Farm tour: Regenerative flower farm fails exposed

Hey guys, it's Brie here at Blossom and Branch Farm and today I'm going to take you on a tour. We've done a lot of changes this year so I'm going to show you all of those and also some things that aren't looking so great this year. So all the realities as well as the nice looking stuff. Let's go. Many of you guys have been asking about how our willow hedge is doing. So you might remember that it was last summer we planted a willow hedge and the idea was to make this cross hatch hedge to disguise the fence and put in some green space. Unfortunately it was doing well at first and then our contractor had to shut off our water for about a month and so they went dry and they didn't make it. So here's the update. They are all dead. I still have to pull them all out. I do want to try this again because I love the idea. I still think it would be really neat but yeah we're going to just have to take all these off. So I've just been procrastinating because I have to take off each one of these little rubber connectors and then we'll turn this into a wattle fence so these won't totally go to waste. We are going to save and use all these willow branches and we'll use them to kind of make a new little wattle fence around one of our beds back in the veggie garden but that's the update is that they died. One of the things people always want to see is the lavender field and the progress. So now our lavender is in its fourth growing season and of course we've got lots of native plants planted around the lavender field. This is a great one it's actually a weeping peach and it makes these little peaches they aren't great for eating but the squirrels really like them so it helps keep the squirrels off of things like my tomatoes that I definitely don't want them eating and that's planted amongst a bunch of other native plants. We've got a lot of columbines here growing underneath this evergreen tree, some yarrow that's kind of started to fade now and then of course we've got the lavender field here. So now that it's in year four these lavender plants have gotten very big you can see we've started to harvest some of it here and we're just about to harvest the rest here in mid-August and the lavender is really nice and full. Now this is a hybrid lavendin so it's called phenomenal so it's good for culinary uses as well as being fragrant and having those nice long stems that are great for crafting with. We have this red bud tree this eastern red bud tree and look at how much those cutter bees have been using those leaves for making this it's always a great sign I love to see a sign of pollinator activity and there's for sure tons of that on the front yard lavender. Now we also always plant a row of zinnias out here out front in these raised beds and these zinnias that I plant in the raised beds never do as well as the ones that are in the ground you'll see those here in a little bit and that's probably because these raised beds are filled with purchased soil and as you'll remember from my zinnia growing 101 video zinnias really like poor soil not this rich soil. Now these are growing in these raised beds from birdies and to be honest I've been really disappointed in them these are only three years old and they're bowing a lot um they flex quite a bit and not only that but the little center supports rusted out so as I've been digging in these I've been finding all those center supports that are meant to kind of hold the beds together and they're completely rusted so seems like they're not meant to be in contact with wet soil and the inside of the beds is doing the same thing so they're slowly corroding. I'm not sure if this is just a problem with these specifically corten steel beds but yeah not super impressed this is why I always just plant in the ground for the most part. All right so over here you guys might recall that we did our addition last year we finished and so this part of the house is actually new and so this area is one that I wasn't quite sure what I wanted to do with this is kind of a placeholder right now so we did a mix of micro clover and a drought tolerant grass because we didn't want to have to water it and while I don't love using clover all the time in my climate just because it's not native and we do like to lean a little bit more on the native stuff it does help when we plant it with grass so I wouldn't just plant the clover because in the winter here it tends to die out and then we just leave the kind of a mud pit here but if we've got it planted with the grass the grass helps keep it from becoming a mud pit so anyway it's a good placeholder for now on that clover is kind of helping this area because it was really really compacted and I didn't get a chance to plant a cover crop in it this year so I don't hate it it's looking fine we planted this really pretty Japanese maple in here and it's a actually cold tolerant one so it does better in our climate but in general these Japanese maples like to have a little bit of protection so you can see it's in a little bit of a sheltered area here from the wind and it also gets a little bit of residual heat from the brick on our house so hopefully it's going to survive it's made it one winter so far here in our zone 5-6 so hopefully it makes it coming back around here there's a what we did with this area here which was we cover cropped it and tried to fix the soil so this was the area that when we were doing construction got absolutely destroyed so lots of equipment on this it was very very compacted we couldn't even get a shovel into it so we did a couple things we added some compost we added some mycorrhizae some inoculants we cover cropped this area we added a little bit of compost but not a whole lot cover cropped it over the winter and then this spring we planted this also with a mix of grass and clover I thought about doing a garden bed here but honestly I have so much space to keep up with I just really couldn't fathom keeping up with another set of garden beds so grass it is for now and then we can always convert this to garden beds later if we want to over here in this bed this is kind of fun we were sent actually some bulbs that I had never tried before so we planted these calla lilies and I have actually never grown these as a cut so I just kind of popped them in here to these perennial beds with these hydrangeas and I'm actually pretty surprised at how much I like them I don't love the orange orange isn't usually a color that I would have picked definitely might add these next year because they've been blooming for almost two months now so really nice long lasting blooms and kind of fun little pops of color all right let's head over to the field because I wanted to show some things that aren't looking so great this year I fully realized I haven't done a full like tour of the remodeled area yet but this is our little workshop space if the weather is really bad like this winter we had to do some cover cropping workshops in here and some soil blocking workshops it's a nice overflow space but we really still prefer to use the barn for most things because it's just cuter all right over the bridge through the intensity here we've got this native willow has really taken off this year in hindsight I planted it a little bit too close to this bridge but it is doing really well and what I love to use the willow for is it's kind of a nice little dupe for eucalyptus so it looks a little it has that same kind of shape of the leaves so it's a nice little filler and also it's really great for doing things like wattle fences so over here in our kind of vegetable area and this is really more for my family and myself I don't sell a lot from this space but we've got all of our kale in here we've got a ton of chives we have potatoes back there lots of peppers because we love shishito peppers around here but this is all just kind of really home production space and of course the greenhouse is back there so we put the greenhouse fairly close to the workshop in the cooler just because in the winter time it is nice to be able to just quickly walk out and not have to go very far and then down here is the wattle fencing I was talking about so this is what those willow trees are nice for because willows do grow very fast they're a great tree to use for this kind of weaving and you could do two things you could put these sticks in the ground I've used rebar here just because I didn't want them to rot out but easy to weave in and out I'll do a video on these next spring quite honestly I don't have the energy to do it right now but later okay over here is the wildness of our native meadow area and this was something that we have been trying to get going for a few years now and it's finally I feel like filled in this is year three and this area is really nice and lush now it's got things like hummingbird mint you've got sunflowers in here lots of rudbeckia echinacea bactesia we have a lot of drought tolerant things like sedum which aren't necessarily native but the bees do appreciate lots of asters yarrow so this is really just dedicated for our pollinators beneficial insects birds as well so in the mornings this is a very very active spot we also have lots of goldenrod in here which I love that yellow goldenrod for kind of pops the color so we did have an issue this year with this area and really this is my fault because when we planted this I thought it would be enough to just smother out the existing grass and I did cardboard I did soil on top of that and unfortunately that doesn't always work so if you have a grass like smooth brome like we have in here which is a rhizome based grass what will happen is that grass continues to grow underneath even if you try to smother it out it creeps together these little stolons underground in these little rhizomes and so this will continue to grow and that's what happened so this spring this was all overgrown with grass and quite honestly I'm pulling it out here and there but it's a little bit of a mess so I'm leaving it for now because there are still lots of great plants in here it does still look fine but eventually we're going to have to deal with it because that grass is going to start to outcompete all these great natives now these two areas are really just more dedicated for grasses so we have things like our little bluestem our big bluestem switchgrass prairie drop seed all native grasses so nothing in here gets irrigated these are all absolutely drought tolerant no irrigation in these areas the sunflowers seed themselves everywhere but these areas are really great for the birds so especially in the fall and the winter when we get these seed heads on top of all these grasses the birds really love eating all of this and having that bird population around really helps us with things like grasshoppers so one of the things I used to have a lot of trouble with here at the farm but we haven't really had for the last couple years has been those grasshoppers because we have so many birds now now usually when people come to the farm they come in along this gravel driveway you can see on the right we've got lots of rocky mountain junipers and on the left we used to have actually sunflowers growing all along the edge of this driveway just because they're great vital remediators and I suspected that there might be some heavy metals in the soil so we've been growing a lot of sunflowers I pulled a lot of them this year and we actually have some blackberries going you can see Cora approves of those and as we go a little bit further we kind of work toward our peony field so obviously peonies aren't blooming now but what I have been really happy with is how that native blue grama grass is filling in those walkways between those peonies so this is usually the view that folks see when they come into the farm to do a you pick so let's go ahead and take a look at this main field this is where we have most of our annual flowers in production here we've got kind of our this tree that I didn't realize was going to get so big our roses which of course are being attacked by Japanese beetles so I've kind of given up on them for a while but we'll probably deadhead all of these tomorrow I don't know the roses for most of the year I kind of just give up on because of those Japanese beetles so we get a good flush in June and then July is usually a loss August is a loss and then we'll usually get a nice flush again in September every year I say I'm going to pull them all out this year I actually planted more gardener math I guess you can never have enough roses but also you can clearly have too many roses all right heading down here this is the row that we're going to start working on so this is kind of the time of year where we're starting to flip beds and that means that things are starting to kind of fade out and die out and not look great like you can see these snap dragons clearly do not look well they've gotten rust they're just starting to die out so we're going to tackle this area we're going to pull all of this out we're going to cover crop this so this is the perfect time of year to do this this was snap dragons and stock and cool weather loving plants so they no longer like it because it's too hot so we're going to cut all this out we'll cover crop it that'll help heal that soil for next year and I'm going to put our cover cropping class in the links below as well as a couple other videos but I'll be showing how we're doing all of this as we go so if you just want to make sure you're subscribed you'll see what we're doing here but over here the lusianthus are just starting to peak and you guys might remember that I had pinched a lot of these late very late so much later than I normally would have so you can see that that did work because what we've got down here is these are the ones that I didn't pinch that are totally fully in bloom right now and then down here we have the ones that I pinched late so these ones are going to bloom here in the next month so it did work to stagger out those blooms otherwise this entire row would have been blooming right now and then of course we have to use all those flowers so I am going to definitely do that next year where I do a later pinch on those lusianthus instead of pinching them when they're little tiny babies I'll link that video below too so you can see what stage I'm talking about we have lots of things that are kind of starting to go to seed over here our fever hue is starting to go to seed so we have to cut that down it's just always this time of year a constant battle between letting things bloom and letting them go to seed a little bit and be natural but not letting them go to seed too much this is an area we kind of expanded last year so we had a lot more of these native grasses in this space and then I transplanted these out of the field and as much as I love these these are called solid aster so it's actually a hybrid between a solid ago goldenrod and an aster and as much as I love them and they're very cute and they have nice face life and these are great for making flower crowns my favorite for flower crowns but what happens as you can see they flop so I had actually taken a lot of these out of the field and I transplanted them over here because this is just kind of a landscaping area it's okay for them to be floppy over here we don't really cut from them anymore but I think I'm going to cut the rest of them out of the field next year because even though we netted them and supported them this year they're still flopping over so kind of a bummer when they do that but the pollinators do love them they're filling in the space so I'm going to leave them here for now but as far as cutting they're okay I guess if we did a better net on them maybe they'd be a little bit better for cutting but we'll take a look at those in the field oh okay one fail we've had this year has been this cover cropped zinnia row so this was a row that I had cover cropped last year with hairy vetch and you can see what that does is it leaves kind of matting of of this was actually the cover crop that we terminated in here and so this does work really well you can see that it's kind of formed a nice thick mat there's not a ton of weeds growing in here I mean considering that we haven't really weeded it there's one right here but considering we haven't weeded this space it doesn't look too bad but the zinnias just are not doing well and I'm not exactly sure why I'm not sure if it's the feed I'm not sure if they're just getting too much shade is probably most likely because these golden currents have really started to take over so we planted these golden currents as a hedgerow to block the wind which usually comes this way so the idea was that these were going to help block the wind but also provide some habitat for the birds the birds love the golden currents they like to nest in here all winter I hear them hopping around but it's creating a lot of shade right here so I think what we're going to do is we're going to leave this row but we're going to take out this hedgerow down here we just don't need two hedgerows of golden current so that's going to be one project that we tackle here this coming year I do love the hairy vetch cover crop I still would do it again I love the hairy vetch it's one of those ones a little bit trickier to control so but it leaves a great mulch for the whole next season all right down here we've got actually surprisingly we still have some foxglove blooming considering how hot it's been that really surprises me but here we are we had dead-headed we planted way too much fever queue this year like just way too much I had this whole section we had that whole section we had a section there we had a section here and the problem with fever queue is that it all blooms at the same time so you can see we just dead-headed a lot of it just again to keep it from going to seed everywhere this is the chunk of out of control natives everybody needs one so you can see we've got lots of rudbeckia in here I actually love this size of rudbeckia they're just petite and cute and little and not oversized really like that size and then I also really like this rudbeckia triloba these are so cute in bouquets just kind of light and fancy but you can see this whole area we did trim back actually a couple weeks ago just so you could even walk down here but between the bee balm the anise hyssop the rudbeckia the calendula there's just a lot of stuff in here that likes to reseed and while we like to leave a sometimes there's too much reseeding so we're probably going to cut down quite a bit of this just so that we don't get too much reseeding next year especially this anise hyssop but it's so good this is my favorite it makes a great simple syrup it tastes kind of licoricey and it also just the leaves are sweet and licoricey themselves my kids love to pull the leaves off of this one and eat them so I don't mind it reseeding itself that much but again there's such a thing as too much these are asters here purple asters so another native that the bees love these are a later fall bloomer so they're not blooming yet but when they do they'll be covered with purple this is the hedgerow that I mentioned we're going to keep we did trim this one back a little bit just to help get some sunlight down so they're getting quite tall they are happy so I hate to cut them down but again in a small field like this they're taking up a lot of real estate and down here is where we have most of our blooms right now so we've got our drops of jupiter oregano you guys have heard me talk about this one a ton it's one of my absolute favorites just because it's great both as a foliage in the spring but also as a bloom in the summer the zinnia row I'm going to do a dedicated zinnia video so I'm not going to spend too much time talking about the zinnias but they are looking great so we've got our queenie red lime we have our queenie lime we have our ballerinas and then we have our um agave from johnny's and these are new varieties this year that we're growing and really been enjoying all of these I'm going to do a zinnia video because I'm going to show you guys how to harvest the seeds from these when they're green so stay tuned don't forget to subscribe for all of that we've got the cosmos down here which I really hate I'll be honest I'm not sure why I had savannah plant them this year other than I think we just had empty space and I was like let's put some cosmos in but you have to keep up so frequently with deadheading them and if you don't they recede and they don't have the best space life so quite honestly they're not my fave but if you got some space and you don't mind them receding themselves grow them I do only grow I will say I prefer to grow the doubles so these are all the double click the double ruffled cosmos versus like the single so you can see these ones are more of a single form I usually like to grow these kind of little fancier ones but still don't love them the last of the echinops over there we need to cut down the rest of those echinops so that's a project I want to do something with them like some kind of a I don't know like an installation or a a blue a blue ball cut that out down here we've got um bells of ireland that I have not planted for five years they just keep receding themselves you can see they've got the seeds in here once they've gotten to the stage where these seeds in here are turned black this is when they're viable so they just recede everywhere and so we usually have random pockets of them throughout the field people like them for you picks they just have some spiky thorns on them so we do have to be careful when people are picking those but I don't know they're kind of a cute little octopus on the end of the row gets a little bit crazy over here we have more oregano I love the greek oregano this is really just true greek oregano which blooms white makes a really great filler just sprawls and this one recedes a lot the drafts of jupiter actually doesn't really recede but this one does the yarrow we've pretty much cut down to make our yarrow cloud you guys saw that video a couple weeks ago we've got some mums in here that are going to be more fall bloomers so the mums with the rudbeckia are usually really nice together and then we did these lilies this year but this row this row all together has been kind of a mess this year we tried planting these lily bulbs in here and quite frankly I just really don't like lilies but you know who clearly does are the bunnies and you can tell that they have just absolutely destroyed the lower parts of all of these so between not really loving them and the bunnies I don't think we're ever going to grow more lilies unfortunately but down here we have our lovely dahlias making their display here in so our cafe au lait are here always one of my favorites I will never not grow cafe au lait and of course we overwinter all of these so we're gonna let these continue to bloom until frost this is this was year three of overwintering them and it's just been very successful and I will never go back to digging them ever again so that was a success there's one lots of borage here that self-seeded itself we've got our echinacea if we don't keep up with cutting our echinacea it tends to get a little bit scraggly looking but I do still like it for its kind of architectural form so sometimes what we'll do is we'll just pull the petals off and then we'll just use it kind of like it looks a little bit like press media or a billy ball so a fun textural again even if the petals are looking a little bit not so great so here's that solid aster so if you pull it up I don't know maybe I'll tackle it maybe I'll tackle it tomorrow I mean they are cute they're a nice little filler and they do have a great base life but just the floppiness is it makes it hard to even just walk past them because they're covered with bees during the morning and during the day so it's a little bit precarious walking past them with all the bees all right over here this area was a bit of an oopsie so last summer when we cut down the sunflowers um I I had Dawn who's our other farm hand um stack all of the stalks behind the barn because it used to be a really weedy area and it was just kind of there wasn't anything back there and so it's like well maybe some sunflowers will recede and now it's a sunflower jungle and there's a lot of rust in there so I that's a problem for future brie and savvy and we will deal with it maybe probably with the bush hog but yeah so there's a cautionary tale you guys probably already know this but they will recede aggressively here's a squash plant that we don't really know what it is uh where it came from it is going all the way across the walkway now um still haven't really seen any fruits on it but there's lots of great blossoms so maybe we'll just do some like fried squash blossoms you know when you get that one squash plant and it's doing so well if I had planted a pumpkin or a squash it would not look as good as this one that's planted itself this is our arbor where we've got some native nine bark on it's of course always trying to focus on some native plants especially on the perimeter around the field so we've got our native nine bark here this is a really pretty one it blooms really nice in the spring and then we also have this native clematis so these seed pods that it makes are just so interesting I really want to do something with this I don't know it's some kind of architectural but the native version of sweet autumn clematis the sweet autumn clematis is actually invasive this one is not but it's native so there's a win over here you'll see all the tomatoes we need to harvest so many tomatoes but the tomatoes are looking really good um you guys might remember I have shown kind of how we trellis these up on this old fence it's very effective so again I had mentioned during that video that there's pros and cons to kind of pruning them to one main stem but one of the pros is that it's very easy to harvest from them so that's why I like doing it that way but again it's all personal choice we've got our lavender blooming in here really well that helps with the pollination of course of the tomatoes and then over here we've got our boys midnight and Roosevelt who have been yelling at us this whole time hi boys what's going on are you hungry so we've been kind of discussing whether the sheep are going to stay just because I really would like to give them a little bit more space um as we've been converting so much of the field and the property to native plants and native grasses we've actually been did you get locked out of the coop we've been trying to keep them from eating it um so the problem is with all those native grasses and things if we let the sheep out to graze they eat a lot of it down so we're kind of running into problems with that we're not letting them graze as much as I really think they should be so we've been discussing potentially rehoming midnight and Roosevelt so it's not something that I want to do but I feel like for their good maybe we should all right we'll pop over here to the chicken coop they got an upgrade this year they got a little bit more space so oh hi everyone so the chickens have this whole shed now which used to be actually our storage shed um now that we have nine chickens we just felt like they needed a little bit more space so they have this whole coop and we got a couple broody gals tonight I blew yeah I know can you this is a rooster being a jerk okay hi two eggs can I take those thank you you're just brooding on the floor over there okay guys go get some water go get some water all right well we got some eggs anyway wait that's a tomato yeah okay good night ladies so the woods I guess I might remember from my last video where I talked about burnout and I was showing you the woods because they've gotten a little bit out of control this year and they to be fair when we started the farm we couldn't even walk back in this area so we've come a long way but it still is a hard to see let me see this so we've come a long way in this space but we still have a long ways to go so this area got really weedy and overgrown this year we had actually put a lot of our field dirt from our construction project back here and I had hoped to be able to get it seeded with natives last year but we didn't get a chance so the weeds moved in which is what happened so I spent all week weeding as you can see I've got my seed I've got blue grandma I have lacy festalia and yarrow and we're going to just feed this whole area back here get it watered in this fall and that's a really good time to do that so the fall is a great time early fall to tackle kind of those native meadow areas if you want to start doing that because you're not competing as much with the weeds like you would be in the spring so when we're direct seeding that's the problem is we tend to run into a lot of weed issues so doing it in the fall where the weed seeds and the germination is not as intense as in the spring is just a little bit easier so we're going to tackle that area this week we still have tons of choke cherries in here these are our suckering choke cherries you can see they put out these black berries the birds absolutely love these so there's so much bird activity back here in the woods because of these choke cherry thickets and then also our American plum thickets so we have both of those plants and they're both native they're both what they call keystone species so very important for a lot of different pollinators and also a lot of the bird population here's the American plums these are not ripe yet but when they do ripen they make a really nice jam or jelly and usually this whole area is the American plums and then usually this is our pumpkin tunnel but of course this year was just totally overwhelmed and burned out and so we never got it planted so it's still just a tunnel but the good news is I won't have to put it back up for the fall for the winter so we store our tractor in there for now next year I'll probably do something else on that tunnel but I don't know for this year it is what it is and that's one of the things right that we all have to kind of just embrace is that there are years there where you just don't get to everything and we just have to be okay with that as gardeners and as farmers but I will say that we've done a couple areas that I am really happy about so this area over here this is our like pile of stuff we have to chip every year we just kind of pile up all of our shrubs and branches and then we'll come and get a chipper and chip all this when we use it on the pathways but we have been doing a lot of this blue grama so that's what I mentioned I had gotten back for the woods is this blue grama and this whole area used to just be bare and also full of poison hemlock and thistle so the blue grama I have found North American native germinates very easily for native grass just like a regular grass does and takes very little water so we don't water any of these areas here's another patch of it where it's come in and what it does is it forms this really nice thick mat and so the weeds really don't germinate in here but you can see how dry the soil is I mean this is really really dry it's all cracked so very dry but again getting no irrigation no extra water but it's still for kind of a wild natural look I think it looks pretty good so anyway we're trying to do more patches of that here and there we've got some milkweed going here but of course I've only seen a few monarchs this year unfortunately but we just let that go crazy and then we've got lots of little apple trees in here from of course and this is originally all an orchard so there's still apple trees here and there but mostly what you see in here is the choke cherries they do sucker and they spread so while it's a great plant and I do love it if you want to plant a choke cherry just be aware that it is going to sucker and it's going to spread there's the compost pile I need to water it this is something else I have not been keeping up with this summer but usually if we're keeping this watered summer is a great time to be composting but I mean it's doing okay keeping a tarp on it does help keep the moisture in but ideally in our climate we're keeping our compost moist so that it's cooking faster all right this is an old sink this is like our old chicken coop which we still have because it's good for quarantining so in case there's a thick chicken they can go in here and have their own space and then over here is the other part of the woods that is very overwhelming and needs to be tackled and I've been kind of just based on keeping it weeded but you can see the suckering elms are kind of starting to sprout in here we do have a black walnut in here we have a cottonwood so some of this stuff I just kind of leave there's lots of cleome which is the rocky mountain bee plant in here but this is all black blank filled dirt this is all ragweed that I pulled out of here so we just have to seed this because if we leave it bare like this that's when it gets really weedy so I need to come in here I need to seed all of this with that blue grama with some yarrow and just kind of out compete all the weeds all right guys so that is it I hope you enjoyed our little tour uh yeah I mean I think hopefully it just kind of shows you that you know what you see on social media is not always what's the reality um it's very easy to kind of pick and choose things to show you guys and things to not show you but it is real and it is honest to show you that there are areas that are totally out of control and I have lost my energy on just like I'm sure you guys have in your gardens this year so hopefully that resonates if you guys enjoyed this video remember to let me know down below don't forget to subscribe and we will see you guys around here next time at the farm thanks for filming