Can These Flowers (and Farmers) Handle The Heat

On this episode of You Can't Eat the Grass, it's so hot. Will nighttime harvest lead to daytime success or will our market sales melt in this heat? Chill out and find out now. After zero warm weather all year long, we finally have some heat this week which is incredible and also causing some problems. The marigolds have finally started to grow. The zinnias have loving the heat. They've put on a little bit of color. They still need more height before I can pick them but it's nice to see them doing something. The lisianthus that we planted in March and then they didn't do anything are finally getting buds on them. They're telling me that maybe something's going to get picked out of here soon. And our experimental carnation bed is budding up also and these did the same thing. They just sat there teeny tiny not growing. They clearly needed some heat. Our rubecca has finally started to open up and we have a million lilies that are all opening up for this week. It's Thursday now. This morning I went out and I got a little bit of picking done so I have some stuff in the cooler. This is where the problem comes in. It's too hot to pick. There is no complaints at all about having such a beautiful hot sunny day. It's been so long since we've had one of these but we're not going to be spending our time out here. Instead we're going to be spending our time in here because our first trick to beating the heat is investing into air conditioners. Last year we did all of our flower arranging in the room down the hall there. We had an air conditioner in it. Close the door, keep it nice and cool. This year more flowers. We need more space. We're doing it in this larger room but this room gets really hot and that just, you know, affects the life of the flowers. So we're going to put an air conditioner in this room so we can cool it down and make it more, you know, hospitable to the flowers. We've only got one window that will work for the air conditioner that we got and it's this one right here. We bought this air conditioner a little while ago but we haven't needed it yet. We bought it kind of in anticipation of needing air conditioners and not being able to get them during the heat of summer. This is the instructions, Serena, could you just throw this in the garbage for me? But air conditioners are boring so let's go outside and harvest some flowers. The middle of the day is too hot to pick flowers on hot days like this which is part of the reason why we love dried flowers so much. Stuff like the status is perfect pick on a day like this. It is not affected at all by the heat and things like the straw flowers if I'm harvesting to hang them up it doesn't matter how wilty and sad they get in the heat because wilty and sad is exactly what they're going to do as they hang to dry. So part of our workflow for this year was more dried flower product so that in these summer days when we have these windows where we just don't have the ability to pick the fresh flowers we can still be out and getting some work done. You know why the statuses are so good in the heat? Because the stocks look like little mini practices. Best color ever. Another way we beat the heat is by working on our business during the hottest time of the day. This video is sponsored by Taylor Brands, an AI driven one-stop shop for aspiring small business owners with everything you need to jumpstart your business. From logo to full business launch your brand in minutes. I love how easy it is to build a brand with their services and especially the register your business LLC help. Unfortunately being Canadians we can't use it. Last year we incorporated our business and it was a nightmare. We spent a week running around to lawyers offices and I don't even want to tell you how expensive it was. I would have loved to have been able to use a simple online service to set up our company. With Taylor Brands you can apply for an LLC in three easy steps and as little as five minutes. Unlike sad Canadian Serena. Give your brand everything it needs to discover Taylor Brands customized business building experience. Answer a few short questions and let Taylor Brands do the rest. Your personal business journey starts here. To learn more search for Taylor Brands LLC in Google or click the link in our description. One of the other big problems with all the heat is that our roadside stand gets insanely hot. We actually built it insulated in the same insulation as our walking cooler and it has an air conditioner and despite that it's still hard to get everything staying fresh in the summer heat. So we better go take a look and make sure everything is doing okay on the stand. Popped a thermometer out here to be able to visually show that it is stupid hot. It is currently the temperature of I don't know because it's too hot for thermometers to tell you how hot it is. And this thermometer is a very accurate representation of what it feels like to be out here and what the flowers suffer through when they're sitting in the sun. As I said this is insulated like it's a walking cooler. There's five inches of insulation in all of these walls. We have a mega mega mega sized air conditioner in here. The reason for that is so that we can interchange it if we have issues with our walking cooler but also it gets really hot in here. So even though it's a tiny tiny space it needs a lot of air conditioning power. And then when the door is open as the afternoon sun comes which is the hottest time of the day it shines in and it just creates this like laser beam onto whatever flowers are in this position which is also you know the most valuable real estate for flowers. This is one of the earliest hot days of the year. The sun is starting to come into the stand. We need to check out these bouquets and make sure they're still looking good because we could be out there working. The sun could be cooking these and they could be garbage. People could be coming in seeing them looking like garbage and being like I want flowers from these people. So far so good but we're gonna have to do some adjusting in here. This is the laser zone so we're going to move these buckets over onto the side. This space over here the sun doesn't shine in the opening small enough so they stay pretty good and then we're going to make it look like things are selling really good. We're going to leave these empty buckets. It's very hot. What do you think Beau? Is it hot out? Dara! Looks so good. I only planted a couple hundred in here and they produce like crazy. You know it's one of those things that feels like why would you put this in a greenhouse but it's pretty exciting to have so much of this filler. Very big. They're so big. Just quickly cleaning up a few stems and then we're getting these into the cooler and that's it. Calling it a night. Thursday over. Put the camera down and bring the buckets please. So we're cleaning up, getting the stems ready. We're a little bit behind. We were supposed to have this done and we were just gonna make bouquets but I mean I didn't actually expect that to happen because we're always behind. We stayed up pretty late last night. My friend Heather's here. We're doing some work. We're enjoying the wonderful air conditioning in here and I'm sure the flowers are too but yeah I don't know. We're 100 bouquets. That's the goal every week. 100 bouquets. We'll get there. Hopefully before 4 in the morning. Oh hello guy. It's very hot but I'm done harvesting so now I gotta get back inside, get working with Heather and start putting these bouquets together. I'm gonna go do a little check-in on her. Last I heard by the time that Heather left they'd only put together 20 bouquets. Hello. It's 9 30 and I picked a little bit more stuff. We don't have very much done yet bouquet-wise but we have everything prepped. The market's gonna be hot tomorrow so we don't necessarily want to send a million bouquets down to the market that aren't gonna sell because that's another thing about the heat. The heat at the market can really affect the flowers so ideally we want to send down what's gonna sell in the morning you know just have a few left for the afternoon. During cherry season I want to be eating cherries all the time so being away from the farm for market day is a little bit of a challenge so I am going to pick myself some cherries for tomorrow so that I can sit around and snack on them while I sell flowers. Do you see those cherries? There's so many cherries. Today was hot and it took a lot of energy out of me. I think I got too much sun too. Tomorrow's gonna be hot as well so I need to conserve a little bit of energy. You know the sales are directly correlated to how much energy I have and how charismatic I am as a salesperson so there's no sense in Serena staying up super late and making all these bouquets if I go down there and be a super low energy salesperson trying to sell them so I need to go to bed here pretty soon. It's late right now and I don't have as much as I want to have done which is like the story of my life um but I was looking at the footage from last week um and I realized because there's like time stamps in it that I'm making 20 bouquets an hour at this point you know having like Heather comes and works with me here we get everything cleaned up which is like a massive job it takes the entire day um but once this is done these bouquets are going together really fast um and you know I've been kind of saying that the time you know the time that it takes to put these together is um 10 an hour um but it looks like I've gained a lot of speed it looks like I've gained a lot of efficiency over the course of the season so far and you know I'm doing double time like 20 bouquets an hour means I'm getting these done in two minutes and then spending a minute wrapping it which is which is pretty incredible the $40 bouquets these are always a pain in the butt because but this is about experimenting right this is important for me to do every week because what I do with the $40 bouquets is I learn what I'm gonna do the following week with the $20 bouquets but even this week I have five already and I've only been working at this for 40 minutes so even these are getting a lot faster you're crazy you got some bouquets for me to wrap yep are they the $40 bouquets yeah get you to do a tiny bit of work but I haven't taught you how to wrap a $40 bouquet I like these pink lilies think pink ready for betty alarm ready alarm never never ready for how to wrap these big bouquets to wrap these big bouquets I make a bigger wrap so I take two one two and I line up the like the the squares so that it's kind of turns into like a star instead of a triangle and then I staple it so the two sheets are together and then where the elastic is which is like the pivot point I line up for the v and then I bring it around three staples that's pretty good fits perfect did you make that technique up yourself or did you learn it I have no idea I could do I could do a pretty big bouquet in this you know and then it's it actually holds a lot of flowers I like the colors in this one yeah you like that yeah lots of drama how do you like these people I like them I like them a lot be exciting we can only pick so much of it this year because they're first year perennials so I need to leave some of the plant to get established but next year to just have like a mass of it that we could like hack to the ground okay well that's it for me oh thank you it's three in the morning and I'm done for the night ended up getting 90 bouquets done so you know that's that's a good number it's not the hundred that I've been doing but it's the perfect amount because we don't want these bouquets to be cooking too much and they look really good I was nervous I was nervous about what they were going to look like but I'm really happy with how they turned out good morning everybody I'm feeling pretty good today I got a little bit more sleep than usual before market I'm feeling ready to go I'm excited about the flowers and I'm excited about the summer market let's get that truck packed and get down there there is actually something I need to do before I get going here and that is get into my cherries oh they're so good that's so good it's ten to six the only thing I got to do now is take those flowers up to the front stand open it up and then I'm ready to roll I'm always in a race every morning that I go down to the market because I gotta squeeze my truck into a tight little spot there so the race is on I gotta get down there and get my truck parked after that it's all easy just gotta sit around and sell flowers all day it's almost eight so the market is about to open no sales so far but that's fine lots of lots of color here and it looks really good it's nine o'clock the market's been open for an hour now and we're at 120 bucks so you know it's not it's not a very quick start just after 10 now things have picked up so we're at 440 you know still a bit behind where I'd like to be but you know this time of the year lots of people have flowers in their own gardens and they don't necessarily see the value as much in buying a bouquet but there's still lots of customers you know I don't think we're gonna be breaking records today that's fine you know as long as we do a good consistent number then then I'm happy now it's 11 and we're at 740 so the race is on can we make it to a thousand it's the first time all year that it's kind of been in question it's noon and uh the big the big update is I'm halfway through the cherries that's what you guys cared about right the cherries we've also sold $1,120 I don't know if that matters sometimes that's how it is on these these hot summer days you know people people are going to the beach and they they can't uh they can't throw a bouquet into the car because it's gonna melt so uh they don't buy it right we have another hour to try to you know get up to a more respectable number if we get 1200 at least we haven't had our worst market of the year so far pretty pretty crazy that that's the standard last year around this time we hadn't even done a thousand dollar market so you know I consider myself pretty lucky to be able to consistently pump these numbers out the market is over now the final tally is two-thirds of the cherries got eaten and we sold $1,370 so you know like that's pretty good that's that's pretty good come back after you know only selling about 100 bucks in the first hour and I can take that as a win it's just nice to be doing these consistent numbers that are like way above what we were doing last year we do have a fair amount of bouquets left over here you can see there's still a lot of stuff so I have to get packed up well they have two of the $40 bouquets left there's still a bunch of these Rebecca's bouquets and you know kind of like a little mix of everything else a bunch of the whites didn't sell but you know it's kind of like a little bit of everything sold the fresh to dry bouquets sold a little better this week so it was nice to see because that's a pretty promising little strategy that Serena came up with with those and yeah so I'm gonna get packed up get home and see what the roadside stand is doing