Learning From Last Year’s Failures.
Wins, Challenges, & Why I Keep Five Jumbo Calendars!
I begin the journey of writing this newsletter in our air-conditioned kitchen on a July day that promises to be sweltering. The flowers have already been harvested in the early hours of the morning and in a couple hours, I’ll be at my friend Caelin’s house - she’s a flower farmer too (shoutout to Flax Hollow Farm) - and we’ll be picking up a knitting project we started back in the winter. I appreciate Caelin because she follows through on things.
Speaking of following through on things, I asked you all to subscribe to this newsletter about two years ago. Better late than never! And honestly, it’s fine because the last two years were just straight chaos but now with a full-ish year of growing under my belt, I think I actually have thoughts worth sharing! Like… All of the things I totally messed up last year and all the things I’m doing differently this time around. Hopefully, these thoughts could prove useful to other beginning farmers out there or at the very least, provide a sort of comfort in the fact that you weren’t alone when you tossed the hundredth tray of seedlings that were supposed to be transplanted five weeks ago and were probably dead anyways.
Well I’m proud to say that this year, I’ve only thrown out four - four trays of sweet peas which honestly weren’t looking too good to begin with. The thing is, I already knew how it would go. I’d plant them out just to “see what happens” and then watch them fail miserably out in the field just like I did last year. I just love sweet peas so much - so I added them to my sowing schedule without any real plans on how I was going to adjust their growing conditions in the field. So after a good hard moment of being real with myself, I chucked them. And now I’m watching my fourth succession of zinnias grow happily in their place. That’s something I learned after last year. Be merciless! If the seedlings aren’t going into the ground healthy, or you want to try it again “just to see what happens” without an actual plan on how it’s going to be better this time around, don’t fool yourself! It’s a waste of time, energy, and perfectly good bed space.
A lot of my wins this year actually revolved around seedling management. While I was doing pretty well last spring on sticking to my seed-sowing schedule, I was constantly dropping the ball in terms of scheduling time to harden-off those seedlings, prepping beds in time, and transplanting them before they were near death. So the first thing I did pretty much as soon as last year’s season ended in November was go out and purchase five jumbo calendars. Everyone who comes over always asks why the heck and why do I have five calendars? Well I’ll tell you! And let me say, it’s changed my life.
By the time February rolled around that winter, every single calendar had been completely filled out with a label at the top and while some may technically overlap in terms of content, they are: Seeds, Transplanting, Field Maintenance, Events/Deliveries, and Perennial Maintenance. I use the first four calendars consistently and look at them every day. I think next year, I will probably combine Field and Perennial Maintenance into one.
My 5-Calendar System Breakdown
On my Seeds Calendar, I started by transferring the details from a separately created spreadsheet detailing my seed-sowing schedule (the spreadsheet includes columns for variety, tray size, tray quantity, notes like “double/triple sow” if the germination rate was low, and of course, the date). This may sound like overkill; why the effort to display redundant information? But if I’m looking at five calendars and multiple spreadsheets, it helps to have that information in multiple formats. This works for me but maybe it won’t work for you. That’s fine! So anyways, I literally write “Sow: Snapdragon 1st Succession” on the day that I’m scheduled to and then a week before my planned transplant date (which goes onto my Transplanting Calendar), I write on my Seeds Calendar: “Harden-Off: Snapdragon 1st Succession”.
If your head is already spinning, I’m so sorry, but here is why I keep a separate Transplanting Calendar and a Seeds Calendar. A seed-sowing schedule for me is more or less set in stone. It totally revolves around my first and last frost dates and the number of weeks I want to keep in between successions of the same flower group. The only reason I would edit my Seeds Calendar during the season is if I added a last-minute variety I wanted to trial or if I was running a week behind. But I really make it a priority to stick to my seed sowing schedule and make time for it even when I’m doing a billion other things. Because if I don’t sow seeds, I won’t have flowers.
My Transplanting Calendar is a little more fluid and decidedly more colorful. While all my other calendars are sharpie-d in, my Transplanting Calendar is covered in color-coded sticky tabs labeled with each flower variety and succession. The colors depend on if they are seed-sown, bought-in plugs, or perennials and also if they are a hardy or tender annual - again maybe overkill but it helps me mentally anticipate the work ahead. And because they are on stickies, I can move them around the calendar in relation to ideal transplanting weather or if I’m running a week behind and want to remind myself that they’re sitting on the deck waiting for me to get around to them.
The Field Maintenance Calendar is a mix between a hard schedule and tasks as they come up through the season. Just to keep myself accountable, I literally write “WEED” under every Wednesday between the months of May and October, and “DEADHEAD” every Monday starting in July. I also write “PREP ROW #5” the week before Row #5 is scheduled to be transplanted into and specify that bed’s needs (i.e. compost, fertilizer, drip tape, landscape fabric, etc.). Throughout the month, I’ll also pencil in if a row looks like it needs to be netted or corralled in the coming weeks and also note big scheduled deliveries of infrastructure, compost, etc.
My Events/Deliveries Calendar is self-explanatory but I write in all of my farmers market dates for the year, any scheduled farm visits, and my delivery route for each week. I also note if any wholesale customers requested a particular flower for that week so I can remember to circle back with them about availability.
The Perennial Maintenance Calendar was more helpful in the early spring when we were getting in big deliveries of plugs and bare roots and I wanted to visually spread out the workload of getting those into the ground. I haven’t used it much since then but I do have a separate Perennial Maintenance Schedule in spreadsheet form which is divided broadly into months rather than by the day. I think I’ll probably keep the spreadsheet moving forward and nix the calendar.
Because of this highly-detailed, incredibly anal system I set for myself before the season even started, I’ve been able to stay more or less on schedule which has been a huge win for me as I love a schedule and I was frankly really depressed last year when I was flying by the seat of my pants feeling like everything was spiraling out of control and all the seeds I had spent hours sowing were doomed for the compost pile.
The Biggest Win Of All
As a result of all my winter prep and my jumbo calendars, I was also able to pace myself with field clean-up which I had put off until early spring and with Liam’s help, we had the entire field cleared of debris by the time we started laying down compost mid-March. Speaking of compost, another HUGE win for us involved how we spread compost this year. Spreading compost is just one of those things everybody talks about when prepping new beds but nobody actually talks about how?! We don’t own a tractor so if you do, you’re either going to laugh or gasp because we pushed fourteen 75-foot rows worth of compost via a single wheelbarrow from the dumpsite in an adjoining ex-horse pasture into our main production field. Yes, we hand-shoveled compost into a wheelbarrow and pushed it 250 feet away, dumped it, and spread it by hand with a rake. And by we, I mean mostly Liam because I expired after the first two trips with the wheelbarrow. And if you didn’t know already, Liam works a full-time job, 9-5, five days a week so for about a month, his evenings and weekends consisted of hauling around cow poop by hand. NEVER. AGAIN.
That was May and June of last year. The following August, we put a couple hundred extra dollars into the business account and rented a tractor for the weekend to spread compost on beds we were planning to plant into in September. I know you’re probably wondering why we didn’t just do that in the first place but to be completely honest, we didn’t know renting a tractor was an option (we still don’t know a lot of things are options) until our good friends Josh and Do-Hee of Vernon Street Farm told us about their tractor guy and hooked us up. Make no mistake, having a tractor even for a weekend was a game-changer as Liam’s body was no longer being sacrificed. But the system wasn’t anywhere near perfect because we were totally ripping up the field. Last year was WET and as soon as we brought the tractor off the sod lawn and into the production field, I almost passed out watching the tires dig a trench right into the middle of our beds. The space between the tractor wheels just weren’t wide enough to clear our 4-foot wide rows.
So this past winter, not wanting to compromise on our existing bed proportions (the compost had already been laid for half the field and I had burned so so so many pieces of 4-foot wide landscape fabric) I searched keywords like “compost spreading” into multiple facebook groups and reddit forums trying to figure out how other farms did it at a similar scale. Liam had already suggested laying down a sort of plywood bridge for the tractor but I worried about soil compaction and also the fact that one of us would be dragging around huge, heavy pieces of plywood as the tractor made its way down the row.
After weeks of on and off research I spotted a comment left by Jenny Love of the No-Till Flowers Podcast (love you Jenny) on the ASCFG Facebook group where she suggested bringing the tractor + compost as close to the row as possible and having it dump into two wheelbarrows lined up side-by-side. Together, the two wheelbarrows were roughly the width of a front-end loader and there would be minimal waste off the sides. Then you could simply push the wheelbarrows down the existing footpaths thereby avoiding any actual compaction on the bed itself. It sounded like an obvious solution but Liam was understandably resistant to the idea because the paths between our rows were like quicksand. Anyone who visited our farm last year can attest to having a boot suctioned off their foot at the lowest point in the field (drainage on our farm is a topic for another day). Rolling a single, weight-concentrated wheel down the path without getting stuck simply wasn’t possible.
So, I proposed adapting his initial plywood bridge that would have covered our beds into narrow plywood planks that would fit our pathways. Guys, it worked brilliantly. Wheeling across plywood was like flying. There was no resistance at all. Between Liam on the tractor and me pushing the wheelbarrows and raking it out, we were able to do twenty-five rows over two days. And they weren’t long days either. I think we worked a total of twelve hours.
As we were zipping around the field, ecstatic at the success of our newfound system, I couldn’t help but think about the physical agony Liam went through last year. Every time we finished a row in under half an hour, I looked at him, mournfully, thinking about how it would take us an entire evening to do half a row the year before. I felt incompetent knowing this solution had existed if only I had looked a little harder. I also worried that Liam resented me for all the work he had to do last spring and was painfully reminded of how I had spent the remainder of that season feeling like a weak and useless woman for not being able to keep up with him as we spread it by hand. But thankfully, Liam doesn’t hold grudges and he really had to talk me off a ledge as I continued to project my own insecurities and steeled myself for any trace of bitterness that didn’t actually exist. I just felt really bad, ya know!
I will forever treasure the memory of him whipping around on our rented tractor, high on the feeling of having figured something out, eyes shining saying, “Babe, this is awesome”.
March 25th, 2024: A satisfying view from our bedroom window that evening.
