Where to find us/ Important dates:

August 1^st 2026: Next email subscriber giveaway winner chosen!

August 7, 2026: Next Fresh Friday Market on 2^nd Street in Maysville, Kentucky. 6:00 pm- 9:00 pm. Please come see us. Go eat dinner at Babz Bistro or Sol and Sage, or Hippie Burger then come shop the market. It can be a whole thing. These markets have been painfully slow so it would be amazing to see some people come through for the vendors.

September 3, 2026: OAK Field Day at Loving Farm where we will be talking about the development of a filter strip along the railroad track in addition to other ways we incorporate conservation on our farm. It is free to attend and our favorite vegan food cart will be here selling her delicious food. Be ready to NERD OUT!

Save the date: Saturday, September 26^th. To celebrate the harvest moon, we are teaming up with Graceful Serenity Yoga for a half day retreat hosted here at the farm filled with flower crown crafting, yoga, herbal tea and a soundbath!

Hello Flower Lovers!

This post is for the information eaters out there! Feel free to skim through and look at the pretty pictures if you just need some cheer.

It was another roller coaster week for flower farming, with the highs being a trip to Frankfort with some preorder sales and extras for The Kentucky Flower Market, followed by an OAK field day at Kentucky State University where we got to see our friend Linelle’s amazing organic flower and herb garden that she farms with her counterpart, Seun. It was really interesting to see the different trials of mulches and ways to manage weeds. The portion of the day about pollinator patches inspired us to come home and knock down a huge patch of johnson grass in our own native plant habitat that very evening, and some more on Saturday.

Again, I will reiterate that by way of our method of land management it may look like we don’t care about weeds. We absolutely do. We also care about the environment and chemical inputs (especially conventional ones) which is not on our BINGO card, so we rely solely on manual removal. I refuse to believe that weeds are going to be the demise of the human race. After reading Rachel Carson’s book, Silent Spring, last summer my gut feeling that just because some big agency says something is safe, does not mean that it is was really solidified into firm belief. I guess I am the “anti-vaxer” equivalent related to herbicides and pesticides. I live with the burden of that choice on the daily (maybe it is a recovering catholic thing). If there were six of us working here, we would probably dedicate three of us to manually removing weeds from the pollinator patch alone. But alas, it is only two very hardworking women managing this farm and the land it resides upon so we choose to use our time growing as many flowers and vegetables as possible amidst the other day to day things that running a home requires.

After working in drug research for about 10 years, I saw first hand how long it took to study a new medicine for safety AND efficacy (to test how well it actually works). The one thing about medications is that we usually have a choice whether to take them or not take them. We know these conventional herbicides cause illness. Furthermore, there is not much choice on how we are exposed to them. It is in our air, waterways and used around so much of our food. Here is a study about soybean production and the use of glyphosate, explaining that it is used multiple times per crop. Of course, feel free to dive deeper into it yourself, but this is a nice starting point. Soy is used in so many processed food items as an ingredient and in animal feed that ends up as meat on the kitchen table. There was a recent decision (last month) which blocks the right to sue for cancer related illness related to herbicides because, as the Supreme Court determined, the EPA did not require a warning label on the product. To me, that is insanity, but also, insanity is an underlying theme of so many decisions these days.

Just this week we learned that one of our Kentucky farm mentors, Salad Days Farm, had to forgo the sale of all of their cherry tomatoes this season because of herbicide drift. Herbicide drift is what happens when another grower sprays their field and the droplets end up in an unintended place, in this case, an organic vegetable farm. There is little way of even pinpointing where the drift came from because of how the droplets of the chemicals can travel so far in the air (that we breathe, by the way). This is going to cost them about $20,000 in lost revenue this season alone. They could have turned a blind eye to the issue and sold that crop anyway but chose to have their weirdly wilted tomatoes tested. When the cause of the damage was confirmed, they made the incredibly difficult decision to pull their crops for the safety of their customers.

I really don’t think the general public has a good understanding of how this works. I had no idea until we moved here how widespread the use of these chemicals herbicides were until we got into farming ourselves. Is any food really purely organic? I am doubtful at best. Would people even care if they knew? For some reason scientific facts which prove either the safety of something or the danger of it is so easily ignored by humans and the folks who could make the changes in our favor are too concerned about the money behind it all to support the facts in our favor. This was definitely one of the lows of the roller coaster of farming in recent days. It is heartbreaking. Because of the loss to them, I feel it is the least I can do to share their story here with you.

For another take how industrial agriculture came to be, please read/listen to The Unsettling of America by Wendell Berry. Nick Offerman reads the audio book so it is a fun, familiar voice. Even though both of the aforementioned books were written over 50 years ago, they are both still so relevant today.

Anywho, on Wednesday we had a couple of sweet local orders of flowers and carrots that we traded for some delicious food. We love, love, love trading for things (especially food) as opposed to money. We also came into some blackberry starts that I potted up after dropping off some flowers at a neighbor’s house. The volleyball net is out (was up but it fell) and Perriee and I are still married after it all. For such a simple looking contraption, it was extremely humbling trying to put it up, especially in the hot sun. A friend came over on Friday to lend a hand getting our bell tent back up in the field for our upcoming family night with friends in August. I can’t wait to see how much transformation we can accomplish for them and hope it feels magical when they are here.

Random ideas: 1. Host a bookclub at the farm: Carson’s Silent Spring and Berry’s The Unsettling of America. The Berry Center emailed us a nice discussion guide to use for this very thing!; 2. Host a grower-buyer meetup here at the farm where we have flower farmers and their current and potential customers connect in person. Who is in?

Pride and Flock Update: The cats are good. Howard the duck is still here, causing trouble for his lady “friends”. I actually called the vet this week to let them know that he is up for adoption if anyone is looking for a very healthy, 8-year old khaki campbell drake. We do want him going to a home where he can be healthy and safe, believe it or not.

I never thought it would come to this, but here we are. Dayz is the only one who is not afraid of him, because it is the only life she has known, but left to him 24/7 she would succumb to him like how I suspect Nick and June ultimately did. I can’t prove anything, but I really feel like he just wore them out through his bullying. The others are constantly stressed out by his presence and scream and run whenever he gets out, which is too much to count. Perriee put a few landscape staples in the green netting that separates the run where we think he keeps getting through which seems to be helping. Yes, we need to reinforce his side of the enclosure with a gate of some sort to secure him better, right after we finish the weeding.