Where to find us/ Important dates:
Saturday, September 12th: Disco night at Turtleback Ridge Brewery. There will be music and vintage vibes and of course, some flowers!
Saturday, September 19th: Bourbon, Boots, and Blues 12:00pm-5:00pm. Shelby County Fairgrounds. The Kentucky Black Farmer Association is hosting this fun day full of vendors and music after the vending is over!
Saturday, September 26th. 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 using our homegrown ingredients, yoga, herbal teas and a sound bath! Register here.
October 1st: Next subscriber giveaway drawing! We love doing these because we ALWAYS share a moment of excitement for the winner.
Sunday, October 11th: “Birds of a Feather”, Mini Market and Music at Loving Farm featuring Nat Lefkoff in collaboration with Presa Ceramics. The food and drinks and entertainment and market are all so exciting. We are 99% sure we will have our favorite face painter here as well. It is going to be a whole thing.
Saturday, October 17th: Hainted Harvest 3:00-7:00 with storytelling by Derby City Midnight at dusk: Turtleback Ridge Brewery
Hello Flower Lovers!
I have to kick off this week’s newsletter with a quick recap of the Organic Association of Kentucky field day That we hosted on Thursday. Perriee and I split up between Mad, one of the amazing OAK folks to talk about our NRCS practices, and Shari from the University of Kentucky, who spoke about coppicing and propagation of native and non native plants. You only had around an hour for each cohort and it went by FAST!
Shari and I teamed up and we began with a quick tour of our production field where we set up a demo station to quickly show how we made all of our 30 ft rows in our production space. Perriee and I chose a spot ahead of the field day along the filter strip behind the production field to show this. I was outside in my pajamas on Saturday, finishing it up for a quick photo to show what it should generally look like. Put as much compost and straw on top as you can, up to maybe 6 inches or so but we absolutely do not get that much on top, for lack of materials and woman power hours to complete a task (sometimes you have to let the desire for perfection go in order to get ahead in your dreams). I would say we shoot for 2-3 and then the cover crop (buckwheat at the moment, then winter wheat).
After a peep at the Flower Studio, our group then gathered around one of our redbuds in the field where Shari gave us some homework this winter to cut it 2-3” above ground level to help it grow for cut flower production. It was the perfect topic for the day, having a few cut flower farmers in attendance and it was obvious that everyone was super interested in her presentation. I know I learned a ton! That is what was so cool (well, one of the things) about the day; all of the people who attended had collective knoweldge and experience that could save the world, yet ALL of us were just so interested to learn MORE. Broken record here…I love my job. I could go on and on about all of the highlights of the day. The only downside was not getting to get to know everyone on a deeper level, like all of their background stories. It was a cool group of humans, for sure. Thank you to everyone who helped make the day possible. One last thing that I have to share…on the first tour that I did, I was talking to one of the people about later on and shared a little bit of lemon basil seed which she shoved in her pocket with excitement, a move that always warms both of our hearts. The next day she sent us a message on social media and expressed how she thought it was cute that both Perriee and I gave her seeds on our respective tours, not knowing that until she told us. I lemon basil and Perriee, bergamot. Admittedly, I teared up upon reading that.
Speaking of tearing up, I was a crying mess at the Dirt Pearl’s supper last Sunday in Irvine. All happy and cathartic tears, coming from sharing stories of how the land has impacted our lives. It was the exact same vibe of people gathered together, hungry to learn from one another, already heavy with experience and successes and failures. It’s a farmer thing I guess.
To continue on the topic of knowledge, we were approved to get reimbursed for an online flower farming course in November through Trademark Farmer AND for a one year membership in Ellen Frost’s online community, FlowerMore. Both of these experienced flower professionals just have a way of teaching that Perriee and I both soak up very easily so we believe these two added educational outlets are going to have a huge impact on our farm in the next several months. Jenny Marks is a cut flower farmer in New York who shares her business methods to help flower farmers become profitable. If you know Perriee and I, you know we would happily give each bloom away for free if we could, but we have to generate some dollars in order to continue this dream of a journey. The timing feels right, having been full-time and somehow almost made it through our second year this way, having a few trials and errors under our belts to work off of.
Ellen’s community has a complimentary design focus, being a place to ask questions and share information about using local flowers in floristry. I am already so excited to work on this month’s design challenge and looking forward to a discussion of invasive species use, a topic Perriee and I swirl around in quite often (not planting and using invasives, but foraging the ones we have that might work for a job we are doing). For the wedding we did a couple of weeks ago, we were thoughtful about what we brought, not wanting to introduce anything that we would not want here, which has a healthy ecosystem and small farm in production.
If you are local to the state, check out Kentucky Greenworks for more info on the program that helped us with these opportunities.
Pride and flock update: Hot off the press, Howard is one week into being integrated back into the flock. His molt is just what he needed to snap out of his mating overdrive. Having them all back together again without incident is like a load lifted indeed.
Loving Farm 