We have made the tough decision to sunset our CSA program. I have made an equally tough decision to take a hiatus from wedding flower work (o.k. so I might still do June weddings where peonies and perennials are at their prime). Wow! This is a big shift as many of you have been with us for decade(s).
I could say that it’s the woodchucks that are making me do this. When I started farming with Rob in 2008-2009 season, our vegetable beds were overrun with woodchucks. Since then we seemed to have had a truce, wherein they left the broccoli and fruit alone in exchange for all the clover and forage in our sprawling field borders. That is up until this season, wherein the next generation of ‘chuckers’ managed to tunnel from the old barn foundation, burrow under our fence and re-surface right next to our beans. I had to admire their engineering and spatial sensibilities, even as they leveled the blossoms and went onto the carrot tops.
Woodchucks aside, my goal of slowing down, taking a sabbatical from production farming this season didn’t really happen, as a few wildcards and labor needs needed to be a priority. It's all good, though it’s also really hard as the farm is home. I love growing food and beauty and sharing this with you. I love plants though need to shift and restore balance. While I am grateful for the humane growing season, wedding flower re-books from last year, a few writing projects that brought joy, and just in time support when the harvests seemed endless, my body is telling me I can’t do it all anymore and I need to pause and listen to it.
I have decided to step back from the business of farming, focus on orchard care and
Farm Blog
Thank you again for braving the blizzard to celebrate, connect with great food, and 'planting an orchard'! Just imagine all those future cherry trees (don't forget to squat:-).
I am so uplifted from all the good vibes, intentions, laughter and seeds shared and planted.
We were able to raise $850.00 in funds! This will go a long way, thank you! Additionally, with all the seeds donated today and from what I've gleaned from others, The women growers in the Sine-Saloum region will be able to plant out a couple hundred row feet/farm. In the past we've planted shared 'demonstration beds' ie since many of the farmers share space/land to grow on we've constructed seeds beds to trial different varieties, plant insectory herbs and flowers and share techniques. From there seeds are harvested and shared forward amongst the individual farmers. So in essence your generosity helped plant teaching/learning/eating/
sharing beds of veggie, herb, and flower goodness!
I will honor my commitment and extend the immense gratitude, generosity that was shared during the workshop with the women farmers in the following ways:
Work with NCBA CLUSA Farmer to Farmer Program to transfer funds and mail seeds.
I'll also email and share highlights, photos forward later this week in celebration of our workshop success.
I am tentatively set to travel there Nov/Dec. or January in 2016.
I also finally remembered the name of third grower group, JUBO (means widespread). If you're interested in learning more about how they got started, here's a link to an interview I did as part of my last Farmer to Farmer adventure in Senegal.
I Will keep you in the loop as the project evolves and thanks again for sharing your generous spirit!
For the chocolate lovers:
Becky Otte, who made the amazing truffles, has more of her chocolate goodness to share and is selling some of her creations just in time for Valentines. if you're interested send her an email: raonine@gmail.com
Also Here is a link to Roots Chocolate website.
For the Fruit Lovers:
I've enclosed a handout of some of the different fruits we grow at our farm as well as a flyer highlighting this season's events at the farm! We'd love to have you venture out and tour the orchard, come visit us (though not nearly as cool as the orchard poses we did during the workshop).
Thank you again for helping me transition from being a butterfly weed seed (ie wind pollinated, not knowing where or how my intentions, projects might stick) to more of an oak or cashew seeds - wherein I can deepen my awareness, provide support in the same place(s) in Senegal for the growers and in my backyard in Wisconsin:-). Here's to planting the seeds of the as yet to be imagined on and off the yoga mat! Wishing you all much abundance.
Happy Mid-winter!
Yours in hardy kiwi,
Erin
PS If you are into exploring the planting side as well as enjoying more local fruit creations, we'll be hosting a Local Fruit Tasting May 16, details on our website.
A Midsummer Frolic to Celebrate American Flowers Week June 28 - July 4
While I have been on a quasi flower sabbatical this year, to pause and (re) consider flower possibilities, this year’s American Flowers Week - June 28 - July 4, is giving me much pause to celebrate!
It is an honor to be among those chosen in the U.S. to be featured for the Botanical Coutre collection! What a diversity of styles featured. You can download/view the Botanical Coutre Digital Book created by Debra Prizing and team with Slow Flowers Society and enjoy the write - up regarding the organic dress we created inspired by the native perennials, pollinator plants, soil and soul love of our Midwest homes.
Written by Debra Prinzing in American Flowers Week 2021, Botanical Couture, Floral Design
In Erin Schneider’s world view, plants and people co-exist in harmony, a notion clearly expressed in the floral dress she created last summer using botanicals harvested from Hilltop Community Farm. Erin is a co-owner and land steward with her husband Rob McClure of the 60-acre farm in La Valle, Wisconsin, which is situated on traditional Ho Chunk Nation lands, about 90 minutes northwest of Madison. Their tagline is “Hand Agriculture for the 21st Century,” a perfect label for their annual bounty of flowers, herbs, produce and orchard fruit grown for a loyal CSA customer base.
Erin provides her wedding and event customers a wide range of blooms, including many familiar perennials and annuals, but she is most passionate about prairie and pollinator plants, as well as native varieties not often considered for floral design. She hopes to elevate awareness of Midwest prairie flowers and grasses, which are showcased in a Wisconsin-inspired botanical couture garment created for American Flowers Week, an effort to encourage more of her customers and the florists to share a similar appreciation.
Read MoreEven the Best Laid Wonderment Plans....are Subject to Planting
I cannot fully explain the gravitational pull of arboreal grace and how each spring I bow to your tree-ness—as I thrust another pointed dig with the D handle shovel and etch a hole for the young pear tree to and tuck it into the soil spanning rhizospheric reach of influence.
At the start of the growing season, I surrender to my lack of botanical restraint. It’s hard to resist the insistence of fruit trees and tomato starts, and to plant that which will outlast my lifetime. Even the act of pruning (of shedding, mind you) yields the potential for dozens of new fruit trees as I snip and save scion wood, graft it forward for giveaways, and divide and transplant the currants. With their trimmed limbs, the shape of sea pens, I attempt to write it all down, on seed scrolls, to center myself.
As you may recall, last fall, I shared my intention of a farming sabbatical in 2021 to embrace change and explore, in mutual evocation, what the next ten plus years of the farm may be (or not). I even gave this year a title, “The Transitional Year of Wonderment”..
Toward a Transitional Year of Wonderment
Dear Farm Friends,
I hope this finds you all well and in good health. 2020 continues to be a year of extremes to say the least, though we are grateful that the farm work has given us the opportunity to stay grounded with the Earth, to share the food and fruits of our labors with you, and to soften the edges and tensions with beauty (flowers!), as well as pause and celebrate change and milestones in people's lives. We did our best to share it in as many ways and avenues as possible and for that we are forever grateful for your support along the way!
and well, I am sun-setting with the season, preparing for a farming sabbatical in 2021 and embracing change in the ‘transitional year of wonderment’. You may be wondering where this is coming from as we have enjoyed steadfast, optimal growth over the years. Just as plants give us signs that they need support—an infusion of compost tea, a coating of kaolin clay to keep the curculio at bay—this farmer needs a bit of compost and it’s transformative boost for continued growth and sustenance.
I hope you feel the embrace of my gratitude to you for your support over the year(s). My heart continues to be fed by the relationships we’ve cultivated, the feasts shared, fruit trees planted, and the lessons learned. I hope this letter to you helps you understand why I am putting the brakes on production farming, what this means for the farm, what Rob’s plans are, and well, what’s in store beyond the transitional year of wonderment.
Read MoreFlowers for First Responders and COVID Care Workers
Farmers + Flowers + Your Contribution = Bouquets of Gratitude gifted to our First Responders and COVID Care providers in honor of their essential services.
We get it. We are all feeling the disruptions of this global pandemic and having to adjust to uncertainty in so many ways. On our farm we’ve lost 100% of our wedding and event flower markets for 2020 yet we have an abundance of peonies and perennial flower mojo that we would love to share! As Ladybird Johnson proclaimed, “Where flowers bloom, so too, does hope.”
We hope you can help us. Here’s how
From now to the end of June, you can pre-order/purchase a custom flower bouquet, grown and designed with love and care from our farm, which we will then give away to First Responders and COVID Care Providers in our local Madison and Reedsburg/La Valle neighborhood(s). You can also contact us directly and we can process your order.
We hope this small act of kindness and beauty will give our essential workers a boost of hope and express our appreciation for their essential work during the COVID-19 crisis.
To honor our workers and thank them for keeping us safe,
Read MoreFinding Success with Local Flower Farm Events
I am excited and grateful to be a guest blogger with Team Flower, a global flower community that spans generations, experience levels and areas of expertise through sharing resources, expertise and cultivating networks of mutual support. The following is the first of several guest blog articles that I’ve been asked to feature for Team Flower.
You can access the article in its entirety on their website
and if you are interested in experiencing our farm events and farm flowers, we are hosting Brunch n Blooms this year on June 14 and August 9, 2020. RSVP Here
Hosting events on your flower farm offers opportunities for both community learning and illuminating your flower farm. It’s a great way to connect your community with your business, strengthen relationships with customers and local vendors, and build networks of mutual support in a festive atmosphere. Flower farm events are a lot of fun—and offer a lucrative revenue channel and creative outlet—but they can also be a lot of work. A little planning, budgeting, and intention-setting on the front-end will go a long way in harvesting positive outcomes for you and your community.
Over the years, the event models on my own farm have evolved, and I want to share some flower wisdom and insights I’ve gleaned to support you with artfully hosting on-farm events. Read more
Read MoreThe Three Wonders of Marigolds and Wonderment of the Season
Mid-winter’s lucid grey days know no end to longing and wonderment. Even the morning birdsong seems subdued under the atmosphere’s nimbus mood. Can you tell it’s the cabin fever phase of farming in Wisconsin?
I wonder will year 13 as your farmer florist and orchardist, be a ‘Baker’s Dozen’ kind of luck or the kind of luck that makes you surrender. One thing I do know is that I am lucky, I can pay attention to the wisdom of flowers and fruit. I can listen to the wisdom of what people say it is they value about being around flowers, feasting on our fruit.
Marigold Wonder One
I long to plant summertime,
Prop your yellow – orange pathfinding poms,
That edge the gardens with the
three phases of your existence
Confusion – balance – creative force
In a vase
Like the Ashes of the Old World.
2019 Flower Retrospective
I designed my last bouquet for 2019 today. A modest seasonal wreath to illuminate the ephemeral magic, radiate the beauty and calm, transmute the grit and grind of growing. It was an infusion of dried strawflowers, lavender, gomphrena, hot pepper, hops, hazelnuts, and thyme. I am continually amazed at the intensity of color and optimism present in blooms, even when dried. Supported by a wreath of grapevine, layers of evergreen, and plumes of switchgrass, and shaped by my hands and hearts, my mind daydreams to this past season.
Flowers are a distillation of Nature’s music. They help us tune in and fine-tune how we show up in the world. They are with us in celebrating and commemorating life’s milestones and to welcome strangers and family alike. My hope is that the flowers we grew for you this season brought joy and new connections and brought a bit of beauty and balance to your days. I hope you found your investment in our farm’s flowers worthwhile, enriching, and were inspired by nature and the relationships that emerged from the rays and rhizomes—bouquet feasts and brunches embedded within the hospitality of the land. This soil and soul love I find with flowers is indeed sustaining and has kept me going and growing on our farm for 12 years. It's quite a regenerative and humble place to be immersed in—all this flower power moving through the landscape that we get to share with you!
Here is how flowers sustained us in 2019:
Read MoreYour Farmers are on TV! Enjoy the Guest Blog from our Friends with WPTV Around the Farm Table →
We had so much fun working with Inga Witscher, Colin Crowley and the crew at Wisconsin Public Television in being part of their “Endless Summer” Episode of this season’s Around the Farm Table. Enjoy the blog entry by the show’s producer, Colin Crowley and enjoy the episode!
Producer and videographer (and occasional goat wrangler) Colin Crowley is back, with a behind-the-scenes look at the second episode of Around the Farm Table.
Read MoreThe Fruit and Flower Mood Board - a Season's Color Palette Reverie
The other day I received an inquiry to grow and design a flower feast for a 2020 wedding celebration. With 12 years under my belt, I continue to deepen my understanding of how to both read the landscape as a grower, align wedding dates with flower phenology, and read the needs and interests of clients and members.
June brought the ability to see green. Growth was the name of the botanical game and I found myself marveling at how the pears, peas, and poppies sprung from its original seed-coated horizontality, gesturing forever upward and outward. Onward with growth, mulch, and the subtleties of purple and pink. Pink pillows of peony blossom, cathedral spiries of delphinium racemes and the intimate splashes of pink on pistils on view when I paused to consider fruitset of apples and aronia.
Read MoreA Love Apple Lament: RIP First Generation Quince Trees
“There is no fruit growing in the land that is of so many excellent uses...serving as well to make many dishes...and much more for their physical virtues.” John Parkinson, Paradisi in Sole Paradisus Terrestris, 1629
This winter we experienced a bit of paradise lost with just one sole quince fruit holding steadfast to our 'orchard terrestris'. It is with great heart ache that we had to say goodbye to all but one of our quince trees. Allow me a lover’s lament and with it a longer than usual newsletter article.
I was making the morning rounds, loppers in hand, lamenting the role of grim orchard reaper, but reminding myself that just as we try to give the plants in our ‘care’ a good life, so too can we give them a good send off to the composted beyond. Working close to the land with my hands, having experienced the death of family and friends, I thought I knew a thing or too about life and loss. So, I planted white clematis vine at the base of a few quince trees that took on a dancer’s pose in its tree tomb stillness. I took comfort in imagining the ways that snow white flowers will entwine and embrace the quince in its dance with decay. I took solace in noting that a dead tree will harbor more life in the form of insects, fungi, and avian friends during the decomposition process than it will when alive.
Read MoreWrapping up In Her Boots Podcast Series Talking Beauty
“The Earth didn't need to be beautiful, it just is..." Mary Oliver
One element that drives our farm, but is often overlooked, is beauty. We grow food and flowers as it connects to our passion for the Earth and people, builds bridges, softens spaces, and helps us connect, explain the mystery in between my hands where bouquets are born.
I am grateful and excited to wrap up the In Her Boots Podcast Series featuring our farm to talk beauty and celebrate the beautiful place that is our farm and our hearts. Happy Listening!
Read MoreWomen Farmers and Regenerative Agriculture
I had so much fun sharing insights with Lisa Kivirist, Eco-preneur, Author, Director with the MOSES Rural Women’s Project, and all around inspiring human! Enjoy the third and final iteration as a guest on the In Her Boots Podcast series, geeking out on regenerative agriculture and all good things that emerge from our humble collaborations with the humus-sphere and fellow humans.
I am grateful to Lisa’s storytelling ingenuity and keeping me on course (am prone to fruit tangents).
Happy Listening!
In Her Boots Podcast Features your Farmer's Story
One thing that keeps me going and growing 12 years into my farm tenure, is the network of farm women in our area, that I can lean into and draw inspiration from, share ideas with, and offer mutual support in times of stress and celebration. To me, this embodies our design intentions with food forests—perennial polycultures of multipurpose plants that share resources and create networks of mutual support. Whether it’s pears or people, we’ve been able to set up a strong underground root system and keep flexible shoots, in part because other farmers keep us propped up. I tried to capture this spirit in conversation as part of the In Her Boots Podcast with Lisa Kivirist, Eco-preneur, Author, and Director with the MOSES Rural Women’s Project.
I am grateful to Lisa’s storytelling ingenuity and keeping me on course (am prone to fruit tangents).
Happy Listening!
Agency and the Allurement of 'Farmerhood'
While ice dams plague roofs, snow drifts cloak balsam roots, and the soil steeps in frozen stillness, I turn inward. Winter is not just a workout with the shovel, but also an exercise in exercising choice—if only to stir movement and heave the frosts of doubt that last season—the wettest, darkest on record for this farmers 12 year tenure stewarding Hilltop—threatened to erode the seedbed of my spirit.
Bone-weary, I fall back to the days spent pumping butternut barbels to meet the ossuary demands for the mid-winter dinner. Why do I persist? There is this lingering romantic myth in our culture that is perpetuated about farming. It goes something like this: Summer days are spent basking with butterflies and blooms, gallantly hoeing away weeds and cares, plucking peppers, and careening with carrots, so that come winter, farmers in the world's temperate regions, kick back, relax, sleep and feast the days away in a quiet merriment as there is 'nothing' to do. This world might exist, if only in fits and spurts, but do we really have control around our days, and who would really choose working 90 plus hrs a week in pursuit of plums? Life circumstances and societal demands of business plans, taxes, market analysis, crop plans, seed orders, grower conferences, 'off farm work to feed the farming habits and pay the interest on your operating loan', the unsatiable hunger of instragram and facebook feeding, and our longing to (re)connect with nature (ironically through social media datapoints and virtual realities) make it hard to take a step toward Enough.
What's a farmer to do?
Read MoreFlowers by the Numbers, 2018 Flower CSA Bouquet Breakdown
I picked my last bouquet today. It was a modest mix of mums, and a few lingering calendula, veronica, tansy, and '3rd generation delphiniums' that survived the frosts, a freeze and even snowshowers the other morning.
I am continually amazed at the intensity of color and optimism present in blooms. I continue to find hope imprinted in a ray of beauty. Late fall on the farm is a time to not just tuck in the flower beds with a bit of mulch and manure, dig up the dahlias, divide, transplant and seed spring blooming perennials, but also a time to reflect, on the seasons past. I would love to learn how the season fared for you?
Please take a moment to reflect and share the following:
What worked?
What didn't?
Would you do it again? Why or why not?
And for some context, the following are reflections on the season, where your flower share investment went, and what's in store for next season. You may want to settle in with a warm cup of coffee/tea, as by now you likely know that brevity is not a strongpoint:-).
Why a Flower CSA?
Read MoreFibonacci Numbers, Sunflower sequence, and Mid-summer's angles of reposeFibonacci numbers, mid-summer's angle of repose
Happy August! Wow it's really August and we are already at the mid-point of the Flower CSA season. There is a point in the growing season that reminds of my days in Washington's North Cascades pondering alpine glacial geology while collecting native plant seed for restoration education projects with the National Park Service. We would be along the trails seed collecting Elymus glaucous (blue wild rye) and a slough of floral friends. Now and then I would stretch my back and shift my gaze from soil to skyline. The glaciers would 'sit poised' when viewed from a distance, like a well fed cat, cool and contented on its perch. That such a mass of ice, could just 'hang out' along a 60 plus degree slope without an ensuing avalanche is a marvel. In geologic speak, this point is known as the angle of repose – the steepest angle at which a sloping surface, (in the case of glaciers ice) formed of a particular loose material is stable. It's a marvel that an icy mass of material withstands gravity at such an angle--that such stillness from a distance—can mask all the movement taking shape, giving form to the Earth upon closer viewing.
In the botanical sphere of your flower farm, there is a similar angle of repose,
Read MoreThis Growing Act of Beauty is For You
“Those who contemplate the beauty of the Earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts.” Rachel Carson
I am trying to endure. April has been rough and exhilarating for your farmer. Rob has always been much more Zen about life's disturbances and I continue to learn from his fluid, grounding love. For me, I've been at the mercy of April's moods. On the one hand I am welcoming the snow and quiet and the chance to linger over coffee with friends, catch a film, read the backlog of BrainPicking's Newsletters, or dust off the canoe. On the other hand, snow and cold unsettles my circadian farmer rhythm. We should be hardening off our young larkspur and allium transplants and seeding spinach alongside sweet peas. Instead the seeds and seedlings stock-pile in our greenhouse overflow zone (aka our kitchen and dining room).
Cold and wet is great for fruit tree planting, grafting, and dividing perennial herbs. Yet this too has been hard to do since the frost refuses to leave let alone heave under the weight of the shovel. 2014 memories come to mind—a year without kiwi due to a lingering cold come May—the kiwi refused to fruit save for 11 brave berries. There is reason to hope amidst the fickle jet stream.
Read MoreMadame Butterfly a Floral Opera
I have been contemplating flowers and operas. Specifically the story of Madame Butterfly. I know, I spend way too much time thinking about flowers and am ready for the ground to thaw and start planting!
Ever wonder how flower varieties are named? This question nudged me as I paged through the seed catalogs and became mesmerized by the floral photo candy of Antirrhinum majus – Madame Butterfly var. My curiosity soon meandered to Giacomo Puccini's famous Opera, Madame Butterfly wherein the human Butterfly first took to the stage in Milan, Italy in 1904.
The unique double-petal flowers of Madame Butterfly snapdragons are no less dramatic than the opera's themes of cultural and sexual imperialism, and allow me to mingle the operatic and horticultural. Here is my attempt at the Snapdragon Opera of Madame Butterfly.
Madame Butterfly the Opera – summarized from the Metropolitan Opera website
Read MoreA Floral Feast Reflection...2017 Flower CSA Breakdown
I have always grown flowers – in my mother's garden, as part of my own garden landscapes, apartment balconies, and kitchen windowsills. When I started farming with Rob in 2009 (Rob has been a CSA farmer since 1993) flowers were always part of the field mix, work/life balance and experimentation, and soul nourishment. The last 4 years, however, I have been consciously shifting from vegetable production to fruit and flowers and this is my second season with a 'formal' flower csa program. I enjoy how it balances and compliments other areas and market channels for our farm including wedding flowers and fruit and vegetable share program.
Read More