Dog Days

Pup + sea of buckwheat

Fern is a puppy. All she wants to do is bite your hands. She'll shred a piece of kale, if you throw it at her, but then she wants to bite your hands again. 

And you want to let her. Because it's summer, and you're sitting in the grass, and the wind is blowing through what's pretty much a forest of zinnias and cosmos, and it just keeps raining every.damn.day, and this puppy is full of life and attack and excitement.

Fern is my friend Sarah's pup, and lives her ridiculously chill life at Farmhand Flowers, in Germantown, where I spent Monday afternoon (with my other friend Sarah), getting bit and walking through a jungle of summer weeds and sitting talking flowerwork and drinking lemonade and coffee AT THE SAME TIME.

Forgive my love of the and and and sentence construction.

 Sarah's house, with Fern + other Sarah's shoulder in the foreground.

Farmhand Flowers resides on a multi-use 60 acre parcel, home to lots of projects (medicinal, maple, visual, heart) and the ghosts of parties past; you can feel 'em all there.

Field trips are exciting; new friends are the best. In the meantime, my garden begins pumping its little heart too, screaming out the nigella above (also called love-in-a-mist) and the requisite zinnias, cosmos, ageratum, gomphrena, sunflowers, larkspur (damn fine larkspur), etc etc etc etc ad infinitum.

I realize things I could have done differently. Such is life. I see places where nature is tricking me, too - I look through the thick-branching cosmos to find a massive hole that's conduit to perhaps entire families of groundhogs, trafficking as they do not in flowers but in my garden-neighbors' brassicas, peas, herbs, etc.

 Pardon my headphone cord.

So I stuffed some cardboard and straw in that mother and let's see what they do about that. 

Visiting Sarah made me so grateful for a garden and a path and the excitement I feel about this work. It made me even more appreciative of this short season, the opportunity to sow a second succession of things, and the sticking-with-it mentality you have to have if you want to do anything, namely farm. 

ta-da

The next goal, beyond planting again, is to get some flowers into the hands of some people. I've been gifting lots of bouquets lately, feeling flower-rich, and I have some weddings on the horizon, but if you're in Troy and in the mood, hit me up for a little tabletop-enhancer or romance-catalyst. I got you. 

Important Ladies

Sometimes my appreciation of certain people is like a deep deep string inside me, like a grounding note that doesn't get struck very often. It makes my eyelashes vibrate when it does.

This interview with Sarah Ryhanen, my friend and idol, and Erin Benzakein, who's doing all kinds of good things for people like me, just made my eyelashes straight up shake.

obvious or subversive?

Sarah says, "We all know this…our job is to work in both obvious and subversive ways to spread these ideas around so that people start placing paying more attention to flowers and start seeking out local stems. Everyone should have flowers in their homes everyday. Flowers need to come out of the ‘special occasion’ closet. Flowers make people feel good. This is what it is to be human, to admire beauty, to indulge in the unnecessary. Plus, we’ve got to plant more flowers to save the bees. That’s another discussion for another day."

I'll take all the discussions, please.