Keeping Up With the Holiday Rush | Holiday Wreaths

I know here on the farm we have been so busy that um which is a blessing. We have a lot of our evergreen wreaths that are going out this year and lots and lots of orders coming in for those. If you've missed out there is a link below that you can check them out if you'd like. But this week I'm just taking you along as we're preparing the farm stand for Christmas. We've got a load of evergreen trees. We need to put up some lights. We need to style the nursery for our short opening. We're just open for a couple weeks with the holiday season and then we also have like Thanksgiving bouquets that went out and then we're going to transition into people can make a wreath. So we have to have wreaths ready here on the farm as well. So it's a fun time. It's very festive. There's a lot of people coming and going. It's just nice to see folks that like to support the farm and then I like having my kids around and everybody it's like all hands on deck as far as the family goes. So they're all here we turn on some good Christmas music and we just kind of work away and get our products done. So my goal this week is to get all the wreaths shipped. We have until tomorrow to get I think we have about it might be like close to 60 wreaths that we're doing um that are shipping out and then we have just our own farm stand that we have to make some wreaths for and then we have to get Christmas lights up, stage the trees, go pick up some trees. We have a whole list of things that we're gonna do to get ready for the Thanksgiving weekend which is next weekend. That's when everybody starts the full-on Christmas decor. In the back the kids are starting to set up everything that we need for the wreaths. It goes really really fast when we do that. We have different stations of two wreath makers and then Ben's full of the product and a recipe that's written out and then two examples of wreaths up on the wall and so it makes it really really easy. Anyways Riley is in the studio and then she works on finishing the wreath. So she's double checking making sure everything is up to par since she's our designer on staff and then she does all the the bows and then the packaging and then she's in charge of all the shipping labels and getting UPS to come pick up and those kinds of things. So it's like a whole production and then I just kind of oversee everything and then but beautiful. A beautiful evening. There's no wind and the sun is setting and it's just this golden hour that is just rocking it. Anyways I've got some nobles that I'm putting up and I just wanted to show you what we do to get them to stand up really nice so people can see all the way around. So I've been just working the nursery over just moving things that are like out of season and then putting things that are in season that look still really good like evergreens and we have a few like herbs and things like that that just look really really good still. Living Christmas trees are a big thing for people. They really like to buy those and then be able to put them in the yard and things like that. So I set out the ones that look really really good and displayed them and then now I'm just putting around a few Christmas trees. We have another load coming in on Monday along with a whole bunch of garland and things like that that we'll be offering. I do have some wreaths that we are making to put on our vintage stand. So this is a Dorf Alberta spruce and they get around eight feet tall and five feet wide so they're really nice for the yard. Gives a nice statement. Also just kind of like a cone formal look to the garden that's from Monrovia. We have several of them. We have different sizes too. We have some smaller ones and then I just put around like this is just beautiful color. Just gives the evergreens kind of like a pop of color. This is a golden hinoki false cypress. This little guy gets about 10 feet by four feet so it's deceiving. It will get good but it's fairly small for just a bush. Anyways look at that sun just setting so pretty. So we got in an order of these are high noble or high mountain nobles which are kind of like have the nice spacing and you can still see the trunk a little bit. It really makes for the ornaments to kind of shine. So we have several of these that I'm going to be placing around. So this is the clamp that we use. This is where the Christmas tree trunk goes and then we just use like a board to kind of clamp that on so you can kind of see the board kind of goes right through here and then just kind of pushes on just like that. It's really snug so then that way the tree doesn't fall over in high wind. Okay I just picked up all of the other Christmas trees that we have and I'm gonna follow this other truck and head out to get the garland. We've got a ton of garland for a couple events that we're doing so it is kind of fun to see a big operation as far as a tree farm. Okay so I just got back to the farm. I'm gonna unload everything and then I'm probably gonna wait to style it. We need to build another rack to hold the trees. We have so many this year that we're running out of space so I've got to get that done and then yeah everything will be set up ready to go for the Thanksgiving weekend. This is like you know the big shopping weekend for a lot of folks. They come out, they get a tree, they do the whole family thing after Thanksgiving and then they go home and decorate it. It's just fun to be a part of everybody's kind of life I guess this time of year of making family memories which is kind of cool. Okay I'm gonna give you a quick little tour of our little stand right now that we've got going and not everything's out yet but I'll kind of give you an idea. So I have these cute little they're just vintage little terracotta pots that I put paper whites in and they're starting to bloom. Then I have just a bundle of paper whites as well and they are just you know by bulk you know you can do that. Isn't that just the cutest? Super easy to do. We have of course our hats and mugs and then some of the little trees that we got and then we have this is um just some sticks and things like that that people could put together their own little pots or porch pots things like that. I do have just some just utensils, not utensils, garden utensils. We have garden um just the things that I like to use on the farm so I just got a few extra this year to kind of share. I'll hopefully have these online as well but uh these are just you know garden spades and we've got the larger ones which are just a little heavier duty like to do bigger projects. So we have all those those are all handmade locally. Of course for the Thanksgiving weekend we have some beautiful bouquets that girls made up. This is going to be full of evergreens that people can put together their own little greenery bundles and take home. We have some Ilex berry, we have some red twig dogwood um available. The this kind of stuff I don't grow all of it so we get it from Charles Little and Company and they are just an amazing farm that grows a lot of woody products and things like that that this time of year help fill in and round out our little cute farm stand. We do have just a couple of these cute little trees look how sweet they are. They're excellent for like kids' rooms or you want to put one on the porch or something like that and decorate it. It's really kind of fun so we have a couple of those guys there which is cute. Jason hung a ton of lights so we're just getting it really really cozy for folks to come out. We're making these like little pathways that people can just kind of wander through the nursery and yeah just kind of make it a little bit more enjoyable. So we got a ton more trees and we did several different kinds and we also have a big event that needs hundreds and hundreds of feet of this beautiful beautiful garland. So they're just spooled up really large. We got that from that local farm. This is probably going to fall out when I open this so I might need Riley's help. Riley's here. Should we put a trolley here? Okay so Riley and I and Keith got the van unloaded. Now I am loading the van back up with greenery that we've kept from our farm and we're just sending it to our wholesale. So all of this greenery goes on up to Portland and Seattle and we ship to the Portland wholesale market and then the Seattle wholesale market there and yeah I mean we do a couple shipments of this goes on out gets it you know so that other florists and event planners and things like that can use the greenery and things that they're doing. We also do our own events so Riley's got all those garlands of beautiful garlands that we're going to be wrapping some light poles with. We're making some wreaths and then also getting our stand open for business so people could buy garland from us if they want to. Usually we hand make our own garland for specialty events but sometimes if people just want something for their front porch then they can also just buy it by the foot along with beautiful trees. So I think it's coming together. My vision for this is to very much have this Norman Rockwell beautiful space that people get very inspired with for Christmas. When I was a kid I just I my parents always took us to this place called Das Hassenburg and it was a German Christmas ornament little storefront and it was just like tucked away in the countryside out of somebody's home and it was just the sweetest little thing so I've always tried to recreate that and so or a Hallmark movie I don't know either one I think it's kind of cool. Anyways I'm gonna finish loading up the van it's starting to get kind of chilly although chilly to us is you know it's 55 degrees right now so but the sun is starting to set already and I gotta get a whole bunch of noble weighed out bundled and some more juniper so thankfully Keith is back from vacation and helping us today which is really really nice when you're doing heavy work like this. So just here at the studio outside the studio bundling up some of this beautiful ponderosa that we just cut today. As you can tell the the needles are a lot longer than your typical fir or cedar a lot of people love these in their design work especially up in Portland the Seattle market we'll be sending those up here tomorrow morning. And then I'm sending up some of this beautiful atlas cedar this is a weeping atlas so it's got a little bit of a curve to it so to keep it tame we tend to cut it up and then people use it a lot in wreath making or event design. Beautiful beautiful look at those berries on there but this is hinoki weeping cedar which is really really pretty it's got that yellow to it this is a huge tree we have a hard time cutting off of it but each year we're able to get a little bit but isn't that gorgeous oh I love it but yeah it's got that weeping habit really pretty in the landscape and yard so all of this stuff is we gotta finish filling I'll show you the rest of the stuff we have going so this time of year we have some beautiful beautiful eucalyptus we have some laurel going we have some sword fern that grows native here we've got some more different type of cedar this is kind of lighter in color very very fine in texture really pretty and then of course we have some doug fir this is just kind of grows everywhere around here so it's kind of one of our staples that we use in wreath making and Riley is doing some wreaths in the back. Okay so Keith is building just basically tea post with a two by four I believe so anyways this is just to hold up the Christmas trees now we got a few other types of Christmas trees in this year besides the nobles we do have just some more I guess they're farm raised which they're not my favorite at all they're a little bit more uh just you know groomed it's really hard to put I feel like ornaments on these I don't know what you guys think uh where is if you have these like more natural nobles they have nice spacing and you can really see everything all the ornaments and all the things that you have on the tree these are nobles as well but they are farm raised and so they're a little bit thicker fat squatty little guys but super super cute and a lot of people really like these so we ended up getting in a few of them for this weekend I think we're going to be super super busy I'm excited to see how it goes but anyways so we're getting it all set up but I have one more tree to do which is in the studio and I thought I'd take you along as I do that really quick it's just kind of got some ornaments on it that we are selling and uh it's just kind of a start to I mean it's nothing huge or anything like that but it is kind of a fun kind of a crazy crazy week but we got it all done it's ready to be um to have our grand opening or holiday grand opening so we're super excited and yeah I hope you like this video even though it was kind of random it is what we it is and that's what we were doing this week so you got to tag along with me anyways until next time much success in all you do and grow we'll be seeing you shortly back here at Crowley House Flower Farm very very soon happy holidays everyone bye