Can it be July already?
As this flower farmer's year races away I'm trying to remind myself to slow down and smell those roses while we have them
A time of abundance
A flower farmer’s year is a rip rollocking ride interspersed with knock-you-off-your-feet occasions of breathtaking beauty. The challenge to all of us growing flowers for sale, is to keep up with the ride, and at the same time be prepared to screech to a halt so that we can spend minutes at a time staring slack mouthed at the glory of the farm in full flower. All those months of planning, seed ordering, sowing, pricking out, fleecing, watering, feeding are being rewarded now with beds overflowing with colour and so many roses we can smell them before we can see them. Abundance is the word.
Hopefully we also have plenty of good sized orders so that we can harvest the abundance and with it supply our customers. Even I, the inveterate photographer, sometimes forget to take shots at this time of year. Even I, a girl with a great deal of experience in ramming a twenty four hour period with many strictly managed chunks of time trials, an objective at the end of each, find it hard to keep up with the orders, enquiries, workshops, garden tours.
On rising early….
There is a good way to do it though, and here I recommend to you the extremely early alarm call.
Lying in bed means you might hear the birdsong, but you won’t see those little fledgelings sitting, a bit shocked, where they’ve landed on the path, and then, spying one mooching towards them, launching with an amazing flurry into the long grass to one side, landing on the developing thistle down seed heads which swing with the barely-there weight of these birdlings clinging on for dear life. Really, the sight of a fledgeling developing confidence to fly is worth slowing down for.
Lying in bed you don’t see the flowers as they reach to the sun climbing over the hedge. Early in the morning flower heads are turgid with water right up to their necks: they look fresh, full of promise, ready for the day. By lunchtime in hot weather flowers can appear exhausted even though they’ll perk up later in the day. See them at dawn. Step out of the house before the sun’s over the hedge. Be up the field to greet the sun. You, the flowers, the sun, the birds: it feels as though the world belongs to just you and them if you get up early enough. So that’s my advice.
Set your alarm for 5am and get up when it goes off. Blearily pull on yesterday’s clothes, clean your teeth, drink a glass of water, and while the kettle boils for coffee take your dog out into the light and listen for the birdsong. Wherever you are: in a city walk to a park, in the country, take the lane to the fields, in a garden or flower farm beat the bounds as the sun rises and the kettle boils. Give yourself five minutes. Cut your own bunch of sweet peas or roses. Make a thirty stem challenge for yourself. Stand on top of the nearest hill and face the rising sun for a minute.
Then you can reach for the to do list, pour the coffee, in my case make the cutting list and start filling buckets, and by 6am you can be out there getting on with your day. And your memories of summer 2025 will be punctuated by those quiet early minutes spent outside with the dawn. You won’t miss it. Summer 2025 will not pass you by.
If you think this is too early then sleep on friend, but don’t come to me and say the summer’s gone and you missed it. You do have time to stand and stare if you make it. Standing and staring is for the morning time. Alone at dawn, just you, the birds, the waving grasses, the feeling that the earth around you is taking its own breath before the bustle of the day: this is the time to stop and smell the roses. If you do you’ll know what I’m talking about. If you don’t, I hope the sleep is worth it. Believe me, no amount of evenings news watching, box setting, catching up with Eastenders can be better than an early rise in summer. And if you find the early alarm call exhausting, schedule a twenty minute nap at lunchtime so you can reset for a busy afternoon. Or better, be in bed by 9pm and you’ll get your eight hours before the alarm goes at 5. And then you too can have the dawn, and the quiet time, and summer won’t pass you by in a blur because you’ll have stopped, and made time to see it.
In other news:
Our summer term of workshops and live chats for the club have finished but we come back in September with a raft of exciting opportunities for you. After the success of our first guest, marketing consultant
’s expert appearance on our live chat at the end of the summer term, I’m scheduling more guests to take us through the autumn - I’m hoping for three guests per term going forward and I’ve got a great list of people I hope you’ll enjoy hearing from. We’ll be announcing the autumn live chat schedule just as soon as we have it all firmed up.Our three day eco floristry retreat a couple of weeks ago was a great success and we’ve scheduled it for the same week (British Flowers Week) next year. Our three day workshop for the autumn term is our Flower Farming Intensive which is three days here at the farm with group mentoring looking at growing, marketing and sales, and floristry for people who want to take their flower growing business to the next level. It’s always an inspiring three days and we look forward to it every year. Either of these sessions can be booked as 1, 2 or the 3 whole days.
And we are about half way through the booked weddings and events for which we are supplying flowers this year. 2026 is booking up nicely though so do get in touch if you’d like to find out more about our DIY wedding flowers offering for 2026 as we have weekends which are selling out already.
And highlight of the year so far, better even than winning a gold medal at the Chelsea Flower Show, small scale flower farming was mentioned by our local MP Sarah Dyke in Parliament recently. So I’m in Hansard which is a place I never expected my name to be.
So enjoy your early mornings in July friends. Don’t forget to water your biennial seedlings and prick them out when they’re big enough to handle. Mine are nearly all germinated from being sown over the weekend of 14/15 June so I’m taking off their plastic lids so they don’t rot, but keeping an eye on how dry they get and keeping the compost damp. Hopefully we’ll have masses of good seedlings to plant out towards the end of August and into September.
AND ONE LAST THING! Please will you sponsor me? I’m doing a sponsored walk on September 13th from Alnwick to Bamburgh Castle in Northumberland. It’s a twenty six mile walk and I’ve been training hard with my friends Ailsa and Michele, tramping all over Somerset and Dorset on our precious days off (we love doing these tramps and I’m really not complaining!) We are a competitive threesome though so I’d love it if you’d sponsor me so that I can improve the lives of people suffering from cancer and raise more than my friends (😘)
Sponsor me at my Just Giving page here please - it would be great to be able to make a real difference to the life of somebody suffering from cancer. Right, I’m off for a walk…
Georgie x
