January news from the farm
Well hello and a very happy new year from chilly Somerset where we've had snow this week and I still have tulip bulbs to plant.
Don’t panic if you too find yourself in January and behind with jobs in the garden. Blame the mild autumn and sound as though you’re an expert when you say you’re waiting for the ground to be cold enough before planting tulips. I’m hoping I will have sufficiently recovered from the annual Christmas holiday lurgy this week so that I can get out into the garden and plant bulbs in the snow. Hopefully I’ll make a film too while I’m out there.
Bon, as usual we are leaping into the new year with all kinds of plans afoot.
Firstly: If you’d like to order diy flowers for your wedding or event this spring, summer or autumn, do get in touch as quite a few of our dates are already sold out. I’ve just this minute put in my seed order, and we have some scrumdiddlyumpchious varieties to grow for you this year. Very few daytime workshops and a strategically planned harvesting schedule means hopefully more unusual and interesting flowers at the plot this year and some colour planning I’m very much enjoying considering this year’s pantone is a soft kind of creamy coffee colour and I’m sure most of the wedding flowers we’re asked to cut will need to combine well with it.
The full list of seeds I’ve ordered for 2025 will be added to my new Substack, which is where I’m moving my online Club community.
Substack is a more versatile platform than YouTube. There the Club members will have a chat section, a bit like their own whatsapp group, all the usual clips I make especially edited for the Club, as well as podcast options and a place for work better posted written – eg the seed list.
I’m still working my way around there but in case you’re interested do pop over to Substack to have a look.
- You can follow for free, which is like following on Instagram, and you get the short, chatty posts there.
- Or you can subscribe at no cost and that means you get all my free longer form posts there. I do love having a place to write again so I’m really enjoying this option.
- Then if you become a paid subscriber you have access to the club chat, the club edited clips, the live chats which are like a weekly workshop and which we hold at 5pm UK time most Thursdays during term time and the paywalled written content (and our club discount).
I’m hoping to be able to post one free and one paywalled post most weeks, whether they be written or filmed clips or spoken work on a podcast.
We have scheduled three full terms of workshops and demos for this year, online and at the farm.
Chopping the year into three ten weeks terms has been transforming for us: we can see the shape of the clearly, still have twenty two weeks when not holding workshops and demos, focus the intense working periods during the school terms so that we can be a bit more available for the endless taxi service which is the lot of the rural parent during school holidays. Thanks to the growing club membership (their investment is being rolled across the business so that we can make all our learning activities more affordable,) we’ve been able to arrange most of the workshops into demo length sessions with time for questions.
All our demos are live sessions which we record so we can send them out to people to catch up with later if they can’t attend in real time. We’ve looked at the costs and the prices, and having cancelled out some of the admin we’ve been able to make most of them an affordable £35.
My colleague Nicola has been very clever too and made bundles of two or three sessions which makes them even better value. And of course, our club members receive a 10% discount on workshop or demo bookings.
I loved a recent description in the local The Spark magazine here in Somerset, which described my workshops and demos as, ‘inspiring as well as clear as a bell on technical detail.’ There are lots of new sessions listed for 2025 too so do have a look and treat yourself to learning something. Your garden and your floristry will thank you for it.
Right, it’s five o’clock but only just properly dark. The evenings are drawing out minute by minute though the mornings still feel black as night until school run time. I love how quickly one finds one has more time in a day with more light in it.
I may be behind with the garden (caused by foolishly entirely rewriting and rephotographing The Flower Farmer’s Year for a whole new edition coming out February 2026,) but the daily extra minutes mean we can all do a little bit more every day, and suddenly everything feels more possible. Which is perhaps why my seed order, despite the eye watering cost, is quite enormous and a bit different this year.
Goodness but I feel the winter like a sack of bricks weighing down my back, which means, yes I can find a silver lining to most situations, which means oh how sensitive am I to the incremental signs of coming spring. Which makes me feel that everything’s possible. Let’s try and do it all.
Have a good January all, and happy gardening
Georgie x
Fun activities ahead this month:
- I’m off for a top up day with life coach Alice Armstrong-Scales next week. I’ll be making a clip about what happens on a day like this and why I think it’s helpful especially to people running micro businesses or pursuing a creative career.
- I’ll be at the Flowers From the Farm conference in Nottingham at the end of the month. They’ve very kindly asked me to compere the event. I’ll certainly be reporting back from that having taken a view from their flower growing members re how our industry is developing year on year.
Garden activities this month:
- Plant sweet peas sown in October in the polytunnel
- Plant first two rounds of ranunculus into the tunnel
- Plant anemones in the tunnel
- Re-align bed edges of whole plot
- Weed and mulch whole plot. We have about 1000 running metres of metre wide bed to tidy and mulch. Yes, I’m flexing my muscles.
- Keep off the land if it’s very wet – no good turning what’s already a marsh into a puddled pond instead of a flower farm.
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