05/22/2026
May's not over yet, but it feels like it should be!
This has probably been the most brutal month ever in the history of us farming. It's a big part of the reason I haven't been posting much -- it's hard to feel like showing up online when you don't have much to show. But I keep insisting on telling the real story not to get pity, but because I think the world has enough people selling the "super polished" version of their life or their farms and not enough people showing the messy side.
And if you're a follower here, chances are you appreciate that alongside the beauty, we also try and show the grit, so here goes:
We had so much crop loss in May. Second picture in shows what should have been thousands of tulips, only about 30 of which survived to put on any kind of bloom. The rest aborted either just below the surface or just as they'd emerged thanks to the extreme whiplash in temps. Not shown are our other losses--90% of the peonies, most of the alliums and irises, plus a lot of other bulb or perennial crops we've come to really rely on, like our lilacs.
The ironic thing is that we'd switched around our whole crop plan to heavily favor spring this year -- we'd invested into more infrastructure, more bulbs, more beds, all of it. Based on all of our projections and plans and hard work, we were planning on having our spring output be quadruple what it usually is.
That did not happen.
There was one saving grace though, and that was our ranunculus crop--easily the best we've ever had. It's been tall and abundant, and it has basically made it possible to continue to fulfill our obligations, though there hasn't been enough of it to open the farmstand to the public again. We did manage to pull off the mixed buckets for a DIY wedding earlier in the month (we did have to buy in some flowers from other farms and wholesalers to supplement), and we also had the flowers for a DIY bridal bouquet (not pictured) too, on top of all of the weekly and monthly subscriptions.
The month has been stressful and challenging, but there have been two major saving graces:
1) Because we've had almost no flowers to harvest, we've been able to actually be super on top of planting, bed prep, and weeding. Even though the first two months of the season were a major disappointment, we still have a LOT of the season left, and right now we're on track to see some serious abundance starting in June (also more than we've ever had before).
2) If you follow along with our farm newsletter, you know our family has a major operation coming up next week--our littlest farmer, Naomi Jean, is finally getting her long-awaited heart surgery to fix the hole in her heart that she was born with. If you've ever had a child undergo a major medical operation, you know how stressful it is. On top of the emotional weight, there's also just the weight of the sheer logistics--missing work, hospital stays, where the other kids are going to stay, who's going to watch the dog, etc. It's been a lot, and the lack of flowers has at least freed up time and bandwidth to be able to handle those a little more gracefully than we maybe would have otherwise. It's also allowed us to enjoy the other usual end-of-school celebrations like May Day (that our three older kids participated in) with more ease than we usually have been able to.
And you know what?
We're doing okay.
Every time we go through hard things, we're reminded of how many people are in our corner, and how good people's hearts are. We are so thankful for everyone who has showed up in ways both big and small for our family.
In the end, "there are no shortcuts to knowledge," like Ben Horowitz says, "especially knowledge gained from personal experience."
At some point in our farming career, we were going to need to learn how there are some things that are truly out of our control, and how to build up our systems and contingency plans for that. This kind of personal firsthand knowledge is often hard to learn while you're going through it, but invaluable in the long run of your success.
So here's to hopefully better days ahead, and if nothing else, lots of lessons learned this season!
