We’ve weathered our first heat wave. Summer surely is here.

Even without a calendar for reference, I could have told you Memorial Day had come and gone. The face of the flower fields change significantly this time in the season. It’s almost instantaneous. As soon as the nights get warm, the summer annuals start jumping. They’ll grow inches in a day. Plants that looked like little wimps on Monday will be stately silhouettes by Friday, buds on top of towering stems.

It’s gratifying. It’s humbling. It’s even a little horrifying. The sheer volume of work that I walk into each day when I open the gate to the field is not for the faint of heart. While everyone else gets excited for summer vacations and days by the pool, I wake up each morning to a ragged routine of getting myself mentally psyched like a tired, sweaty linebacker at halftime, trying to find the energy to bring home a win for the team. 6 AM. Time to rally!

I’m not going to sugar coat it. This spring has been beyond exhausting. I took on nearly three times the weddings I’ve ever had in the spring. Twenty are already done for 2013. Yes, 20 and it’s only the beginning of June. I now know that many weddings in spring is a very bad idea. While I loved all of them and had the very best couples (as always), trying to get spring farm work done, manage the business, reply to hundreds of emails, meet with loads of couples for later this year, and do all the designing for those spring weddings has left me a bit threadbare. I’m used to this level of exhaustion later in the year, usually around late August after the summer heat has literally drained me dry. But I’ve never been at this point so early in the year before. Being a farmer florist is not easy.

Fortunately the flowers are my fuel. Harvesting is my solace. Lucky me…there’s hours and hours of harvesting to do every day of the week now. The sweet peas are popping, spreading their fragrance throughout the hoop house. The bachelor buttons are electric blue and likely visible from space. The berry-hued dianthus is abundant and also sweetly perfumed, particularly in the evenings after a warm day. The peonies have peaked and will be with us for just another week or two. The calendula, astrantia, scabiosa, eryngium, lady’s mantle, ferns, yarrow, foxglove, nigella, larkspur, buplerum, baptisia, mints, and more are also pumping out the stems.

I may have kissed a few of the very last ranunculus and anemone blooms this week before we began ripping out the plants. The heat has finished them off like a swift and heartless medieval executioner. When I stop getting weepy at the passing of my favorite flowers each season, that’s when I know it’s time to quit this business.

When I load the van to drive the full buckets back to the cool of the studio each evening, my head gets a little fuzzy from all the fragrance wafting around in there. Or maybe it’s the lack of sleep and food. Either way, it’s an exhausting, beautiful life I’m leading.