my bulb forcing experiment: part 1

Last September, after a long year of making planting an business decisions on the fly, I decided that I should try to force bulbs for early sales this year.  I was exhausted by autumn, but this last push was going to get me sales earlier than I ever have before.  Locally grown flowers, in Milwaukee, on Valentine’s Day. Fantastic! Well…. It didn’t really work out like I had planned. 

There’s my crates with nothing in them. I had my doubts about forcing bulbs this early in the year. For many varieties they just have not had enough winter but I was hoping that some earlier flowering bulbs would cooperate, mainly hyacinths and crocus. Well they didn’t. The hyacinths have not even sprouted. They have roots and the bulbs still seem to be in good shape so I am going to stick them back outside and see if I can get something for later this spring, maybe Easter. Now I did not put all of my eggs in this Valentine’s Day basket, while I am prone to rash decision making, I am not entirely crazy. I did make a schedule and plan to pull in more crates next month for March and April blooms. Tulips, hyacinth, muscari and crocus from the middle of March to the end of April. Fingers crossed.

crop planning

Right now I am up to my neck in crop planning for the year. In an ideal world I would have had this done by the end of last year so I could work a little less hard this month but…. well it didn’t happen. We bought a house (no not a farm) and are busy building a new germination chamber and grow room in the basement. Yay! So in the hopes that this fancy new grow room will be functional come Monday morning, I am scrambling to figure what I am going to plant first. Here’s my process….

1. Figure out who my customers are and when they need flowers. Well that might be a topic for another day, but the short story is that I need to squeeze as many flowers out of my operation as possible for the longest possible time frame. I am particularly interested in having more variety early (April, May) and late (October, November). These parts of the season take a bit of risk and creativity. The addition of my hoop houses last fall should help.

2. I already ordered my seeds based on what worked well in the past and what I wanted to add this year. I made a list of all these seeds and how many I have and separated them into annuals and perennials. The annuals I separated one more time into plants that will be direct seeded into the field and those that I will need to start plugs for. Since the plug production is allegedly starting Monday I am working on that part first. Annuals are first on my list since most of the perennials aren’t going to produce much this year anyway.

3. I take that seed list of annuals that I created and go down the list writing in potential seed dates with the corresponding flower dates. Some, like snaps and sunflowers are going to have 8 different sow dates, others like gomphrena and kale will only have 1.

4. Then I go through that list of all the possibilities and start fitting them into my field map. I have sort of a small field so I know that not everything will fit. I begin to look for things that I know are not going to work well for me based on past experiences and cut them out. Things with multiple sowings get looked at to see if I can tweak the dates and turn 4 sowings into 3 with out much interruption in the flow of flowers.

5. Now I am going to look at that field map (which is a ridiculous mess and doesn’t make sense to anyone except for me) and group flowers together by flower date. With only 12 beds dedicated to annual plugs I am going to have to double crop as many of them as possible. I am hoping for 6 beds to be done flowering and tilled up in time to get another later group of flowers in that same bed. Which is sort of like having 18 beds to work with. That doesn’t seem so unreasonable.

6. I have the list of possibilities and the tentative field map and I start to make spreadsheet for every sowing of every variety with: variety, seed date, plant out date, flower date.

7. Lastly, I will take that spreadsheet and make a new field map. Double checking that I got everything on the map that is in my seeding plan and adjusting quantities based on how much I am trying to squeeze into each bed. Then I will repeat a simplified version of this process for the direct seed items. I have additional room for those. Lots of room actually but there is no water access in that part of the farm so I am limited to only directly seeded flowers.

I know that it will not all work out exactly like I have planned. I will forget to water some flats and plants will die, or the germination will be bad for some things, or the weather will not cooperate. Lots can and will go wrong but this makes it a lot easier in the middle of the summer when I am feeling overwhelmed and there is still planting to be done if I want fall blooms.

summertime….

No question about, summer is in full swing. I am covered in bug bites, the weeds are threatening to take over, there is a mountain of unreturned emails/phone calls to deal with, I cannot remember the last time I had a day off (maybe in May?), there are spiders living in my car, I wish we had a dishwasher, there is so much to do at the farm but it is hard to stay focussed in the heat of the afternoon. And, most importantly, I harvested the first sunflowers of the year a couple days ago. Yep, summer.

what’s up emily?

I had started this blog with the intention of documenting my progress through this year since I knew it was going to be a busy year. Well you know what they say about the best laid plans. So I will just have to summarize the last three months the best I can.

First off, we decided not to buy a farm for real. In a few years we will reassess our situation. We talked to Gramps about using more of his land and he said sure. But it is not really what we had hoped for. We were hoping for a long term lease with a purchase option. What we got was more land super far from water and electricity. So sunflowers, cosmos, zinnias, some woodies, and sedums are getting planted back there. And I am just going to be grateful for what I have got.

And since we decided to stay put I went absolutely crazy putting together plant orders and rearranging my field in May. We put in permanent beds and have been transplanting the perennials that made it through last year to fit into my plan. We added lots more perennials, peonies, David Austin roses, hydrangeas, and other woody cut. Most of this is not going to produce anything for a few years but when it does…. It’s going to be great. I mean really great.

And we finally put up that hoophouse. There is no plastic on it yet but I put a bunch of stuff in the ground. We also put up a giant and crazy trellis system for the hops. It’s no wonder I haven’t had time to write about it.

the deal is off

I had officially come to the decision (along with the help of my husband and homebuilder of a father) that it was absolutely most cost efficient for us to buy vacant land and build a house. A small energy efficient house. All of the places that we looked at needed new roofs, new windows, new furnace, etc. We figured it was less expensive to put these on a new house. So when I finally heard back from the loan officer at the FSA that they would not approve funds for the building of a house it took the wind out of my sails. I called around and to see if there was some way that this could still work and it seems like there is not, at least not on  my budget.

I spent the better part of the day yesterday freaking out and looking through real estate listings. Someone seriously needs to stop me from looking through these listings. We simply cannot afford what it is that we want and spending hours combing through these listings is not going to change that. We have been over this so many times and revised where we are willing to make compromises. In the end it turns out that I am still financially uncomfortable moving an hour away from the city and living in a drafty old house that needs a lot of work. The dollars just are not there. They might be some day, maybe even someday soon, but right now they are not so the deal is off. We are not buying land this year. I am hoping to work something out with Grandpa. He has really been resistant to change but there has to be a way to do something that will help a little. I have decided that there are three things that I really need to make this farming operation profitable:

1. More land.

2. Some really great plants. You know the type that are a little pricey up front and take a few years to get established.

3. Infrastructure. Like a well, a greenhouse, a shade tent.

I can really only afford  two of the three, so I am hoping that a little more land will materialize in the form of a long term lease. Again, cross your fingers for me.

the ball is rolling…

The last couple weeks I have been contemplating this question:

Is it better to make the wrong decision or no decision at all?

I am not sure, is the answer but I am tired of waiting around for the right opportunity so we are going to make an offer on a nice 7 acre property a couple of miles from where I grew up. Which I have some mixed feelings about but again, I am tired of waiting around. Vacant lots in our price range are starting to sell.

It is a lot that is hilly and gravelly in parts. And I am already thinking of all the great stuff I can plant there. I am not sure where we will live or if the farm service agency will actually lend us the money or if our conditional use permit will be approved so that we can put up a shed or hoophouses. So many ways in which this could go wrong and cost us a lot of money. Also so many ways it could go right. Cross your fingers for me.

i wish the fsa was more helpful

Wow, do I wish they were more helpful. I have talked to a number of loan officers in different counties and gotten different responses from all of them. Unless you plan to milk cows or plant hundreds of acres in corn, they don’t know what to do.  One guy was flat out no help at all. He told me that he didn’t really know how to help me and implied that he didn’t really want to learn. Also he gave me the wrong loan information. It turns out that there is more than one loan out there for people like me: wanting a farm but having no money. Good thing I decided not to farm in his county.

Then I talked to some other guy and he also told me that he was not really sure how to help me but he seemed willing to try if I would have pressed him. Which I didn’t because I was still working on coming up with that down payment.

I came up with that down payment, well most of it, and called to find out who would help me fill out this ridiculous application. I had to drive to Madison, seems silly but OK. And I met with a loan officer who was actually helpful. Turns out I didn’t need a down payment at all. Fine, now I have some operating money saved. But the downside is that a few of the properties that would have been a great fit for me are sold. Alright, that’s OK, we’ve moved on. We’re getting ready to make an offer and I have just a few more questions about this application. Now the once helpful loan officer is not returning my calls.

This application is so redundant and so not applicable to my operation, see above comment about cows and corn. But I have it mostly done after months coming up with theoretical numbers and figuring out how to convert bouquets to bushels. Now I am just wondering if they will actually loan me the money or not. They don’t have any to give out as we speak so I just have to get in line, for potentially six months. That seems like a tough sell when negotiating a price for a piece of land.

i’m freakin’ out man

OK, I am seriously freaking out. This weather is driving me crazy, if it would just warm up a few degrees at night I could start moving things outside which would free up room under my grow lights for some more seedlings. And since I am about three weeks behind in my seeding schedule, I could really use some warmer night time temps here. I know that last year was an anomaly and I wasn’t expecting that again but I was really counting on at least having average temps. But then I suppose that’s why the call them average, you have to take the highs with the lows. I have snapdragons that are getting too tall and I just pinched them back. I guess that’s not such a bad thing I will have more flowers but they will be shorter. I do really love my tall snapdragons but I have learned that being a farmer is a lot about being happy with what you are given and adapting to circumstances beyond your control. Ugh. Really? I don’t like that there are things beyond my control. I really need a greenhouse in a bad way. At least I have this studio move to keep me busy, keep me from stewing in anxiety all day long.

paradise found?

The farm hunt has taken up so much of my time and energy over the last three years and we are getting down to descion time. Do it now or wait for fall. And when I say do it now I mean like next week. This decision has absolutely consumed me this winter. It is not just a home purchase, if it were I would have done it by now. It is also my business and potentially where we will earn our living for the rest of our lives. So it is a huge decision and it is weighing on me. Up until this year we have not really had the funds to afford it, I had been looking and I thought that if we found the right thing we would make it work in some way. Well now we have the funds and I am having a hard time finding the right thing. Compromises have to be made due to the fact that our funds are limited and our situation is unique. How far are we willing to commute? How many tillable acres do we really need? How many would we really like? Is that landfill across the street going to cause a lot of problems? How close to the lake is too close? Adjacent to a trailer park? And can I really live in some of these houses?  This has been the biggest issue. Nearly everything we see needs works, usually a lot. Some of them should just be torn down, seriously they look like the setting of a serial killer movie. I have answered all of these questions so many times and with each new possibility the answers change. And so we have decided, again, for the fourth time, that it is most cost effective and comfortable for us to buy vacant land and build a small house. Seems easy enough, right? Well all of the lots I had my eye on have sold and it is back to the drawing board. It has become difficult to keep out the negativity, I know it is not useful but it has a way of creeping in. I will be spending the next week looking through listings, calculating drive times and calling around to all of the various municipalities about zoning, permitted uses, etc. I hope to make an offer to someone by the end of the week. And I hope they accept it.