With May’s arrival our flowers have started coming in, right in time for Mother’s Day. As guests come to stay, they will be welcomed by a sea of greenery. Baby plants are quickly maturing as our rhubarb gets big enough to harvest and spring flowers come into full bloom. Tulips unveil their bright colors, stretching their delicate petals as the day wears on. Daffodils twinkle below the fruit trees, having been meticulously planted across the entire property by Julie. Grape hyacinths speckle the landscape as well, releasing a sweet perfume. Julie likes to point out that there would be a significant amount more of them if the ducks hadn’t decimated the bulbs back when they were allowed to free range. Nevertheless, there are still plenty of flowers to start making fresh bouquets again, which is one of our favorite things to do!
Learning from Floret Flower Farm
This year we started utilizing a new method for making bouquets from Floret Farm. She says each bouquet should only take you a minute or two if you follow her formula. This involves utilizing the five essential ‘ingredients’ to make a perfect bouquet: focal, spikes, disk, filler, and airy elements. Ideally your bouquet should be 50 percent filler, 30 percent disks, and 20 percent split between the other three elements. We even bought some of Floret’s branded seeds so that our bouquets have a wider range of the elements. We are super excited to see how they perform, especially succeeding in buying particular seeds of the site is about as exciting as winning the lottery.
Before we found this new method, everyone was making the bouquets as they pleased, and it showed. Our final products varied quite noticeably in size, stem length, and diversity of the flowers included. They also didn’t seem to last as long as they should. Floret’s videos helped us solve these pesky problems.
Nowadays, we have a designated person who makes the bouquets one to two times per week. To do this, we take a wheelbarrow out into the field first thing in the morning, because the heat will degrade the quality of the flowers. We fill our wheelbarrow with several buckets of cold water so we can separate each essential ‘ingredient’. The flowers get their bottom leaves removed in the field, as they would otherwise rot in the water and shorten the lifespan of the bouquet. Then, we move them to the garage and knock out bouquets. Since our operation is on a much smaller scale than Floret Farm, we take the extra couple of seconds to create bouquets with different color schemes so our guests have options.
After the bouquets are made, they’re secured with rubber bands and wrapped in brown paper. To extend their life we also add some flower food to the water. Any bouquets that don’t go out immediately get stored in the fridge, which significantly slows down the process of decay.
With all these changes, our bouquets have become quite spectacular. In fact, we think they’d make for the perfect mother’s day gift. Alternatively, if you have a lady in your life that you’d like to show some appercaition to, you can give her the gift of Goldberry and send her to stay at our modern farm resort. Goldberry Woods is actually named after the River Woman’s daughter from The Lord of the Rings, a beautiful nature spirit who serves as an exemplification of Mother Nature herself. What could be a more perfect place to stay? Moreover, if you book a trip in May, we are offerening succulents to those who ask (motherhood is not required).
