August News

Forgive the lateness of this missive. We held a wonderful Flower Farming Intensive Workshop last week after a steady stream of weddings and events, and I simply couldn’t force myself to sit down and put pen to paper for a day or two there. Now, however, I have a new printer (as of today,) so I’m feeling very nine to fiveish, and am giving the whole office, as well as my to do list, a big sort out. So here I am.

We survived the storm last weekend - for those of you who grow flowers and want to know how we avoided having the whole plot smashed flat by those astonishing winds, do come on a workshop in the autumn, and I’ll tell you all my strategic planning on the plot layout score. Equally, the dahlias survived the lashing winds well and are looking better than they ever have, so a morning learning all about growing, propagating, cutting (and fighting off the evil slug) in your dahlia patch might entertain you very much - we have a half day dahlia workshop lined up for you on 17th September so book now, as places are strictly limited! For those who don’t care how we grow dahlias and just want to enjoy them, well then, doorder flowers for yourself or a friend, and we’ll just send you some gorgeous blousy blooms to make you smile.

There are lots of ways I can tell it’s August on the flower farm. One of them is that next year’s weddings suddenly start to book up. And this is how I commit to another year doing the same job. I take a wedding booking for the next season and think, well, I’d better order some seed then. And then I hold a flower farming intensive workshop and it goes really well and I start looking at dates for running another, and all of a sudden I’ve made the list of next year’s workshops too! And so the cycle turns.

I LOVED teaching our flower farming intensive workshop last week - it’s so good for ME because it makes me look at how we function as a flower farming and teaching establishment, makes me look at the year we work, where I’m faffing about achieving nothing, how I can strategically plan to be more systematic and therefore get more done, have a more lovely garden, more lovely flowers, teach more workshops, do more weddings, and all without being more exhausted (this new printer is making me feel VERY on it with the systems.) So keep an eye out for interesting new workshops. I’m going to see if I can run anotherFlower Farming Intensive in October, and we’ve had requests for kitchen table business workshops, so I’ll see if I can squeeze one of those into November. And watch out for a really exciting new venture being launched also in October - more about that in the September newsletter.