Blackwell Bees & Co.

I’d like to take a moment to honour these snapdragons. They were the first plants in the ground in late April/early May and they’re still green and flowering after a few frosty nights in November! Good job! You were beautiful. You were colourful. Now you will become compost for next year’s garden.

Post-frost flowers are still awesome.

It’s a small pile, but it’s a start. And it’s only November. Processing the past season (haven’t even fully tidied up all the things yet) and thinking about the future is often a collision in my mind that happens this time of year. It’s pretty wild in my brain right now.

This little patch of flowers doesn’t look like much. It doesn’t look like much in the sea of beautiful flower farm photo perfection on social media. There are live flowers here and dead flowers and dying flowers and it’s not that pretty. But for me, this tiny row of flowers (4’ x 50ish’?) was a glimmer of hope when all my other flowers failed this summer. I planted 4 - 4’x50’ beds of various types of flowers and almost nothing grew. Lots of money, time, brain juice and energy... just down the drain. When all seemed lost, I threw the remainder of my zinnia, cosmo and sunflower seeds (and a few others) into this awful, clay, conventionally farmed soil and they grew! The other flowers failed a second time, but these three powerhouses filled this spot up with colour and beauty and made me smile for months! I wanted a tiny farm stand to sell flowers. And now I don’t know what I want. Sometimes failure makes you want to try harder, but sometimes it just makes you tired. Like the sunflower in this photo. See more

Maybe the last beautiful day this year. Great opportunity to take a kid and a couple of doodles out for a walk.