You never know when  or where inspiration will strike.  Always be on the lookout!

I’m still fighting this awful cold and was rather sluggish about getting my design together for this week for The Seasonal Bouquet Project.  But while I was out in the field harvesting blackberry branches, I happen to notice some fluttering leaves in the woodland that surrounds the field.  They had a silver tint that was glinting against the late afternoon sun.  I climbed over some brush and fallen logs to get to the little tree that was bearing them, delighted to find that it was a Halesia, or Carolina Silverbell.  This darling little native understory tree is a rare find and a welcome treat.  Not only does it have the most beautiful little leaves, it’s also loaded with dainty fragrant white bells in early May.  The timing was perfect.  I cut a huge armful and giddily headed for the studio, dreaming up a silver urn full of silvery foliage.

The lilac and alliums are also blooming in profusion at the moment.  Actually, they’re just about done now, but there were heaps cut and ready for this design.  The ruffled burgundy ranunculus were the perfect foil for the purple and silver.  The wild columbine danced among the lush foliage like little fairy caps.  I said it before and I’ll say it  again, this has been one of the most amazingly beautiful springs I’ve ever experienced.  The flowers are slaying me.

This urn was so huge though (almost as tall as me) that I’m afraid all the delicate details got a bit lost in the photos.  I tried hard to capture them.  It’s been interesting how The Seasonal Bouquet Project has not only helped me flex some design muscles, but it’s also honing my photography skills.  I’m so grateful for this experience!

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I have to confess, this bouquet didn’t feel like my best work.  I’m bone tired from all the spring work and not having a day off in. . . .well, forever.  I’m also fighting a cruel one-two punch at the moment of a nasty spring cold and a serious bout of allergies (so much pollen in the air here right now!)  It was really hard to get the energy to tap into any deep source of creativity.  But you can’t hit a home run every time you step up to the plate, right?  Besides, I think I hit a couple home runs over the weekend with the weddings so I’m cool with getting to third base.

For pretty much my whole career as a floral designer, I’ve been obsessed and most concerned about texture in my creations.  It didn’t matter so much about what color a bloom or leaf was, as long as it had a cool shape or size that would mix with everything else I had in mind.  But I’ve noticed this spring, I’m getting really involved with my color selection.  Instead of dreaming about the shape and texture of a bouquet, I’m dreaming about how that perfectly soft peach ranunculus will look next to reddish blush of the succulent.  In this bouquet here, I was definitely influenced by the rich amethyst of the ranunculus coupled with the same richness of the cotinus and heuchera leaves juxtaposed with the peach ranunculus and the one violet succulent.  Of course there was still texture!  I do adore those little allium buds and the newly sprung green “bearded” wheat (that wiry green in the center).

Until next week . . .  xo.

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Case and point: Sheila and Raynor’s wedding at the picturesque Morris Arboretum this weekend.  These lovebirds actually came to me on short notice.  We didn’t book their wedding until just a mere 30 days before they said “I do”!  Fortunately I was already growing heaps of blooms in peach and soft pink for other brides this spring and so could bring their vision of watery blues, dusky greens, and soft grays accented with lots of peach and pink to life.  And I was so glad they adored succulents as much as I do.   The textural combination of bold succulents with soft spring blooms was truly magical.

To say I was obsessed over Sheila’s bouquet is an understatement.  The sheer number of pictures I took of it will attest to my adoration, and it was really (really!) hard to let that one go. I may have lingered with it for a few moments in the van in a near-tearful goodbye…   There were a dozen succulents tucked among the ranunculus, tulips, stock and dusty miller.  The whimsy of the wild mustard seed spikes kept it all from feeling too daunting though (or so I hope).  It went beautifully with Sheila’s awesome dress!

It was such a treat to work with Joshua’s Catering again!  Laurie’s just a gem and her staff super duper nice.  I loved the place settings they used of soft blue napkins with the prettiest silver I’ve seen in awhile.  The combination really made the centerpieces sing.  Half the tables got antique blue mason jars filled with colorful flowers and half got lots of succulents potted up in antique silver vessels.  Candles and some loose blooms and succulents added a little extra pizzazz.

Another favorite design of the day was the flower girl’s halo.  Sadly, I’m not sure she ever agreed to put it on (six year olds can be fickle), so I’ll include this very rare self-portrait of me modeling it in the studio.  Don’t laugh!

Thanks, Shelia and Raynor, for using locally-grown flowers and allowing us to be part of your very special (and beautiful) day!!  It was such a pleasure!

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The tulips are just spectacular this year.  They are certainly the stars of this arrangement with their long slender curving stems.  The three varieties featured are ‘Menton’, ‘Black Hero’ and ‘Renown Unique’.  Keep an eye out for a separate blog post sometime soon on the tulips at the farm this season and why I love them so much.

And making the first, but surely not last, appearance this week were the dramatic arching branches of blackberry.  This is by far one of my favorite foliages to use in large designs, both for its pretty looks and its very long vase life.

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Catherine and Jeff had a beautiful ceremony along the creek’s edge.  I couldn’t get over how absolutely beautiful Catherine looked in her ivory lace gown with her red hair all swept up.  The bouquet I made for her in peach and cream was just the perfect match.   The talented ladies from Love Me Do Photography were on hand to capture it all!

Photo by Love Me Do Photography

Our rustic oak branch chuppah could not have been more at home than in this wooded setting.  The floral garland on the table underneath was particularly eye-catching.  But I think my favorite floral touch of the day was the big crate of dogwood branches that greeted guests at the back of the aisle.  Catherine’s family is from North Carolina, where the dogwood is the state flower.  So the crate of dogwood was not only beautiful but also quite meaningful.

Congratulations, Catherine & Jeff!!  Thank you for letting us be part of your special day!

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“Make hay while the sun shines.”

It never rings more true for me than in the warm days of April.  While there’s no hay on my farm, there is a lot of work to get done while the sun shines.  Spring rains often foil one critical task in particular: making the planting beds.  Wet soil is easily compacted and also mucks up the tiller.  The best time to till is when the soil is just moist enough to hold together in a loose ball when you squeeze a handful tight, but with no excess moisture at all.  Too dry and the soil will loose its structure, and you’ll be covered in dust.

This week was a great one for making planting beds.  We had lots of rain a few days earlier, and the sun has been shining since so the moisture level was perfect.  And the air temperatures were cool and comfortable, a very lovely thing indeed because making planting beds on this little flower farm is very labor intensive, as you’ll see.

The field has been planted since last fall in a cover crop of winter wheat and clover.  The wheat has really taken off in the past week with the spring warmth.  It adds great biomass to the soil when tilled under, and it’s been doing a superb job at suppressing the spunky spring weeds.

Making the Bed

First, the front-end loader on the tractor is used to spread out piles of rich, aged compost along the swath that will be the planting bed.  Then we go along with a metal hand rake and spread it out as evenly as possible.  Ideally  there would be a thickness of an inch or more of compost on the bed.  Since I added a huge amount of compost last fall before sowing the cover crop, this spring we’re not adding quite so much.

Next, I go along with my handy garden cart and spread by hand two types of organic fertilizer.  One is cottonseed meal.  That’s great for adding a nice slow-release nitrogen that the plants will use to grow big over the season.  The other fertilizer is a “green potash” which is essentially a mixture of ground-up sea organisms (think krill and kelp) and a mined mineral that releases water-soluble potassium for the plants to take up.  This helps a great deal with flowering and overall plant health.

Once the compost and fertilizers are spread, I jump on the tractor and till everything in, going back and forth a few times to get a nice fluffy bed.  I leave just a smidge of wheat standing between beds to become our walkways for the season.  The wheat continues to grow in these paths, getting mown every week or so, until the high heat of summer kills it.  By that time, the weeds aren’t nearly as feisty so we generally don’t have too much trouble with weed control in the walkways.

After the bed is tilled, it’s time to lay the drip tape for irrigation.  Two lines are laid for each bed, with emitters for the water every eight inches.  We use landscape staples to hold the lines in place every fifty feet or so.  The lines are tied off with tight knots at the end to keep them from leaking. The drip tape connects to a “header” line at the top of the field, which in turn connects to a main line to the well.  The irrigation system is set up in zones with automatic timers so watering happens with super efficiency.  There’s nothing worse than lugging around hoses to water when you’ve got a million other things to do on a hot summer day.

With the drip tape in place, two people work together to roll out the plastic to cover the bed.  This task is the one you don’t want to do on a hot day as it’s very tiring!  We use plastic on the beds for two reasons:  it is a huge labor saver when it comes to weeding (the field is rampant with wild amaranth, chickweed, and mile-a-minute vine) and it helps conserve moisture in the soil.  It is my dream to eventually get away from plastic once the weed seed “bank” has been depleted, and we’re no longer fighting a loosing battle with them.  It would be great to just “lodge” (crush with a heavy roller) the wheat each spring and plant into that instead.

In any case, for the time being, we roll out thirty feet of plastic or so at a time and work together to shovel soil onto the edges to hold it down.  It’s important to keep the plastic as taught as possible so we tug on it a lot and step on the edges with our feet to keep it tight until the soil holds it in place.  The 300 foot rows at the farm never feel quite so long as they do when we’re putting on the plastic.  My goal is to have a mechanical plastic layer for the tractor ready to use in the near future.

We usually try to do two rows at a time, giving us some security if a rainy spell should come.  We then set about planting.  On a good day, we can get an entire 300 foot row planted with two people busting it out.  To make the holes, we use a tin can with the edge cut off.  We used to cut “teeth” in the can like pictured, but have since found that it’s actually more efficient to skip the teeth and just cut a straight edge (think how sharp the edge is on the lid of a can you’ve just opened). It’s the most amazingly simple, yet effective, tool ever.  Push down, twist, and remove . . . a perfect circle of plastic comes out.  We just have to be careful not to nick the drip tape in our rush.

And then in go the plants!  Thousands upon thousands of plants, all destined to become beautiful, colorful, fragrant bouquets!   We’ll re-plant into these rows at least a second time after the first round of crops is done.  Some really early/fast crops will actually allow us to get three crops into the same space.  It’s hard to believe sometimes how quickly the field transforms from the bareness of spring (all you see is long lines of ugly plastic) to a rampant jungle of lush growth.

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The dogwood has been truly magical the past two weeks.  Normally it doesn’t make the most reliable cut, because hot sunny spring days force the blooms open too fast and then they “blow out” and drop their petals quickly.  This spring, however, the days have been cool and generally cloudy.  The dogwoods have opened slowly and have lasted for weeks.  I’m taking full advantage of this amazing tree native to Pennsylvania’s woodlands!

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                          Nothing quite like a true spring wedding!

When Carolyn and Brian came in for their initial consultation last year, we had an instant connection over embracing sustainability, being word nerds, and loving locally produced food and beer.  I was super pumped to bring together their vision of a warm, colorful, springy celebration for family and friends!

The venue was the Crane Arts Center.  While it’s a fun and unique space, this converted warehouse is rather sparse and a bit raw.   Dressing it up can be challenging. On the plus side, the space is big enough to accommodate very large events and guests can tour the art galleries featuring local artists while sipping cocktails.  The bright yellow, orange, green, white, and peach of the floral decor really helped make the whole place feel more festive and comfy.  The featured blooms were dogwood, heirloom daffodils, ranunculus, anemones and tulips. Our hand-painted wooden table numbers also contributed to a distinctive look.

The ceremony was in the back garden, which was in full bloom with cherry blossoms that perfectly framed the arbor we put up and decorated with spring blooms and foliage.  Gotta love a blue-blue sky above too.

Carolyn and Brian had a custom logo made for their wedding.  It featured an artichoke so we put artichokes in the centerpieces and one in Carolyn’s bouquet to tie the theme together.  Love ‘n Fresh did not grow these particular artichokes, though there are artichokes currently planted at the farm to hopefully produce these awesome architectural accents later this season.

I have to thank my team for their hard work pulling this wedding and the others this weekend together.  Corinne, Emily, and Heidi:  you rock!   Also, loved working with Ken (and his amazingly attentive staff) from Diverse Catering and Inna from Peach Plum Pear photography again.

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This edition of The Bulletin is going to be some link love for the small business owners out there.  I’ve recently stumbled on some great articles and tools to help with streamlining workflow.  As my business has grown rapidly, I’m finding myself having to quickly learn to delegate tasks I thought I would never give up doing myself because they seem so important or possibly tricky to show someone else how to do.  Turns out, “systems” were my answer.  Thanks to some really kickass bloggers, I’ve learned a lot about creating and implementing systems for my business recently.  I’m excited to see where they take Love ‘n Fresh and to also {hopefully, fingers crossed!} get some more balance in my own life.

Who doesn’t love at Choose Your Own Adventure book?  Take this online business “choose your own adventure” by  Cash & Joy to get some insight into how your business is going and how it can move forward.  It’s so much fun!

Kudos to Michelle at Bombchelle for an awesome article on Design*Sponge that got me rolling on all this “systems” making and thinking.  I signed up for her Systems 101 freebie e-course and devoured it on one sitting.

And have you seen this article in Flying Kite about my mad social media skillz?  Okay, I’m not all that awesome, but it is good food-for-thought for both farmers and small business owners.   I’m now making systems to help me streamline social media tasks.  Sweet!

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Shira and Ryan are such a fun and energetic couple.  They fit together in that way that you know is going to keep them together for the rest of their lives.  When Shira came in for her initial consultation, she told me about how Ryan proposed and it made me laugh, it was so cute.  He used to joke with her that when he proposed, there’d be a Cherrio in the box instead of a diamond ring.  When he did actually pop the question, he made dozens of Cherrio hearts and hung them from the ceiling in their apartment to surprise her when she got home.  What woman wouldn’t say yes to a man that’s willing to get crafty and has a great sense of humor?

Of course the Cherrio hearts needed to play a special part at their wedding!  We hung them on branches at the ceremony and then incorporated them at the reception later.  And to surprise Ryan, I tucked in a single Cherrio (one of the originals) into his boutonniere.  I loved the big grin he got when he saw it!

The ceremony was held at the Lowes Hotel in center city.  After they were hitched, Shira and Ryan led a parade of their many guests, complete with a glittery band of Mummers, to the reception a few blocks away at the landmark Reading Terminal Market.  Love ‘n Fresh worked hard (and fast) to transform this rather raw space into a colorful and festive “street festival” atmosphere.  We designed over 50 lush and vibrant spring centerpieces in vintage milkglass, cheese boxes, and colorful tins to sit on top of chevron fabric runners handmade by Shira’s mom.   Unfortunately you’ll not get to see any of those centerpieces here in this post as we were so crunched for time to set-up that I didn’t get a single photo of the reception space.  Fingers crossed Langdon Photography got some great shots for us!   Especially one of the flower bow-tie I made for the pig statue on the dance floor. . . yep, this was a memorable one!

In the interest of full disclosure, due to the size of this wedding and the unseasonably cool spring we’ve had in Philadelphia, we had to buy in a good many of the flowers from other local growers and California.  Still, we used every single stem of anemone, hellebore, muscari, hyacinth, bleeding heart, ranunculus, and succulents we had at the farm to make these designs extra special.

Congratulations again, Shira and Ryan!!  Thanks for including us in your love story!!  xoxo

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