okay because we just buy more for next year and divide the ones that we love in the field!

June was also the month that boomed with photographers interest in taking photos in the flower field! Gosh its been so fun seeing all the photos on social media and all the happy families and couples and babies in the flowers. It brings our hearts so much joy! By the end of July we will have over 20 photographers come to the field! Holy moly! Sometimes it hard for us to understand why photographers would want to come to our working flower farm. We see the mess, the weeds, and dead flowers but all the photographers have great eye for finding the beauty in our field!

Besides me ranting about the dahlias our month was busy with self-serve, special orders, cleaning up the farm, deadheading, pulling out old spring blooms, and preparing the beds for summer and fall planting. More of the same over here, but one of our favorite summer crops starting blooming in June!

Lisianthus!! (top left picture)

These amazing summer flowers have an incredible vase life sometimes lasting up to two weeks. We had such an abundant crop this year and so many of the varieties had great stem length and beautiful bloom colors. Some of the varieties are ruffly and some are more rose looking. They actually have the nickname "the poor mans rose" but I think I would take a bunch of lisianthus over a bunch of rose any day of the week. They aren't super fragrant but their vase life and beauty makes up for it.