I quit Flower Farming! Here's why!

hey everybody guess what today is February the 1st I'm in zone 8B and it is time to wake up the garden so I figured I would take you on a walk today show you everything that I have to do which is a lot um but I think you'll you know kind of see my vision as we go so let's take a [Music] walk so one of the things that I try to do and practice here on on the farm is rest and rest for a flower farm is super important because we go so hard at

it all season long outside in the elements that our bodies just need to break and so does the garden so um I know some people who probably Farm year round but for for myself I feel like it's important for me to rest and for the people that volunteer um and help me to rest so I make it a rule that we um work up until thanks giving and then we take off the months of December and January and let me tell you it is so hard sometimes when we get beautiful days like today where it's

you know nice and sunny and warm it's hard not to want to go out and do something in the garden especially when you see the mess that we've got out there cuz I just literally Let It Go but it's important it's important that we take that time for ourselves to rest and um I got a lot of like inside projects done I was able to enjoy the holidays with my family and you know just kind of let it go so I'm going to show you it's a mess I'm going to just say right now it's

a mess after you know just letting it lie we've had tons of rain this winter we've had super super cold weather this winter we've had um you know I think everybody in the whole country experienced the winter storm that we had come through so um but it's time it's time to wake up the garden it's time to start doing all the things and I just thought you know it'd be fun to show you where I'm at and just show you what the plan is and where we're going from here so behind me you see this

is actually a flower bed that is up against our house and we live in a barn dominium if you haven't seen that video I've done a couple about how we did that it was actually an old barn that we converted into a house but this front flower bed is one that I use for like overflow so some times I'll have succession planted zenas in there I've got my mint in there that I use a lot for bouquet so I've let everything like weeds and all just everything left it you know for the winter I have

tons of like little birds that come in here and eat all these seeds so I'm going to mow all that down I've got some uh perennials in there got some hydrangeas and other things hiding in there so I'm going to clean that up I've actually been saving cardboard that I'm going to put down as weed barrier in here cuz uh I have landscape cloth under there but but I think it's kind of deteriorated over the years so my plan for this year is I'm going to use that a little bit more um for cutting so

I'll show you what I do on that in another video all right so there is the problem child actually not a problem but this was where this is kind of like a multi-functional space I've used it for several different things this is what is left from the sunflower festival and yes I liter left it I was just exhausted and I've kind of tried to pick up things after the festival before we um take off for the winter and this is as far as I got this was a maze and if you were part of the

sunflower Festival you um probably saw it and went through it it was a fun little maze we had sunflowers and and we had zenyas and Cosmos PL pled in here but we had an early freeze in October like 2 weeks before the sunflower Festival so everything died so we had to jump out here and get creative because we had already you know had the sunflower Festival planned so we literally Maggie and I got out here uh Maggie is one of my interns that had stayed in volunteers she's just a lifesaver I love her but we

got out here and we literally built a maze I drew it out on paper I can show you a picture of that here I drew it out on paper we laid it out um we had a bunch of bamboo growing on our property we made our own poles and then I just ordered a bunch of landscape cloth and we made the walls and then the girls got out here and painted on the on the walls and it was just cute as it could be so it was a makeshift fun little thing um in in Li

of having a flower maze hopefully this year we're planning better and we'll have a lot more um things flower related for the festival but anyway so in the spring if you came to our farm tour last year this was the pin wheel and I'll show you a drone shot of that here it was so beautiful y'all it was another one of the things that I dreamed up because I kind of try to be creative in this area it's just an extra little field that we have uh coming up the driveway here but um it was

a it was a pin wheel that I laid out and that had like Cosmos sen zinas and we had that for the farm tour before we mowed it down for The Maze but anyway so you see I've got this area to clean up here I'll be taking all this down taking all the poles out we'll come in here with the tractor and we'll teal everything up this you guys you're not going to want to miss this this year this year what I'm going to do in this area is this is going to become our annual

upic field that's right we're going to go to upic this year I have so many people that want flowers and want the experience of cutting their own that um I've made the decision that we're going to go to primarily upic this year so that's going to be a first for us it's going to be exciting I think it's going to relieve a lot of work off of our shoulders because normally we're doing all the cutting we're doing all the bunching and and you know delivering flowers and it's just I don't know I this is this

is going into my fourth season and I try to Pivot every year if I see something that that is not working or an idea that I feel like would work better it's okay to Pivot you know it's it's okay to change plans try something you never know until you try it right so this is going to become rows of annuals and I have so many beautiful zenyas planned Cosmos just sunflowers all the things that people can come and that are easy to pick and that everyone loves and they come in so many colors so I

can't wait to show you how we transform this but the first thing is clean up all right so into the field we go yes we are proud members of the Florida AGR tourism Association love that organization it helps us to host people on our farm for our different events so here we have the garden beds we have five beds 8 ft long in this area so this is a whole row of Yaro right here that this will be the fourth year for it it over Winters in the spring it will be like you know 3

4T tall so we have um Snapdragon and this and snapd dragon and some weeds but we'll get all that cleaned up we were right in the middle of replacing all of the irrigation lines when it was time to quit so guess what instead of continuing to work we left it and I'm kind of glad we did because we had that huge freeze I mean like we don't get that cold here that often but it literally was down in the teens for 3 days and that is cold for Florida y'all we're not equipped for that and

so I lost all of my water timers we had some busted lines so I'm glad that we didn't replace all the water lines and the irrigation because I'm sure that I would be replacing it again so that was kind of a smart move I know it looks like a mess but literally we worked up until Thanksgiving and then that was it I'm like okay we're quitting we are we are going to be disciplined enough to just walk away from it but you can see like over the winter it is a mess we have weeds that

have popped up rain that breached the rose we got to you know go back in there and fix those but it's okay because now you know it's it's time to start working again and it will only take us a few days to get out here and clean this up replace all the irrigation and then all the seedlings that we have growing in the grow room will pop in the ground and we'll be good to go and I know what you're thinking you're probably thinking oh my gosh you have just created yourself so so much work

but you know what you got to rest rest is super super important and it you know it's it's here waiting on me and now I've got a plan and we'll jump out here and we'll do it and it will have been worth the rest all right moving on we have the greenhouse and I really didn't have anything uh going on in the greenhouse much this is the old marold bed and let's go in here and see I closed it up because we get really super high winds out here so that's why I closed it all

right so same thing going on in the greenhouse we've just kind of let the beds go we'll get in here and pull up the voluntary weeds there's some there's a few things still hanging on in here we got some status and I think the winter killed all my eucalyptus I mean it was cold y'all I've got a few I've got some lanthus in there so we'll get that cleaned up of course all the dalas the cold got it I was just tring it this year to see if the bulbs would survive in the pots so

we have yet to dig those up to see how those did of course all the tomato plants will get out of here so just a lot of clean up inside the greenhouse we plowed this um this field under and let it go we'll get that ready and Maggie has uh a vegetable garden plan for that that and then of course the OG Garden which is the beds down there just a lot of cleanup and I've got a garden plan for early spring blooms I say early spring spring blooms cuz we're already February 1st here so

that will be full of like cool flowers that I have um growing in the growroom so you see we have our work cut out for us but you know it was a choice that I make to to be able to take off a few months and enjoy the family time and doing things inside the house and so now it's time to get back to work and I basically what I do is to to make sense of it all is I'll walk out here with a pen and paper and I'll just start making lists lists of

everything that needs to be done everything that needs to be planted I've already um made my garden plan I did that back in the fall because when you know I I did I say I totally rest but I actually did um soil block a few things for spring you know I just hopped out there in the flower barn and soil block some things for spring and put those under the grow lights cuz I knew that you know I would be ready to plant so I did do that but other than that I didn't touch the

garden so I drew out the garden plan in November and I knew you know where everything's going I know where you know what I'm planting all the seeds are ordered everything is you know ready to go and so that's what I do I'll make a list and and then we have a big whiteboard that we just start writing things on and that way when we come in we know okay this is what we're going to do today it's kind of like a schedule and it you know we just work off that and get out of

the sun it's a little bright this morning so we just work off that list and we just start tackling things you know down the list one at a time and I'm a list person I literally work off list for everything it kind of drives me crazy sometimes but you know if I don't write it down or forget it I don't know are you are you guys like that do you work off list but I do and then of course we um you know after we make a list we had a creative meeting um we've got

uh my event coordinator that meets with us Melanie love her I know you guys have met her at our events but we planned all of our events for the year we've got all the dates out and we're starting to book the vendors for those just plan all the fun things if you don't follow me on Facebook or Instagram it's blackb Barn blog be sure to hop over there because I uh make all the announcements you know mostly on Facebook on our page but and then uh on our website blackmar blossoms.com but we will um post

all the announcements there and then of course you can join our email list on our website and then you will be the first to find out all the fun things but um it it was a great year last year it was probably our best year yet and I know that this year it's going to be even better better we have so many fun things planned we're going to start with our Mother's Day tea again and this year we we sold out last year like immediately so this year we've decided to do um two different times

so we'll have a morning session and an afternoon session and um it's going to be fun and then uh our farm tour is coming up and the farm tour is I love the farm tour cuz it's where we invite everybody it's a free event everybody can come out see the farm and person see you know what we do we're going to have demonstrations we're going to have workshops going on this year and this year we've decided on the farm tour you we had four Farms with this last year but we were all in different counties

and so it was kind of difficult for people to see everything in one day so this year we've scaled back and it's just us and fussel day lily farm and we're in the same county we're in Washington County Florida so you'll be able to it's from 9: to three um what is the date Memorial Day weekend it's that Saturday it's on our website and it's on our Facebook page but if you're seeing this before that time frame be sure and plan on coming it's a fun day it's from 9:00 to 3: and you can just

Farm hop from our farm to day Lily's uh fussel day lily farm and they have all kind of things planned going on over there as well but it's basically a day of learning and a and an experience to see you know how a flower farm works and of course we'll have flowers for sale we'll have our upic open so it it's going to be a fun time too and then our huge sunflower Festival that we had last year was the first one you guys I was blown away we had 800 people on the farm for

that we had uh two bands we had a concert we had like 20 vendors food trucks uh sunflowers in the in the you know for sale by the bunch of it it was so fun but this year we have something special planned it's going to be even bigger so be sure that you saved the date for that it's in October I believe it's the 21st this year but like like I said again it's on our website um and our Facebook page so be sure and follow us there and follow us along for everything that we're

going to be doing in the garden to get prepared for all those things so anyway thanks for watching the video guys I just wanted to give you a quick tour around the farm and show you all the work we have to do and the fun things that we've got planned so be sure to follow along I've made myself a new year's resolution that I'm going to post more videos this year I get so busy working that I don't take time to do it and I know it's important because a lot of you guys like to

not only follow along to see what we're doing but you're learning too and I know that's how I learn just by you know watching others so I'm going to be better about posting more videos showing you guys the processes and uh you know all the fun things and all the work and everything I'll try to do better about posting videos this year make sure again you're following us on our social media pages and remember Bloom where you're planted [Music]